Memorial and Meeting Place, Former Ladelund Concentration Camp

KZ Gedenk- und Begegnungsstätte Ladelund

Several memorials in the North Frisian village of Ladelund commemorate the victims of the Ladelund concentration camp, a satellite camp of Neuengamme. Between November 1 and December 16, 1944, the camp existed on the northern edge of Ladelund. About 2,000 male concentration camp prisoners had to conduct forced labour constructing the »Frisian Wall« fortifications. In 1950, the St. Petri parish set up the first memorial on the Ladelund cemetery.

History

Following the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, Hitler ordered the construction of fortifications along the German North Sea coast and the Danish border. Several forced labour camps were established along the coast to serve this purpose. On November 1, 1944, the first transport of prisoners from the Neuengamme concentration camp arrived in Ladelund close to the Danish border. The prisoners were brought to barracks of the Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD, Reich Labour Service), which had been set up in 1938 to house 250 people. The SS also transferred about 1,000 from the Husum-Schwesing satellite camp to Ladelund on November 1. Another 1,000 prisoners arrived at Ladelund directly from the Neuengamme main camp. The inmates of the Ladelund satellite camp were deployed in constructing fortifications. Most of them had to dig anti-tank trenches - strenuous work during which they were frequently forced to stand in water flowing out of the tunnels they were digging. The prisoners were constantly subjected to abuse by the Kapos and guards. SS-Untersturmführer Hans Hermann Griem was in charge of both the Ladelund and the Husum-Schwesing satellite camps. He personally shot several prisoners and was reputedly very brutal. 200 soldiers of the navy served as guards. The exhausting labour, insufficient food supplies and lack of hygienic facilities caused many illnesses and deaths in Ladelund; about 300 prisoners died between November and mid-December 1944. On December 16, 1944, the Ladelund satellite camp was dissolved, probably because the situation on the front was rapidly worsening for the Germans. The »Frisian Wall« was never completed. The SS transferred the prisoners back to the Neuengamme main camp.

Ladelund, 1938, RAD-camp Ladelund, KZ Gedenk- und Begegnungsstätte Ladelund

Ladelund, 2007, Memorial stone from 1985, Brigitt List

Victims

The prisoners held at Ladelund came from various European countries. Dutch prisoners constituted the largest group. Over 1,000 of the 2,000 men imprisoned at Ladelund came from the Netherlands. About 500 came from Poland, 200 from the Soviet Union. Some came from what is today the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy and Belgium. About 300 inmates perished during the six weeks in which Ladelund was in operation. They were buried on the local cemetery.

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 1950, the St. Petri parish in Ladelund established a memorial on the local cemetery on which about 300 victims of the Ladelund satellite camp were buried. It was one of the first memorials to victims of the National Socialist regime in Western Germany. In 1985, the parish erected a monument on the edge of the camp premises bearing the following inscription: »The dignity of men is unimpeachable. KZ Neuengamme satellite camp Ladelund November – December 1944«. In 1989, the parish opened a documentation centre on the camp grounds, which houses a permanent exhibition on the history of the Ladelund satellite camp. Thanks to donations it could be extended in 2006. Since 2002, a rusty metal sculpture commemorates the fates of the prisoners at Ladelund. It was designed by apprentices of the Theodor Schäfer vocational school and set up on the border of the former camp premises. The former camp grounds of the Ladelund satellite camp are now agricultural crop land - just like before 1938.

Ladelund, 1944, Fresh graves for the victims of the Ladelund satellite camp in 1944, KZ Gedenk- und Begegnungsstätte Ladelund

Ladelund, 2006, Detailed view of the steel sculptue, KZ Gedenk- und Begegnungsstätte Ladelund

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition, guided tours, meetings with survivors, educational work for schools and extracurricular programs

Open

The memorial grounds are accessible at all times. Exhibition opening times: Tuesday to Friday: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday: 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. or by appointment

Contact

http://www.kz-gedenkstaette-ladelund.de

info@kz-gedenkstaette-ladelund.de

+49 (0)4666 449

Raiffeisenstraße 3
25926 Ladelund

Ladelund, 2006, Permanent exhibition at the memorial, KZ Gedenk- und Begegnungsstätte Ladelund

Ladelund, 2007, Steel sculpture at the former camp premises, Brigitt List

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