The Museum for Hamburg History set up a memorial at the last remaining prefabricated concrete slab building in the Hamburg district of Poppenbüttel in 1985. It is dedicated to the memory of the forced labourers, most of them women, who were deployed here by between September 1944 and April 1945 in the construction of a panel housing estate.
History
Between September 1944 and April 1945, there was a women's satellite camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg-Sasel. The women were deployed in the construction of temporary housing in the neighbouring district of Poppenbüttel for residents of Hamburg who had lost their homes in air raids – they built »Plattenhäuser«, prefabricated concrete slab buildings. On September 13, 1944, the SS brought about 500 Jewish women from Poland and several Sinti women to the satellite camp Hamburg-Sasel for conducting forced labour in building a concrete slab housing estate. Italian military internees too were forced to work on the construction site. They worked for the Möller and the Wayss & Freytag construction firms, and had to perform strenuous tasks such as laying tracks, levelling out terrain and transporting prefabricated concrete construction elements, all this in harrowing conditions. Some of the women had to remove debris following air raids in Hamburg's city centre. The SS dissolved the Hamburg-Sasel camp towards the end of the war, most probably on April 7, 1945. The women were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Victims
About 500 Jewish women from Poland and several Sinti women were interned at the Hamburg-Sasel satellite concentration camp. They had come from the Łódź ghetto and had been deported to Hamburg via Auschwitz-Birkenau. At least 35 of them died of the strenuous labour, due to abuse or due to the severe cold in Hamburg-Sasel. There is no information about their fate following the liquidation of the camp; many may have died after their transfer to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
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 June 1982, a monument and a memorial plaque were set up on the site of the former satellite concentration camp, on the initiative of a group of pupils. The Museum for Hamburg History established a memorial in the only remaining building of the panel housing estate in 1985. Located on the square in front of the memorial stands a wooden sculpture by Franz Vollert, which was dedicated on September 1, 1981. The Plattenhaus Poppenbüttel Memorial is run on a voluntary basis and is a branch of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial. A new permanent exhibition was opened on September 9, 2008.
