Rhineland-Palatinate National Socialist Documentation Centre / KZ Osthofen Memorial

NS-Dokumentationszentrum Rheinland-Pfalz / Gedenkstätte KZ Osthofen

Between March 1933 and June 1934, an early concentration camp was in operation in Osthofen, a small town near Worms. The people incarcerated there were for the most part political prisoners in police custody. An exhibition compiled by the Centre for Political Education in Rhineland-Palatinate and the Osthofen Project support association presents information about the National Socialist period in the region. At the same time it commemorates the fates of those imprisoned at the Osthofen and Hinzert concentration camps.

History

Shortly after the National Socialists' rise to power, the new government began suppressing all opposition and quickly established several concentration camps. By order of the local NSDAP, a concentration camp for the region of Hesse/Rhine-Hesse was established in March 1933 in a derelict paper mill in Osthofen. It came under administration of the Worms police department. Communists but also social democrats, who had been in »protective custody« for over a week, were to be incarcerated here. A second camp, constituting part of the Osthofen camp, was meant for prisoners who were to be subjected to »more severe arrest«. The latter camp was later moved to the Osthofen district court prison. From June 1933 on, the police increasingly arrested Jews and members of oppositional parties other than the KPD and the SPD. The prisoners were taken to the Osthofen concentration camp without being put on trial. The National Socialist press presented the camp as an educational and correctional facility in which »savage Marxists« were to become »decent humans«. In reality, conditions at the camp were very brutal. The prisoners in both camps were severely abused by the guards. In camp I the men were accommodated in large, unheated, cold and damp factory buildings. They had to build their own furnishings and improvised fireplace in order to be able to heat the factory hall in winter. In camp II conditions were far worse. While prisoners at camp I were allowed visitors and could receive food parcels, this was denied to the prisoners at camp II. Supplies were insufficient at both camps, yet all of the prisoners were deployed in work details in and outside of the camp. The Osthofen concentration camp was dissolved in June 1934. Many prisoners later came under the scrutiny of the Nazi authorities once again and were persecuted or imprisoned.

Osthofen, 1933, Exterior view of the concentration camp, Förderverein Projekt Osthofen e.V.

May 1933, Prisoners from Worms are brought to the Osthofen concentration camp, convoyed by police, NS-Dokumentationszentrum Rheinland-Pfalz / Gedenkstätte KZ Osthofen

Victims

Despite the severe abuse and terrible conditions the prisoners were subjected to, there were no fatalities at the Osthofen concentration camp. Over half of the prisoners were members of the KPD. The two other large prisoner groups were social democrats and Jews. Members of the Centre Party, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses and several Sinti and Roma were also brought to the Osthofen concentration camp following their arrest. On average the men were incarcerated for four to six weeks, some were imprisoned much longer however. There was one female prisoner among the inmates at Osthofen. Carlo Mierendorff, a member of the Reichstag from the SPD and later part of the Kreisauer Kreis resistance group, was one of the prisoners at the Osthofen 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

The historic building of the Osthofen concentration camp has been preserved because, following the camp’s closure, it housed a furniture factory for decades. During the Second World War, forced labourers were also employed there. After the factory closed in 1976, the building was used as a warehouse.

In 1972, former prisoners of the Osthofen concentration camp founded an association; in 1978, this association set up a memorial plaque on the exterior wall of the factory building. In 1992, the state of Rhineland-Palatinate purchased the plot of land on which the camp stood. In 1996, a first documentation centre on the National Socialist period was opened on the premises of the old paper mill. Since 2002, the National Socialist documentation centre of Rhineland-Palatinate has had its seat in the upper floor of the remodelled building. Visitors can learn about both the history of National Socialism in the region and the history of the Osthofen and Hinzert concentration camps in the centre's reading room. The centre is run by the Centre for Political Education in Rhineland-Palatinate and closely cooperates with the Osthofen Project support association. They jointly developed the new permanent exhibition - »National Socialism in Rhineland-Palatinate« - which was opened in 2004.

The Osthofen concentration camp served as the inspiration for the novel »The Seventh Cross«, which the writer Anna Seghers (1900–1983) published in exile in 1942. One room in the memorial is dedicated to the author and her novel.

Osthofen, undated, Entrance gate before the renovation of the premises to create a memorial site, NS-Dokumentationszentrum Rheinland-Pfalz / Gedenkstätte KZ Osthofen

Osthofen, 2026, Entrance gate of the former camp, Stiftung Denkmal

Possibilities

Guided tours by appointment, reading room

Open

Tuesday to Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday, Sunday and on holidays 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Contact

https://www.gedenkstaette-osthofen-rlp.de/

info@ns-dokuzentrum-rlp.de

+49 (0)6242 910 810

Ziegelhüttenweg 38
67574 Osthofen

Osthofen, 2008, Exterior view of the memorial, NS-Dokumentationszentrum Rheinland-Pfalz / Gedenkstätte KZ Osthofen

Osthofen, 2026, View of the exhibition, Stiftung Denkmal

Osthofen, 2026, View of the premises of the former camp, Stiftung Denkmal

Osthofen, 2026, Exterior view of the memorial, Stiftung Denkmal

Salzgitter

Drütte Concentration Camp Memorial Site and Documentation Centre

The town of Salzgitter was founded in 1942 at the northern foothills of the Harz mountains. In 1994, a memorial was set up on the premises of the Salzgitter AG company, dedicated to the people who had...

Nordhausen

Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial

Since 1954, a memorial on the site of the former Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, close to Nordhausen on the edge of the Harz mountains, commemorates the fate of the prisoners who were slave laboure...

Stadtallendorf

Documentation and Information Centre Stadtallendorf

Between 1938 and 1945, over 17,000 forced labourers were deployed in the arms industry in what is today Stadtallendorf. The Documentation and Information Centre (DIZ) deals with this time period and c...