Neue Bremm Gestapo Camp Memorial

Gedenkstätte Gestapo-Lager Neue Bremm

In 1943, the Saarbrücken Gestapo set up an extended police prison on the Goldene Bremm, a popular destination for excursions on the French border. A memorial has honoured the fates of the men and women who were incarcerated there since 2004.

History

From the beginning of 1943 until the end of 1944, the Gestapo in Saarbrücken used a barrack camp on the Neue Bremm as an »extended police prison« due to overcrowding in the regular prison facilities. This type of prison was subordinate to the local Gestapo, unlike concentration camps, which were maintained by the Main SS Economic and Administrative Department. This enabled the Gestapo to run the extended police prisons in an unbureaucratic manner and without control of other institutions. The Gestapo could in this way incarcerate people and brutally abuse them without having to justify their actions to any other authorities. The prisoners were taken captive for various reasons. They were not only people deemed »work shy« and political opponents of the regime – prisoners of war from many countries in Europe were also arrested. Initially, the camp was supposed to help »discipline« men and women within a few weeks, after which they were to be released. However, many prisoners were incarcerated for much longer. The Neue Bremm prison consisted of a men's ward and a women's ward, separated by a publicly accessible pathway. In the middle of each of the camp wings was a pool for extinguishing water. While work commandos had to perform forced labour clearing away debris caused by air raids, the prisoners remaining at the camp were forced by the guards to do »camp sports«. Amongst others they had to hop around the pool for hours in a crouched position with their hands clasped on their necks. The guards threw those who had collapsed or lost consciousness of exhaustion into the pool. The food supplies in the camp were especially dire: within a few weeks, the prisoners were starved down to mere skeletons.

Neue Bremm, about 1943, Photo of the Neue Bremm barracks camp from across the street, Initiative Neue Bremm, Privatbesitz

Saarbrücken, 2005, Reverse side of the »Hotel of Memory« memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Johannes-Maria Schlorke

Victims

Approximately 20,000 men and women passed through the Gestapo camp. There were many forced labourers from Eastern Europe, prisoners of war, political opponents of the National Socialist regime, members of resistance movements in the occupied territories, »asocials« as well as Wehrmacht deserters and draft resistors among those incarcerated. Due to its vicinity to the French border, many prisoner transports from collection camps in France were brought to the Gestapo camp. Among these prisoners were Frenchmen, Belgians, Britons and Italians. According to new research, there were between 600 and 800 prisoners at the camp at one time. The names of 82 murdered prisoners have been verified. The actual death toll was much higher, today it can however no longer be determined. Many of the prisoners who were transferred by the Saarbrücken police to other camps died there of the effects of the malnourishment and the abuse they had been subjected to in Neue Bremm. Several prisoners drowned in the extinguishing water pool after guards had forced their heads down with wooden clubs. The terror at Neue Bremm was primarily directed against Jews and inmates from Eastern Europe. Prisoners who fell ill or weak were brought to the sick bay, yet they did not receive any medical help there. It is assumed that the camp doctors killed many of them by poison injections.

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 1947, the French committee of former prisoners set up a monument on the former camp premises. Over the years, however, the camp was for the most part forgotten. The barracks had been torn down shortly after the war. In 1975, a hotel was opened on the former premises of the women's camp. A part of the former men's camp was converted to an industrial zone. In the autumn of 1998, citizens of Saarbrücken founded the »Neue Bremm Initiative«, whose aim it was to remodel the memorial site. A public tender competition yielded the winning concept by Berlin architects Nils Ballhausen and Roland Poppensieker entitled »Hotel of Memory«. The memorial complex »Neue Bremm Gestapo Camp«, financed by the federal state, the Saarland state and the city of Saarbrücken, was opened on May 8, 2004. It consists of a 60-metre long wall on which the word »hotel« has been inscribed in several languages – this is supposed to draw attention to the contrasting use this popular excursion site was put to. The former sites of the barracks have been marked on the premises behind the memorial wall. The other side of the wall displays information about the history of the extended police prison camp.

Saarbrücken, 1999, The extinguishing water pool and surrounding barbed wire haven been integrated into the present-day memorial site, Initiative Neue Bremm

Saarbrücken, 2005, View of the »Hotel of Memory« memorial, visible on the left is the monument from 1947, Stiftung Denkmal, Johannes-Maria Schlorke

Possibilities

Guided tours, seminars, training for teachers, meetings with survivors

Open

Accessible at all times

Contact

https://www.saarbruecken.de/kultur/stadtgeschichte/gedenkstaette_gestapo_lager_neue_bremm

info@lpb.saarland.de

+49(0)6897 7908-104

Metzer Straße
66117 Saarbrücken

Saarbrücken, 2008, Detailed view of the memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Johannes-Maria Schlorke

Saarbrücken, 2008, Reverse side of the »Hotel of Memory« memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Johannes-Maria Schlorke

Saarbrücken, 2008, View of the memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Johannes-Maria Schlorke

Saarbrücken, 2008, Total view, Stiftung Denkmal, Johannes-Maria Schlorke

Saarbrücken, 2008, Reverse side of the memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Johannes-Maria Schlorke

Saarbrücken, 2005, The »Hotel of Memory« memorial, which was dedicated in 2004, Stiftung Denkmal, Johannes-Maria Schlorke

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