Leonberg Concentration Camp Memorial Site

KZ-Gedenkstätte Leonberg

From spring 1944 to April 1945, there was an SS-run subcamp of the Natzweiler Concentration Camp in Leonberg. During this one year, a total of 5,000 male prisoners from 24 European nations worked in the two bomb-proof tubes of the Engelberg tunnel, the first motorway tunnel of the Reich. An exhibition on the history of the Leonberg Concentration Camp has been on display at this site since 2008.

History

The first Engelberg Tunnel near Leonberg was opened to traffic on 5 November 1938 after three years of construction. It was part of the Reichsautobahn route 39 and, with a length of 318 metres and two tubes, was the second motorway tunnel in Germany after the Nasenfel Tunnel (opened on 30 October 1937; now the A8).

During the Second World War, the old Engelberg Tunnel was used as a Messerschmitt AG plant from 1944 as part of the underground relocation of German armaments production. Around 3,000 prisoners brought from the Natzweiler-Struthof Concentration Camp in Alsace to the Leonberg subcamp assembled aircraft wings for the Me 262 in 12 to 18-hour shifts, for which purpose a false ceiling was installed to increase the production area to 11,000 m². Shortly before the end of the war, the machines were dismantled and the tubes were finally blown up on 15 April 1945.

Leonberg, 1935, Timber heading work at the Old Engelberg Tunnel, Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg EL 75 VI a Nr 6275 / Bild 1

Leonberg, 1938, South portal of the Old Engelberg Tunnel, Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg EL 75 VI a Nr 6339

Victims

A total of around 5,000 prisoners passed through Leonberg concentration camp. They were mainly used to work in the Messerschmitt sub-plant »Presswerk Leonberg« in the two walled-up motorway tunnels. From the start of production in July 1944, their numbers rose steadily to 3,200 by January 1945. This meant that the two camps were completely overcrowded. The deportees came from 24 European countries, mainly Poland, the Soviet Union, Italy, France and Hungary. Seven per cent of the prisoners were German and at least a quarter were Jewish.

A total of 389 deaths were recorded, not including the much larger and unknown number of deaths among those who were deported to the Vaihingen/Enz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen camps as exhausted prisoners. The Leonberg camp was disbanded in mid-April 1945, a few days before the French invasion. The 2,700 prisoners who were still alive were sent on a death march or a death journey towards Bavaria, partly on foot and partly by train. There they were to be deployed again in Messerschmitt factories and construction sites. Documents prove that 406 prisoners from Leonberg died as victims of the death marches. The actual number of prisoners who died is undoubtedly many times higher.

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

In a trial before the French Military Tribunal in Rastatt from 12 to 19 April 1948, two members of the guard teams, four prisoner functionaries (camp elders and Kapos as heads of work squads) and three senior employees of the Messerschmitt company were given long prison sentences, in one case the death penalty. The death sentences were later commuted to prison sentences and the prison sentences were shortened after being partially served. Only one of the four camp leaders was caught and brought to trial.

In March 1999, a concentration camp memorial initiative was founded in Leonberg, which contacted former concentration camp prisoners who were still alive throughout Europe and two years later was able to present the results of an extensive study entitled »Concentration camp and forced labour in Leonberg«. In the same year, a 1.5-kilometre »Path of Remembrance« was laid out through the town, along which visitor groups and school classes are guided today or can explore the history of the site on their own. The trail is signposted with six information boards in German, English and French.

Since 2008, the preserved part of the Old Engelberg Tunnel has housed an exhibition on the history of the Leonberg Concentration Camp. In front of the tunnel, on 8 May 2005, the concentration camp memorial initiative erected a memorial designed by Johannes Kares, an artist from Tübingen, in the form of a 25-metre-wide and three-metre-high steel wall engraved with the names of 2,892 concentration camp prisoners as well as 16 Gestapo prisoners and forced labourers known at the time. In April/May 2013, the »House of a Thousand Names«, also designed by Johannes Kares, was erected on the opposite side in front of the tunnel. As part of a two-week youth camp, 150 young people engraved the approximately one thousand names of the last prisoner transport from Flossenbürg to Leonberg by hand on metal plaques.

Leonberg, 1958, Car traffic in the reconstructed Engelberg Tunnel, Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg EL 75 VI a Nr 6396

Leonberg, 2019, Entrance to the memorial in the Old Engelberg Tunnel, Photo: Lena Altman

Possibilities

»Path of Remembrance« walking tour through Leonberg, exhibition in the Old Engelberg Tunnel, group tours, offers for school classes, teaching materials, publications, library

Open

The documentation centre in the Old Engelberg Tunnel is open every Sunday from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. from March to November
Guided tour of the exhibition from 1. 15 p.m. to 2 p.m. on the first Sunday of every month

Contact

https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-leonberg.de

info@kz-gedenkstaette-leonberg.de

+49 (0)7152 41975

KZ-Gedenkstätteninitiative Leonberg e.V.
Untere Burghalde 49
71229 Leonberg

United States, around 1945, test flight of a Messerschmitt Me 262 that fell into Allied hands, U.S. Air Force

Leonberg, 2019, Wall of names in front of the entrance to the Old Engelberg Tunnel, Photo: Lena Altman

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