Wöbbelin Memorials

Mahn- und Gedenkstätten Wöbbelin

In the spring of 1945, a satellite camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp existed merely for a few weeks near Ludwigslust in Mecklenburg. The SS used it as a collection camp for prisoners from death marches and dissolved concentration camps in northern and central Germany. Over a thousand prisoners perished within these few weeks due to the terrible conditions at the Wöbbelin satellite camp. The Wöbbelin Memorials commemorate their fates.

History

From mid-February 1945 on, prisoners of the Neuengamme concentration camp had to build a new satellite camp outside of Wöbbelin. The construction of several stone barracks was begun, however, due to severe time pressure they were never completed. When the first prisoners arrived, the windows and doors had not yet been installed and there were no plank beds inside the barracks. As the Allies were advancing towards Germany in 1945, the SS was dissolving its concentration camps and satellite camps in order to prevent survivors from bearing witness to the conditions in the camps. Many of the prisoners taken to Wöbbelin had come from the Neuengamme concentration camp and its satellite camps, but not only - some came from Auschwitz. Shortly before the end of the war, there were over 5,000 prisoners at Wöbbelin. The food supplies were by far not enough for the growing number of inmates. Survivors reported cases of cannibalism among the prisoners. There was only one waterhole for the entire camp, which supplied contaminated water, making many of the prisoners sick. The camp commandants planned to dissolve this camp too in late April, shortly before the expected arrival of the Allies. A part of the prisoners was chased into a cattle car on May 1, it never departed however. The US 82nd Airborne Division arrived at Wöbbelin one day later and liberated about 3,500 prisoners. What the soldiers saw shocked them. According to eyewitness accounts they could not tell the living from the dead. Hundreds of corpses were scattered on the premises, the air filled with an unbearable stench of decaying bodies.

Wöbbelin, Spring 1945, The camp shortly after liberation by the US Army, USHMM

Wöbbelin, 2009, Sandstone relief by Jo Jastram, erected in 1965, Mahn- und Gedenkstätten Wöbbelin

Victims

The prisoners deported to Wöbbelin were of at least 16 nationalities. Due to the fact that the prisoners were not registered, there is no information about the number of deaths at the Wöbbelin satellite camp. It is estimated that in the time between mid-February and the camp's liberation on May 2, 1945, over 1,000 of the prisoners perished. The dead were buried by a prisoner »corpse commando« in mass graves in the vicinity. Some of the bodies were piled in a sanitary barrack upon orders of the SS. Following the liberation of the camp, over 200 more people died of the effects of their imprisonment, despite the rescue efforts of the American military.

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

All of the buildings in the camp complex were torn town shortly after the end of the war. In 1960, a sandstone relief by artist Jo Jastram was set up not far from the victims' graves. In 1965, the Theodor-Körner-Museum in Wöbbelin opened an exhibition on the history of the camp. The exhibition was reworked in 1995. 1965 was also the year in which a stone bearing the inscription »KZ 1945« was installed close to the former camp premises serving as a reminder of the site's history. The stone has been moved since then and is now located on the former camp premises.
In February 2002, the memorial site and the sandstone relief were vandalised by right wing extremists. The relief was restored that same year. In 2005, a memorial complex displaying information and some names of the prisoners who perished here was dedicated on the former camp premises. Already in the year before, youths taking part in an international exchange had set up several sculptures at the site.

Wöbbelin, Spring 1945, Survivors shortly after the liberation of the camp by the US Army, USHMM

Wöbbelin, 2006, Memorial stone at the site of the former camp, Mahn- und Gedenkstätten Wöbbelin

Possibilities

Exhibition at the Theodor-Körner-Museum, organisation of youth exchanges and seminars

Open

April to October
Tuesday to Friday 12 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. to 4.00 p.m.,
November to March
Tuesday to Friday 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Closed on Monday and Saturday

Contact

https://www.gedenkstaetten-woebbelin.de/cms/

info@gedenkstaetten-woebbelin.de

+49 (0)38753 807 92

Ludwigsluster Straße 1a
19288 Wöbbelin

Wöbbelin, 2006, Detail of the memorial on the former camp premises, Mahn- und Gedenkstätten Wöbbelin

Wöbbelin, 2003, Memorial on the former camp premises, Mahn- und Gedenkstätten Wöbbelin

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