Kaltenkirchen Concentration Camp Memorial in Springhirsch

KZ-Gedenkstätte Kaltenkirchen in Springhirsch

In 2000, a memorial was opened in Springhirsch, a district of Nützen, on the premises of the former Kaltenkirchen satellite camp. Up to 1,000 prisoners were subjected to forced labour in this camp between 1944 and 1945.

History

In August 1944, the SS established a satellite camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp in Springhirsch near Kaltenkirchen for the Luftwaffe. Barracks of the Luftwache not far from the Kaltenkirchen airbase were used for this purpose. The Wehrmacht had decided to reconstruct the airfield and applied for labour force with the SS.
In August 1944, the first transport of about 500 prisoners arrived in Kaltenkirchen from Neuengamme. The prisoners were chased through the village to Springhirsch, 10 kilometres away, and admitted into the newly established Kaltenkirchen satellite camp. The prisoners had to conduct forced labour: they had to extend the airfield's landing strip so that it could be used by a new type of fighter plane and did excavation work and levelling of the area. The strenuous physical work, the long march to the building site and the insufficient supply situation led to many illnesses and fatalities at the camp. At the beginning of 1945, SS-Hauptsturmführer Bernhard Waldmann replaced camp commandant Otto Freyer. Conditions under the new commandant worsened rapidly: food rations were reduced and working hours were increased from eight to ten or eleven hours. The number of deaths rose. Among the guards were only two other SS men, the inmates were otherwise guarded by about 58 soldiers of the Luftwaffe. On April 17, 1945, the SS evacuated the camp. The prisoners had to march northwards. They were eventually loaded onto cattle trains and deported to the Wöbbelin concentration camp.

Nützen, probably beginning of the 1950s, One of the former camp barracks, used as a restaurant (torn down in 1972), KZ-Gedenkstätte Kaltenkirchen

Nützen, 2005, Stone sculpture »Turning Stone«, KZ-Gedenkstätte Kaltenkirchen

Victims

Soviet and French prisoners comprised the largest prisoner groups at the Kaltenkirchen satellite camp. Apart from that, prisoners came from Poland, Germany as well as some from Belgium, Italy and Yugoslavia. It is not known exactly how many prisoners passed through the satellite camp: most of the time there were about 500 prisoners at the camp, yet due to illnesses and the high death rate new prisoners continued to arrive from the Neuengamme concentration camp. Shortly before the camp's evacuation there were about 1,000 prisoners there. The names of 171 prisoners who died at the Kaltenkirchen camp are known. According to eye witness accounts, over 500 people lost their lives at the satellite camp.

The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority. With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany. Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war. In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives. Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals. The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.

Remembrance

After the war, the barracks of the satellite camp were torn down and the Moorkaten cemetery, where many of the victims were buried, was set up as a »war cemetery«. In 1975, a »historic workgroup« led by Gerhard Hoch was founded. The Moorkaten cemetery was remodelled in 1978, yet not until 1992 was it renamed from »war cemetery« to »cemetery for prisoners of war and concentration camp victims«. In 1994, a concrete slab, which had until then been overgrown, was found by coincidence on the former camp premises. This led to the discovery of the foundations of former camp buildings. From that time on, citizens advocated the establishment of a memorial. In 1999, the town of Kaltenkirchen helped found the »support association for the Kaltenkirchen concentration camp memorial in Springhirsch«. On April 30, 2000, the memorial was opened. Since 2002, the premises have housed a »document house« as well as several stone sculptures by Ingo Warnke.

Nützen, 2008, Memorial stones, KZ-Gedenkstätte Kaltenkirchen

Nützen, 2009, Beginning of the round tour of the former camp premises, KZ-Gedenkstätte Kaltenkirchen

Possibilities

Exhibitions, guided tours

Open

The memorial site is accessible at all times.

Opening times of the documentation centre:

From November 1 to February 28 Tuesday to Saturday 10.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m., closed on Sunday and on holidays

From March 1 to October 31 Tuesday to Saturday 10.00 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday and most holidays 11.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m.

Contact

http://www.kz-kaltenkirchen.de

nachricht@kz-kaltenkirchen.de

+49 (0)4191 723 428

Nützen, 2008, Stone sculpture »Hunger Stone«, KZ-Gedenkstätte Kaltenkirchen

Nützen, 2005, Remains of the wash and latrine barracks, excavated in 1997, KZ-Gedenkstätte Kaltenkirchen

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