Memorial at the SS Special Camp / Concentration Camp Hinzert

Gedenkstätte SS-Sonderlager / KZ Hinzert

Located about 25 kilometres from Trier stood the Police Detention and SS Special Camp Hinzert. The National Socialists used the camp in its early days as a »labour education camp«. From 1940 on, Hinzert was increasingly used as a transit camp for prisoners from almost all of the occupied European countries. The memorial on the site of the former camp, consisting of a documentation and meeting centre, commemorates the fates of the thousands of Hinzert prisoners.

History

In 1938, construction work on fortifications along the German Reich's western border and preparations for an extension of the Reich autobahn were begun. The National Socialist administration set up barracks on the Hunsrück mountain range for workers deployed by the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF) and the Organisation Todt. These men had received police prison sentences. In October 1939, the later commander of Buchenwald, SS Sturmbannführer Hermann Pister, took command at the camp. One of his first official acts was the establishment of an »SS Special Camp« on the premises of the police detention camp. With the beginning of the war, further »labour education camps« for people deemed »work-shy« and those »refusing to work« were set up along the Siegfried Line. The incarcerated men were to be available for labour deployment after only a few weeks of detention. All of these so-called western camps were administered by the Hinzert SS Special Camp. From July 1940 on, when Hinzert was put under control of the Concentration Camp Inspector, it also began to operate as a concentration camp. Apart from delinquent Siegfried Line workers, the SS increasingly incarcerated regime opponents. From 1941/1942 on, not only arrested resistance fighters from neighbouring Luxembourg were brought to the camp but also so-called »Night and Fog« prisoners from France. In 1943, Polish civilian labourers who were to be admitted to the »Volksgemeinschaft« (»people's community«) by the »Race and Settlement Main Office« and were being subjected to a background check were detained here. The main camp, built for about 550 prisoners, was constantly overcrowded. The SS loaned forced labourers to numerous companies and institutions. In January 1945, the Hinzert concentration camp was put under the command of the Buchenwald concentration camp. In March 1945, American troops liberated the camp. Shortly before, the SS had chased most its prisoners on a death march towards Buchenwald.

Hinzert, 1941, View of the camp, Gedenkstätte SS-Sonderlager / KZ Hinzert

Hinzert, 2005, Interior view of the documentation and meeting centre, Stiftung Denkmal, Johannes-Maria Schlorke

Victims

Between September 1939 and March 1945, a total of at least 13,000 people were incarcerated at Hinzert or one of its approximately 20 satellite camps. There is evidence for 321 fatalities, but the real number is probably over 1,000. Many prisoners died of abuse by the SS guards, terrible work conditions, insufficient provisions or of illnesses. Between May 1942 and October 1943, nearly 2,000 French, Belgian and Dutch opponents of the regime were deported to Hinzert as »Night and Fog« prisoners - their relatives were not informed. The SS deported many of them to other prisons and camps such as the Buchenwald, Natzweiler or Dachau concentration camps. Several resistance fighters from Luxenbourg were shot close to Hinzert: 20 in September 1942, a further 23 in February 1944. About 70 Soviet prisoners of war were murdered here in 1941. Prisoners of war and forced labourers, who were held captive by the SS at Hinzert as people guilty of »refusing to work«, stemmed from all European countries under German occupation.

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

Already in 1946, the premises of the former camp were redesigned into a memorial site. The French military administration laid out a cemetery on which the remains of 217 prisoners were buried. In 1986, a monument, designed by former Luxembourgian prisoner Lucien Wercollier, was erected on the site. Since 1992, the Centre for Political Education in Rhineland-Palatinate has administered the memorial. One of its first projects entailed setting up several information plaques close to the »Sites of Inhumanity« on the former camp premises. A permanent exhibition on the camp, its victims and perpetrators was created in cooperation with the Hinzert Concentration Camp Support Association. It can be viewed in the documentation and meeting centre, which was designed by an architectural firm from Saarbrücken and opened in 2005. In 2006, the building was awarded the German Steel Construction prize.

Hinzert, 2005, The war cemetery which was established in 1946, Stiftung Denkmal, Johannes-Maria Schlorke

Hinzert, 2005, Close-up of the documentation and meeting centre, Stiftung Denkmal, Johannes-Maria Schlorke

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition, guided tours free of charge by appointment

Open

Tuesday to Friday 9.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m. and 2.00 p.m. to 5.00 p.m.,
Saturday, Sunday and Holidays 2.00 p.m. to 5.00 p.m., closed on Mondays

Contact

http://www.gedenkstaette-hinzert-rlp.de

info@gedenkstaette-hinzert-rlp.de

+49 (0) 6586 992 493

Hinzert, 2005, The documentation and meeting centre, Stiftung Denkmal, Johannes-Maria Schlorke

Hinzert, 2005, Exterior view of the documentation and meeting centre, Stiftung Denkmal, Johannes-Maria Schlorke

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