Memorial to the victims of the Langenstein-Zwieberge concentration camp

Gedenkstätte für die Opfer des KZ Langenstein-Zwieberge

Since 1949 a memorial remembers the victims of the Langenstein-Zwieberge concentration camp, which was established in April 1944 as a satellite camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp. The memorial has been redesigned and expanded several times.

History

Due to the targeted air raids of the Allies, the German leadership was anxious to move large parts of the armament production to underground facilities. Also in the Thekenberge between Halberstadt and Langenstein the construction of a tunnel system with a floor area of up to 60,000 m² was prepared in order to produce parts for fighter planes. For this purpose, the SS set up the Langenstein-Zwieberge camp in April 1944 as a satellite camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp located about 100 kilometres away. The camp was guarded by about 500 members of the SS and the Luftwaffe.
It consisted of three commandos. The largest, »Malachit«, consisted of about 6,000 prisoners aged between 13 and 70 years, who had to work under the most difficult conditions on the construction of the tunnel system. Many lost their lives in the process. A second command, »Junkers«, consisted of about 900 prisoners, who were also deployed in the construction of the tunnel. The third detachment, »Maifisch«, was to drive a tunnel into the Hoppelberg hill. This project was later abandoned, so that the approximately 200 prisoners of this group were assigned to the Malachit Commando in January 1945.
Maltreatment and public executions of prisoners were the order of the day. A great many prisoners perished due to the hard physical work and insufficient rations. Of the approximately 7,000 prisoners who passed through the camp, about 2,000 died there. On April 9, 1945 the camp was evacuated. Six columns of 500 prisoners each, thjose who were still able to walk, were marched out of the camp. The remaining approximately 1,400 seriously ill prisoners were left behind and were liberated two days later by US troops. During the death march, which lasted for almost two weeks, about 2,500 prisoners were shot by the guards when they collapsed or tried to escape. Only a small number of the prisoners survived.

Langenstein, 1949, Inauguration of the memorial, Gedenkstätte Langenstein-Zwieberge

Langenstein, undated, The memorial at the site of the mass graves in its present form, Gedenkstätte Langenstein-Zwieberge

Victims

Out of about 7,000 prisoners, approximately 2,000 died in the camp because of the murderous working and living conditions. Only about 500 survived the death marches that 3,000 prisoners had to take up in April 1945. The prisoners came from 23 different nations, including France, Poland, the Soviet Union and Hungary.

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 September 1949 a first memorial was inaugurated at the mass graves. In the 1960s the area was redesigned and in 1968 it was opened to the public as the Langenstein-Zwieberge memorial. The site includes the camp grounds and the site of the mass graves. Since 1976, a museum has also been part of the site. In the 1980s, the sculpture »Extermination Through Labour« by the Magdeburg artist Wolfgang Roßdeutscher (*1945) was placed near the entrance. Another striking element of the memorial is the »Death Pine«, a tree from which several prisoners were hanged. The tree died in the 1960s, but its trunk has been preserved.
For decades, the work of the memorial was shaped by international cooperation with former prisoners. Over the decades, the site and the memorial have been redesigned several times. In 2011, name plaques were attached to the memorial.
Today, the memorial belongs to the Saxony-Anhalt Memorials Foundation. It is both a place of research and historical-political education. Individual sections of the tunnels can also be visited as part of guided tours.

Langenstein, undated, View into a tunnel, Gedenkstätte Langenstein-Zwieberge

Langenstein, undated, The execution site »Death Pine«, Gedenkstätte Langenstein-Zwieberge

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition on the planned arms production; guided tours on the site of the former camp; inspection of a section of the tunnel (seasonal); memorial educational offers for groups; library, archive, video library

Open

The former camp site can be visited during the day without advance notification.

Permanent exhibition in the administration and exhibition building:
Tuesday to Friday 9 a.m. to 3.30 p.m.
April to October: every last weekend of the month 2 a.m. to 5 p.m.
For registered groups by appointment.

Tunnel section: April to October every last weekend of the month 2 a.m. to 5 p.m.
For registered groups by appointment.
Closed from November to March.

Contact

https://gedenkstaette-langenstein.sachsen-anhalt.de/aktuelles/

info-langenstein@erinnern.org

+49 (0)3941 567 326

Langenstein, 2008, The sculpture »Extermination Through Labour« at the entrance to the former camp site, Doris Antony

Langenstein, 1945, The camp site a few days after its liberation, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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