THE LONG ROAD TO MEMORIALIZATION:

A HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF

THE ESTERWEGEN MEMORIAL,

1945-2011

By

SARAH SCHRAEDER

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS IN HISTORY

WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY Department of History

MAY 2015

© Copyright by SARAH SCHRAEDER, 2015 All Rights Reserved

© Copyright by SARAH SCHRAEDER, 2015 All Rights Reserved

To the Faculty of Washington State University:

The members of the committee appointed to examine the thesis of SARAH SCHRAEDER find it satisfactory and recommend that it be accepted.

______Raymond Sun, Ph.D., Chair

______Steven D. Kale, Ph.D.

______Rachel Halverson, Ph.D.

______Robert Bauman, Ph.D.

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The many hours spent researching and writing this thesis would not have been possible without the support of many different people. Most importantly, my thesis advisor and committee chair, Dr. Raymond Sun, provided some of the most valuable remarks for this thesis.

Additionally, Dr. Steven Kale and Dr. Robert Bauman offered other much appreciated comments. Finally, Dr. Rachel Halverson’s comments, most importantly her extensive knowledge of German, greatly improved this thesis and its accuracy.

Most of the research for this work was completed in Germany at the Esterwegen

Memorial. Special thanks must be given to the following people for their help finding sources and answering, I am sure, far too many questions: the director of the memorial, Dr. Andrea

Kaltofen; the director of the DIZ, Kurt Buck; a DIZ employee, Marianne Buck; and the rest of the Esterwegen Memorial staff. My research trip to Germany would not have been possible without the financial support from the Department of History at Washington State University, who awarded me the Morris Reed Fellowship and the Wayne Stanford Scholarship.

Without the support of my undergraduate advisor and Washington State University alumna, Dr. Marjorie Sanchez-Walker, I would not have found myself in graduate school completing a thesis. Her constant support and advice during my journey in graduate school was invaluable. I will forever be indebted to my cohort for maintaining a sense of balance in my life whilst writing this thesis. Thank you to Brian Stack and Jacob Wells for reading various drafts of this thesis. Finally, the support and encouragement I received from my family members and friends while researching in Germany and from family members and friends while writing in the

United States made this project not only much easier but also very enjoyable.

iii THE LONG ROAD TO MEMORIALIZATION:

A HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF

THE ESTERWEGEN MEMORIAL,

1945-2011

Abstract

by Sarah Schraeder, M. A. Washington State University May 2015

Chair: Raymond Sun

Memorial sites at former concentration camps serve as primary sites of memory of the

Nazi regime’s brutality and destruction of individual and civic freedoms in Germany. Much of the early postwar period included the development of memorialization projects of large concentration camp sites, such as Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, yet the overall trend in West

Germany until the 1980s was to remember the past selectively, focusing particularly on their own victimhood. While the creation of public spaces of memory of these important sites served to remind visitors of the horrors of the Nazi regime, the smaller satellite camps were dissolved or redeveloped for other uses. These smaller camps were reestablished as sites of memory beginning in the early 2000s, and today these sites are locally highly publicized. This thesis will focus on a case study of the memorial at Esterwegen located in the Emsland, a rural region in northwest Germany on the Dutch border, to explore why nearly forty years passed before any memorial projects began and how these newer memorialization projects compare to the

iv memorials that were established in the immediate postwar period. The Esterwegen Memorial commemorates a dense camp system where tens of thousands of inmates were incarcerated under brutal conditions that became integral to the regional economy and identity during the Nazi period.

The primary focus in studies of memorialization projects of former concentration camps centers around the creation of memorial sites at large concentration camps. As the development of memorial sites at smaller former concentration camps did not develop until the late 1990s and

2000s, relatively little attention has been given to the development of these smaller sites. This thesis will provide an analysis of the development of a local and regional effort to memorialize a set of former concentration camps referred to as the Emslandlager, or camps in the Emsland. It will examine how local and regional memorial projects compare to national projects, a necessary comparison to understand how the Emsland’s process of negotiating its Nazi past in order to show how it illumines and challenges national-level narratives about German memory of the

Nazi era.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iii

ABSTRACT ...... iv

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... vii

LIST OF TABLES ...... viii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... ix

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER

1. THE “CONCENTRATIONARY UNIVERSE” AND THE EMSLANDLAGER ...... 18

2. YEARS OF MIRACLES, YEARS OF SILENCES ...... 43

3. FROM TWO PATHS TO ONE MEMORIAL ...... 72

4. NATIONAL AND LOCAL MEMORIES COMPARED...... 106

CONCLUSION ...... 129

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 135

APPENDIX

A. DAS MOORSOLDATEN LIED ...... 144

B. THE REGIONAL ADMINISTRATIVE GOVERNMENTS (KREISE) IN LOWER SAXONY IN 1932 ...... 145

C. LOWER SAXON STATE PARLIAMENT ELECTIONS SINCE 1947 ...... 146

D. MEMORIALS IN LOWER SAXONY ...... 147

vi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Figure 1; General map of the camps in the Emsland, 1933-1945 ...... 22

2. Figure 2; The German Reich in 1945 ...... 24

3. Figure 3; The Nazi vote in Lower Saxony in the July 1932 Reichstag election ...... 31

4. Figure 4; Germany after the Second World War, September 1, 1945 ...... 45

5. Figure 5; The establishment of Lower Saxony, 1946 ...... 60

6. Figure 6; A scale model of Esterwegen Camp ...... 99

7. Figure 7; The outside landscaping at the Esterwegen Memorial ...... 99

8. Figure 8; The inside of the memorial at the Esterwegen Memorial ...... 99

9. Figure 9; Walking-tour of the Esterwegen Memorial ...... 102

10. Figure 10; The 1946 Jewish memorial at Bergen-Belsen ...... 111

11. Figure 11; A 1952 Bergen-Belsen memorial ...... 111

12. Figure 12; A 1999 plaque placed next to the obelisk at Bergen-Belsen ...... 114

13. Figure 13; Memorials in Lower Saxony ...... 121

14. Figure 14; The regional administrative governments (Kreise) in Lower Saxony in 1932 ...... 145

vii LIST OF TABLES

1. Table 1; Lower Saxon State Parliament Elections Since 1947 ...... 146

2. Table 2; Memorials in Lower Saxony ...... 147

viii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ABM Job creation measures (Arbeitsbeschaffungsmassnahmen)

Bundeswehr Federal Republic of Germany Military

CDU Christian Democratic Union (Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands)

CSU Christian Social Union in Bavaria (Christliche Sozial Union in Bayern)

LINKE The Left (Die Linke)

DIZ Documentation and Information Center Emslandlager (Dokumentations – und Informations Zentrum), Papenburg

DP Displaced Person

DP (pol.) German Party (Deutsche Partei)

DRP German Reich Party (Deutsch Reichspartei) e.V. Registered, not-for-profit organization (eingetragener Verein)

FDP Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei)

FRG Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland)

GDR German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republic)

Gestapo Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei)

KPD Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands)

NPD National Democratic Party (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands)

OKW High Command of the Wehrmacht (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht)

POW Prisoner of War

SA Storm Troop (Sturmabteilung)

SD Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst)

ix SPD Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands)

SRP Socialist Reich’s Party (Sozialistische Reichspartei Deutschlands)

SS Protection Squad (Schutzstaffel)

Wehrmacht German Reich Military

Z Center Party (Zentrum)

x

Dedication

This thesis is dedicated to the men and women whose actions supported the creation

of memorials to commemorate the horrors of the Nazi period in Germany

and the Emsland, and to my family members in the United States

and Germany who provided both emotional

and financial support.

xi INTRODUCTION

A rural, German region on the Dutch-German border was referred to for centuries as the

Armenhaus, or “poor house” of the northern German states or unified Germany after 1871. After the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century, the border with the newly independent United

Netherlands shifted to increase the borders of the German states. This meant that the previously unaffected Boatenger Marshes were now split between United Netherlands and German states instead of belonging entirely to the Dutch. For centuries, these marshes had been left as inconsequential wastelands and useless, water-logged marshes. However, during the nineteenth century, the Dutch people in the region with government support began the process of draining the marshes of water and cultivating the wastelands. While agricultural development and monetary investment occurred on the Dutch border in the nineteenth century, no ventures on the

German side of the border, a region commonly referred to as the Emsland, matched this development.1 It was not until the First World War that Germany acknowledged the necessity of using fallow lands for food and attempted to develop the region agriculturally and economically.

However, these early efforts, and those in the interwar period in the 1920s, proved to be futile.

When the Nazi regime came to power in 1933, more serious projects were initiated.

While connections can be made to increasing employment to improve Nazi support within

Germany, this also can be tied to achieving food self-sufficiency after the shortages experienced

1 The region was referred to as the Emsland because the River Ems dissected the region and the German side of the Boatenger Marshes. For more information on this, see Margret Schute, Staatseigene Siedlungsgebiete im Emsland: Vorgeschichte – Hintergründe Ablauf des Landwerbs, 1925-1942, (Meppen: Emsland Moormuseum Groß Hesepe, 1990) 22-25; and, Christoph Haverkamp, Die Erschließung des Emslandes im 20. Jahrhundert: als Beispiel staatlicher regionaler Wirtschaftsförderungen, (Sögel: Verlag der Emsländischen Landschaft, 1991).

1 during the First World War.2 Specifically, the Nazi regime built an extensive regional camp system, where prisoners were ordered to develop the region agriculturally by draining its marshes and cultivating the lands. Although these efforts were largely ineffective, the increasing attention to the Emsland’s well-being during the Nazi period and the Second World War forever changed its importance nationally. The Emsland experienced considerable economic growth in the postwar period that is celebrated by the Emslanders in conjunction with the large economic development in postwar West Germany commonly referred to as the Wirtschaftswunder

(economic miracle). Yet, their narrative ignores the roots of the region’s economic recovery in the forced labor conscription between 1933 and 1945. It is the lack of remembrance of this development and of the complicity of the Emslanders, or peoples from the Emsland region, in the Nazi terror system until the 1980s that this thesis explores further.

The 2011 Esterwegen Memorial, at the former site of the largest camp among the concentration camps in the Emsland, is an important site of memory for several reasons. First, the Emsland was a rather sparsely populated region with a large number of camps. The camp prisoners were used as forced labor in major agricultural development projects and in local industries during the war. This was a considerable labor force, and one that suffered a high mortality rate. The Emslandlager, or camps in the Emsland, housed nearly 80,000 prisoners, of whom 25-30,000 died due to insufficient food supply and living conditions as well as strenuous

(or physically demanding) labor. The majority of them were Soviet prisoners of war.3 The camps and their prisoners altered the Emsland spatially, making it plausible that knowledge of these

2 For more information on this, see Chapter 1 Footnote 25.

3 Flyer Gedenkstätte Esterwegen. Bundesarchiv Berlin, Y 12/A 441, Stiftung Gedenkstätte. (accessed January 19, 2014). http://www.gedenkstaette-esterwegen.de

2 camps must have been relatively high. It is, therefore, important to understand why selective forgetfulness occurred and required nearly half a century for successful memorial projects to begin.4

Representations of Nazi-era legacies in West Germany have undergone an immense amount of change since the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Two psychologists,

Alexander and Margaret Mitscherlich, in the 1970s and prominent novelists in the early 2000s, such as Günter Grass, argued that the immediate postwar period in Germany entirely failed to remember or commemorate any of the horrors committed during the Nazi era because their of their “inability to mourn,” but others maintained that this period can be understood as a selective process of remembrance.5 The memory culture in West Germany evolved in the 1960s and 1970s influenced by the Eichmann trial in Israel and the subsequent Auschwitz trials in Germany that placed Nazi criminals who had not been prosecuted under examination. During this period, predominant views of German victimhood shifted and provided space in the country’s memory

4 Robert Moeller introduced the idea of selective forgetting in this article, which was followed by a publication that further details it. In his article, he argues that Germans in the 1950s did remember their past and maintains, “Remembering selectively is not the same as forgetting.” For more information about his arguments, see the following studies: Robert Moeller, “Remembering the War in a Nation of Victims: West German Pasts in the 1950s,” in The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949- 1968, edited by Hanna Schissler, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 83; Robert Moeller, War Stories: The Search For A Usable Past In The Federal Republic Of Germany, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

5 The Mitscherlich’s argue this in their psychoanalytical discussion published in the 1970s. Several historical works and other productions of the late 1940s and 1950s latched onto the idea of a German “inability to mourn.” Frank Biess and Robert G. Moeller dispute this idea, but instead argue that Germans “selectively remember” or forgot certain items of their past. Alexander Mitscherlich and Margaret Mitscherlich, The Inability To Mourn: Principles Of Collective Behavior, (New York: Grove Press, 1975) xvi-xvii; Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Robert Moeller, War Stories: The Search For A Usable Past In The Federal Republic Of Germany, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Some of Günter Grass’ earlier works also focused on his in the 1950s and early 1960s, but he revitalized the discussion of Germans as victims in the 2000s Günter Grass, Crabwalk, translated by Krishna Winston, (London: Harcourt Inc., 2003).

3 culture to allow representations of Jewish victimhood. A final shift occurred in the 1980s with the Bitburg controversy and the Historikerstreit that destabilized German victimhood and further centered Jewish and other victims of the Nazi regime.6 After these events, West German government participation and funding in the creation and support of memorials increased considerably. Thus, the development of acceptable representations of the legacies of the Second

World War have been an important part of public discussion in West Germany and post- unification Germany since 1945.

Memorial sites at former concentration camps serve as primary sites of memory for the

Nazi regime’s brutality and destruction of individual and civic freedoms in Germany. While the creation of public memory spaces at these important sites serve to remind visitors of the horrors of the Nazi regime, the smaller satellite camps were dissolved or redeveloped for other uses.

Most of these smaller camps were reestablished as sites of memory beginning in the 1980s,

1990s, and early 2000s, and today these sites are locally highly publicized. This thesis will focus on a case study of the memorial at Esterwegen, located in the Emsland, to explore why nearly forty years passed before any memorial projects began and how these newer memorialization projects compare to the memorials that were established in the immediate postwar period.7 The

Esterwegen Memorial commemorates a dense camp system where tens of thousands of inmates,

6 The Bitburg controversy revolves around former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s official visit to a German army and SS cemetery in May 1985. Harold Marcuse argues that this visit and his speech, which supports the sense of German victimhood showed the deficiencies of German “coming to terms with the Nazi heritage.” The Historikerstreit, the Historian’s controversy debate, was a highly publicized discussion on whether Germans were victims or perpetrators. This controversy began with the critique by Jürgen Harbermas on academic representations of German victimhood. Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 364-66.

7 For a map of the location of the Emsland, see Figure 2 in Chapter 1.

4 including many Soviet POWs, political prisoners, and ‘asocials,’ were incarcerated under brutal conditions that became integral to the regional economy and identity during the Nazi period.

The primary focus in studies of memorialization projects of former concentration camps center on the creation of memorial sites at large concentration camps. As the memorial sites at smaller former concentration camps did not develop in many cases until the 1990s and 2000s, relatively little scholarly attention has been given to the evolution of these smaller sites. This study will provide an analysis of the development of a local and regional effort to memorialize at

Esterwegen, and examine what influenced the participants in the memorial process. It will also examine how local and regional memorial projects compare to national projects, which is necessary to understand how the Emsland’s process of negotiating its Nazi past illumines and challenges national-level narratives about German memory of the Nazi period. This analysis of a much less prominent site of memory provides a further understanding of how the Emsland came to terms with its past. Academic historians and student groups influenced the Esterwegen

Memorial heavily, which stands at odds with other earlier projects as special groups and government interest dominated the latter much more. Local and regional interests, however, heavily influenced both types of projects. Finally, this thesis will further explore and expand on the study of memorial projects in West Germany in order to investigate the change from a purposeful neglect to a purposeful promotion of memory as exemplified at the Esterwegen

Memorial.

Memorial sites offer a particularly interesting entryway into understanding the larger debates about appropriate representation because not only do they reflect national trends in coming to terms with a society’s collective past, but they also provide insights into local and

5 regional representations of the Nazi past.8 Particularly illuminating are memorial sites at former concentration camps as they are controversial in terms of their representations and receive relatively high numbers of visitations, specifically from non-Germans. These sites can be said to be a part of a sort of “camp tourism,” sometimes referred to as “dark” tourism.9 The Esterwegen

Memorial participates in supporting such an industry as it is advertised on the official Lower

Saxony state website and attracts regular coverage in local newspapers.10 Additionally, concentration camps as memorial sites attract many ‘twenty-first century tourists’, especially non-German ones that have displayed a fascination with the horrors that have been so widely portrayed in popular culture.11 Locally and regionally, these sites serve both as tourist destinations and important economic assets to the region as well as being historically significant sites of memory. Local and regional participants largely influence the development of these sites, as exemplified in the case of Esterwegen. Not only does a memorial site at a former concentration camp reflect the suffering of the victims, but local and regional interests are also

8 The German word for “coming to terms with one’s past” is Vergangenheitsbeweltigung, and is commonly used in public debates on the issue and academic works.

9 Journalists J. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley have become fascinated with this type of tourism. They are among the first to have identified this trend. No historical studies have been published that discuss this idea to this date focusing on the Holocaust and legacies of the Second World War. J. John Lennon, and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster, (New York: Continuum, 2000).

10 Tobias Böckermann, “Kulturausschuss zieht Bilanz Schon 60000 Besucher in Gedenkstätte Esterwegen,” Meppener Tagespost December 12, 2013 (accessed January 29, 2014) http://www.noz.de/lokales/meppen/artikel/432695/schon-60000-besucherin-; “Einweihung der Gedenkstätte Esterwegen,” directed by Simone Salzbrun, in Nordwest Zeitung October 31, 2011, (accessed March 24, 2014) http://www.nwzonline.de/videos/einweihung-der-gedenkstaette- esterwegen_a_1,0,1845025571.html; ‘Portal Niedersachsen,’ Niedersachsen (accessed January 29, 2014). http://www.niedersachsen.de/portal/

11 These sites were initially a form of pilgrimage for the descendants of its victims, but Lennon and Foley argue that the identity of the memorial sites of concentration sites, particularly the Auschwitz, has shifted to tourism. Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism, 2.

6 required to become integral to its creation. As Harold Marcuse so eloquently maintains, “the history of each former concentration camp reflects not only the political and cultural history of its host country, but also more specifically the changing values and goals held by various groups in that society.”12 Therefore, this study seeks to examine the history of the concentration camps in the Emsland and to compare and to contrast them to the transformation of other former concentration camps into memorials.

Historiography

Histories focusing specifically on the development of memorial projects of German memorial sites are limited. Larger camps, such as Dachau and Sachsenhausen, were memorialized much earlier and some literature exists on the growth of these memory sites, but memorial sites of these smaller camps are currently very understudied and provide a unique perspective of the process, especially because of its late development.13 A particularly important

12 Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau, 1.

13 One of the few of studies that provides an in depth analysis of projects of memorializing sites of memory is Harold Marcuse’s study on Dachau and Klaus Neumann’s study of a variety of memorials in East and West Germany. Insa Eschebach, Sigrid Jacobeit, and Susanne Landwerd completed a similar, but much smaller study of the memorial site at Ravensbruck in the late 1990s. Reinhard Matz and Adrzei Szczypiorski published a German academic study that provides a collection of essays that focuses on concentration camps in the state of Brandenburg in 1993. It is important to note that few other studies apart from Marcuse’s exist in English that trace the development of memorial sites of Nazi concentration camps. Some other studies include Claudia Koontz’s “Between Memory and Oblivion” and Jeffrey Herf’s Divided Memory. Claudia Koontz, “Between Memory and Oblivion: Concentration Camps in German Memory,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, edited by John R. Gillis, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past In The Two Germanys, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau; Klaus Neumann, Shifting Memories: The Nazi Past in the New Germany, (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000). Eschebach, Insa, Sigrid Jacobeit, and Susanne Lanwerd, Die Sprache des Gedenkens: zur Geschichte der Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück, 1945-1995, (Oranienburg: Edition Hentrich, 1999); Matz, Reinhard, Andrzej Szczypiorski, and et al. Die unsichtbaren Lager: das Verschwinden der Vergangenheit im Gedenken, (Rowohlt: Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 1993). Harold Marcuse provides a list of additional studies of memorialization projects in Germany and Austria in his AHR article in 2010 that include Ulrike Puvogel, Gedenkstätten für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus: Eine Dokumentation, two volumes (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung 1995); Karl Stuhlpfarrer, Bertrand Perz, and Florian

7 source is Harold Marcuse’s Legacies of Dachau as he provides the only extensive historical study of a concentration camp memorial.14 He engages his study on two separate levels. First, he analyzes the town of Dachau, the concentration camp, and the memorial site. Secondly, Marcuse focuses on the larger memory trends in West Germany. While he fails to provide a comparative memory analysis, his work informs the larger structure that this project takes. As Marcuse examines a concentration camp that was one of the largest inside Germany, the site figures prominently in the discussion of memory trends on a national scale. The Esterwegen memorial developed much later than Dachau’s, and, therefore, the two projects diverge considerably.

While there are several sources published in Germany that provide brief analysis of some sites of memory of concentration camps in Germany, Marcuse’s is the one of two English texts that examines a site at such an extensive level.15

The other historian who extensively studies the memorialization of a variety of former concentration camps is Klaus Neumann. In his Shifting Memories: The Nazi Past in the New

Germany, Neumann scrutinizes the developments of memorials primarily in Lower Saxony but includes some East German examples as well. Similar to this study, he seeks to reflect broader, national developments of memory in post-1945 Germany through an analysis of local histories of memorials. More important, Neumann’s focus in Shifting Memories is on the “public

Freund, Bibliographie zur Geschichte des Konzentrationslagers Mauthausen, (Wien: Institut für Zeitgeschichte der Universität Wien, 1998); Günter Morsch, ed., Von der Erinnerung zum Monument: Die Entstehungsgeschichte der Nationalen, (Berlin: Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Sachsenhausen, 1996). This information was located in Harold Marcuse, “Holocaust Memorials: The Emergence of a Genre,” American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (2010): 53-89.

14 Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau.

15 Reinhard Matz, Andrzej Szczypiorski, and et al. Die unsichtbaren Lager.

8 controversies about instances of memorialization.”16 While Neumann seeks to provide a variety of examples throughout Germany, it is impossible to analyze all instances of memorialization.

This study seeks to extend Neumann’s analysis of how public memory shifted in the postwar period by examining local histories of smaller concentration camps and sites of Nazi brutalities.

The field of memory studies as a whole developed much more recently than many other fields of historical study, but one scholar prior to the Second World War, Maurice Halbwachs, a sociologist from France, initially developed the idea of “collective remembering.” He identified that collective memory “reconstruct[s] an image of the past which is, in each epoch, the predominant thoughts in society.”17 While Halbwachs was one of the first to define the term collective memory, his contemporaries ignored his work. One of the initial works that shaped the development of the field of memory studies more recently, and one of the first to utilize

Halbwach’s work, is Pierre Nora’s collection on studies of memory, Realms of Memory:

Rethinking the French Past. He maintains that the developments of studies of total history, as represented by the Annales School, have led to a persistent fascination with the past. He argues that the “historiographic age” of history led to “consummating its divorce from memory – which in turn has become a possible object of history.”18 Nora coined the term of “sites of memory” because no real environments of memory exist.19 The extensive nature of this collection

16 Neuman, Shifting Memories, 4-6.

17 Halbwach’s works were published posthumously originally in the 1940s. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 160.

18 Nora’s work was originally published in French in 1992. Nora, Pierre. “General Introduction: Between Memory and History.” In Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. I, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) 4.

19 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations Special Issue, no. 26 (1989): 7.

9 established collective memory as a field scholarship and the use of the term “sites of memory,” which stems from its original French ‘Les Lieux de Mémoire,’ has heavily influenced other historians of memory. In this thesis, the concept of a ‘site of memory’ heavily informs the understanding of this work, as the Esterwegen Memorial is viewed as such a site.

Another historian whose work on historical memory influences this work is Jay Winter’s

Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. While this study focuses on memories of the First World

War, Winter provides a new and unique study by focusing on a comparative, international mode of analysis of memory.20 Additionally, he examines the development of local memory sites, which he argues are especially focused on mourning of losses. As this thesis analyzes the development of a local and regional site of memory, Winter’s analysis of the much more contested development of the local sites is a necessary supplement. His focus on these sites of memory as sites of mourning informs the analysis in this thesis of the Esterwegen Memorial development.

An additional key study is James E. Young’s At Memory’s Edge: The After-Images of the

Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture.21 This study is the result of his participation in a commission in 1997 to develop a national memorial in Berlin to commemorate the European

Jews killed in World War II. The generation of artists not alive at the time of its occurrence who depict the Holocaust do not seek to represent it exactly as it occurred, but rather as images of how they understand it. The artists represented in Young’s study display their knowledge of the

Holocaust as a “vicarious past” because they feel that simple national representations do not fill

20 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European cultural history, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

21 James E. Young, At Memory's Edge: After-Images of The Holocaust In Contemporary Art And Architecture, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

10 the void left by the killing of European Jews and believe that it “is simply intolerable both on ethical and historical grounds” to attempt to accurately represent it. 22 Young provides an interesting and thought-provoking postmodern perspective of aesthetic representations of the

Holocaust. His work is especially useful because he engages with a variety of memorial art, and provides an analysis of this art that is useful for this thesis when discussing the development and the creation of the memorial at Esterwegen. Much like Young’s work, this study examines the space of memorial sites, and assesses how the creators of the Esterwegen Memorial represented such a “vicarious past.” Even though Esterwegen was not part of the Holocaust, its memorial commemorates the legacies of war and the Nazis, and incorporates some information about the

Holocaust. The Esterwegen Memorial staff also advertises its incorporation at Yad Vashem, a

Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem, as a Holocaust site because a small number of Jews were incarcerated in the camp system in the Emsland.23

While these studies are an integral part of the broader theoretical frameworks of memory studies, it is necessary to focus on some more recent studies of postwar German memory. The works of Frank Biess, Jeffrey Herf, and Robert G. Moeller provided groundbreaking studies for several reasons.24 Specifically, Moeller and Biess both maintain that Germans did not fail to remember their past in the first decade after the war, but rather argue that they remembered different aspects. It is their works that largely influence the postwar developments discussed

22 Ibid., 1-2.

23 Sites of the Holocaust include the death camps in Poland, such as Treblinka, Madjanek, and Auschitwz to name a few, but many other memorial sites, such as Dachau, represent the Holocaust as part of their exhibitions and have been incorporated into the definition of the Holocaust. Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau. Interview with Kurt Buck on July 29, 2014.

24 Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Herf, Divided Memory; Robert G. Moeller, War Stories.

11 below. Moeller, as discussed above, focuses his studies on German victimization, and developed the idea of selective remembering when looking at Germans that fled in the wake of Soviet advances. Biess furthers the idea that Germans did not fail to commemorate the legacies of the

Second World War, but rather remembered in their own specific ways by focusing on the returning POWs. Jeffrey Herf published one of the first comparative studies of East and West

Germany of the growth of a public memory of the legacies of the Second World War. While this study does not provide an analysis of local memory sites in East Germany, it is necessary to understand the progression in East Germany and to engage on some level with the East-West

German divide in order to fully understand the development in West Germany. No study of West

Germany can exclude a discussion on how the memory compares to Eastern projects and trends as they heavily influenced each other prior to unification and have become integrally connected since then. Mostly, Biess and Moeller’s arguments that Germany in the 1950s and 1960s did, in fact, remember the war and the Nazi past is the integral shift that this essay places itself within.

Below, I seek to show how Germans in the Emsland saw themselves as victims and were not affected by a sort of ‘inability to mourn’ as discussed above, but rather “selectively” mourned the

Nazi past.

Sources and Methodology

The main primary sources this thesis examines include documents that track the creation of the memorial site at Esterwegen. The memorial site itself houses an array of documents that illuminate the politics at play in its creation. Additionally, the Esterwegen Memorial has several memoirs and secondary literature on discussions of camp inmates in its holdings that are not available outside of this site and are important to further contextualize how inmates remembered their experience in the camp and participated in the memorialization project of their experience

12 in the camps in the Emsland region. Lastly, I interviewed the director of the memorial site, Dr.

Andrea Kaltofen, and the director of the DIZ, Kurt Buck about the development of the memorial at Esterwegen since its early development phases in the 1980s. Their memories of the process evident in the interviews provide a fuller understanding of the development of this site of memory.25

To gain a further understanding of the process of memorialization and how the larger public perceived it, this thesis utilizes regional newspapers. The Esterwegen Memorial provided access to regional newspapers, in particular the Ems-Zeitung and the Meppener Tagespost.26

While these newspapers are also available at the Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv (The Lower

Saxon State archive) in Osnabrück, this project utilizes the extensive collection of newspapers from the Esterwegen archive as it provided other newspapers’ discussion about the development of memory of the Nazi past in the Emsland. These newspaper sources, centered primarily in northwestern Germany, provided additional resources to contextualize public approval of these sites. These newspapers also provided detailed accounts about how the creation of these sites of memory was represented to the public and popular responses to the memorialization projects.

To further understand memorialization projects across Lower Saxony, this thesis utilizes the information provided about the memorials in Lower Saxony and other West German memorials from a variety of sources. First, the website forums for the memorial organizations often provide a detailed background of the development of their memorials. In order to support

25 The documentation process with the Washington State University Institutional Review Board for the interviews with Andrea Kaltofen and Kurt Buck was completed in July 2014. The interviews completed shortly thereafter in late July 2014 at the Esterwegen Memorial in Esterwegen, Germany.

26 While the Ems-Zeitung newspaper has digitized their works since the early 2000s, previous sources are not yet available on their online archive.

13 these accounts, however, this thesis also utilizes a variety of secondary sources about each memorial site to support or supplement their accounts.27 The state of Lower Saxony commissioned a study that includes a brief history and information about the development of memorials of each local memorial organization.28 Additionally, the Foundation Memorial to the

Murdered Jews of Europe sponsored an extensive study published on their website that provides a compilation of sites of memory that extends well beyond Lower Saxony and Germany. While their list and information about memorials is not exhaustive, it provides an extensive overview of memorials within Germany.29 Furthermore, Appendix D serves to provide an oversight of every memorial, or Gedenkstätte, in Lower Saxony and the year of its creation in order to highlight the general trend of when these sites were created.30 Finally, Harold Marcuse and Klaus Neumann’s studies provide extensive details about the memorialization process of the sites their works

27 For more information about the memorials, see “A Place of Remembrance.” Gedenkstätte Bergen-Belsen Stiftung Niedersächsische Gedenkstätten. Accessed January 15, 2015. http://bergen- belsen.stiftung-ng.de/en/history/place-of-remembrance.html. “KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau,” Stiftung der Bayerische Gedenkstätten, accessed April 27, 2014, http://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/ Elke Zacharias, “10 Jahre Gedenkstätte – Idee und Realisierung.” PDF in Gedenk- und Dokumentationsstätte KZ Drütte. http://www.gedenkstaette-salzgitter.de/gedenkstatte/anmeldung/ (accessed March 10, 2015). “Geschichte: Kampf um die Gedenkstätte,” Gedenk- und Dokumentationsstätte KZ Drütte. http://www.gedenkstaette-salzgitter.de/gedenkstatte/anmeldung/ (accessed March 10, 2015). “Nachnutzung,” Gedenkstätte und Stiftung Lager Sandbostel. http://www.stiftung-lager- sandbostel.de/sls/nachnutzung.html (accessed March 10, 2015).

28 Susanne Lengner and Erika Prätsch, Gedenkstätten in Niedersachsen: Spurensuche Erinnerungen wachhalten, (Hannover: Niederächsisches Ministerium für Bundes- und Europaangelegenheiten Referat für Presse und Öftenlichtkeitsarbeit. 1993).

29 Ulrich Baumann et la., “Information Portal to European Sites of Remembrance,” Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, translated by Barbara Kurowska, last edited June 2011, http://www.memorialmuseums.org (accessed March 5, 2015).

30 Gedenkstätte translates from German into English as “memorial.” The most prominent site listed here is the memorial at Bergen-Belsen, and, importantly, the same site that the architect that worked on the Esterwegen Memorial participated in developing. Andrea Kaltofen, and Udo Mäsker, ed., Die Gedenkstätte Esterwegen: Ein Werkstattbericht, (Meppen: Druckhaus Plagge GmbH, 2012) 15. The other sites listed in Lower Saxony are explained and translated in more detail in Appendix D.

14 review.31

As the focus of this project is to understand the process of memorialization, this study employs a qualitative approach. The memorial site at Esterwegen provides some unique and interesting architectural and memorial techniques. This thesis analyzes how and why such types of memorialization were chosen and how visitors and the surrounding communities reacted to them. The primary sources that this thesis will analyze include the documents and newspaper articles that track the development of the memorial site. Most of these documents were created by members of committees and other groups that directly participated in the production of the site at Esterwegen. The analysis in this thesis also includes the design of the grounds, monuments, and architecture. For example, the Esterwegen Memorial grounds architect chose to plant an array of trees at the sites of the former barracks. The number of trees planted represents the estimated number of men who died at the Esterwegen camp. Like James E. Young’s analysis, my project will contextualize the use of space in the memorial sites and examine the motivations of the developers.32

In order to understand the development of memorialization projects, it is necessary to contextualize their specific history. Therefore, Chapter 1 will focus on the creation and development of the Emslandlager. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of the Emsland region prior to the Nazi regime, and will then focus on providing a detailed description of the

31 The following works by Harold Marcuse, “Holocaust Memorials: The Emergence of a Genre,” American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (2010), 64. “The Afterlife of the Camps,” in Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: New Histories, edited by Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachsmann (New York: Routledge, 2010) 197. Additionally, this chapter uses Neumann’s Shifting Memories.

32 James Edward Young, At Memory's Edge.

15 creation of the concentration camps. The attempts by the Nazi regime to develop the region agriculturally and economically are important to understand postwar neglect of the Nazi past.

The next chapter, Chapter 2, will track the history of Emsland during liberation of the camps and the occupation period. It will trace the immediate postwar usages of the camps from Displaced

Person camps to the creation of a Bundeswehr (German military) depot at the former concentration camp site at Esterwegen. Finally, Chapter 2 focuses on early individual attempts to commemorate the Nazi camps in the Emsland and the Nazi past. These developments establish the framework for understanding why and how the Esterwegen Memorial was created.

Chapter 3 portrays the road to memorialization that culminated in the building of the

Esterwegen Memorial in 2011. It traces the creation of the Dokumentation- and

Informationszentrum (DIZ) Emslandlager, the document and information center of the camps in the Emsland, in the late 1970s and 1980s, and discusses some initial attempts by this organization to create a memorial site at Esterwegen to memorialize the set of fifteen camps in the region, particularly focusing on the organization’s success in creating a memorial house in the nearby city of Papenburg that served as the memorial museum for the region’s Nazi past until the Esterwegen Memorial opened over twenty years later. It then focuses on the actual development of the current site at Esterwegen, tracing its history from the 1990s to its current state today, as a site of memory that is being advertised widely.

The fourth chapter of this thesis discusses how the site at Esterwegen compares to other commemorative projects at concentration camps in the state of Lower Saxony and other West

German memorials. It will evaluate efforts in the Emsland to other regional and national projects, including the Dachau and Bergen-Belsen memorials. This chapter outlines the major differences and similarities of Esterwegen and other sites and provides an understanding of how this reflects

16 the region’s memory. Finally, the conclusion demonstrates the importance of this study, and provides an understanding as to why memory studies are important and why further projects of local and regional memorialization projects need to be attempted.

17 CHAPTER ONE

THE “CONCENTRATIONARY UNIVERSE”

AND THE EMSLANDLAGER

The relatively unknown region of the Emsland situated in current day northwestern

Lower Saxony located on the Dutch-German border, played an important role within the camp system during the Nazi regime. Not only was one of its camps part of the initial development of concentration camps under the Nazi regime, the sparsely populated region housed a total of fifteen camps by 1939. The nearly 80,000 camp prisoners placed in the Emsland were ordered to cultivate the marshes and supplement labor needs in the region.1 The attempt to improve the region agriculturally led, in part, to an increased agricultural production in the region after 1945.

Postwar economic growth was, therefore, directly connected to the labor of the camp prisoners the marshlands and other agricultural wastelands in the region during the Nazi period. The regional population’s knowledge of the camps and their relative silence on the subject until the late 1970s highlights a disconnection between the reasons for the Emsland’s postwar economic successes and the unwillingness, or inability, of the population to engage critically with their past.2 The economic profit from the region’s agricultural growth in the 1960s and 1970s and its population growth in the 1990s and 2000s is directly related to the establishment of plans expand the region’s agricultural production during the Nazi period with the help of the political

1 Elke Suhr, “Konzentrationslager-Justizgefangenenlager-Krigsgefangenlager im Emsland 1933- 1945,” in Vezfolgung, Ausbeutung, Vernichtung: Die Lebens- und Arbeitsbedingungen der Häftlinge in deutschen Konzentrationslagern 1933-1945, edited by Ludwig Eiber, (Hannover: Fackelträger, 1985) 68- 75. “Flyer Gedenkstätte Esterwegen,” Bundesarchiv Berlin, Y 12/A 441, Stiftung Gedenkstätte. (accessed January 19, 2014). http://www.gedenkstaette- esterwegen.de/index.php?con_cat=131&con_lang=1&sid=9fc7e2dfd2f4c9d8ec32242d417971d3

2 Chapter 3 focuses on the discussion of the development of memory after the 1970s.

18 prisoners.

The differences between death camps, concentration camps, and other camps during the

Nazi reign of terror must first be identified to contextualize a discussion of the camps in the

Emsland. Only concentration camps outside of Germany, mostly in Poland, were classified as death camps. The purpose of death camps was to hold prisoners until the time of their execution.

However, these death camps, established during the Second World War, also required labor, which some prisoners would fulfill until they became too weak. On the other hand, early concentration camps within Germany that opened as early as spring of 1933 were mostly designed to accommodate political opponents and place them in “protective custody”

(Schutzhaft) with the hope that hard labor would reeducate them to become more ideal citizens of the German Reich. Many early concentration camps constructed in this period to accommodate the imprisonment of some 150,000 to 200,000 temporally detained political opponents of the

Nazi regime in 1933.3 In addition to being designated as a concentration camp run by the SA and later by the SS, some of the fifteen camps in the Emsland were also designated as “justice camps,” which were camps run by the Prussian Ministry of Justice, by 1934 for the overflowing prisons to transfer their prisoners into the camps. With the start of the war in 1939, other camps

3 Here I use the term “early” concentration camps (Wachsmann) instead of commonly used term of “wild” concentration camps (Suhr) because as Nikolaus Wachsmann explains, the concentration camps all evolved differently and within different phases; “there was no prototype of an early Nazi camp.” Thus, to denote some of the early camps as “wild” takes the disorganization out of the concept that all of the camps were created equal. When efforts to streamline the camp system began, many of the early camps were already closed down. Only six remained in the state of Prussia by mid-1933, which included the camp at Esterwegen. For more information on this argument, see the Nikolaus Wachsmann, “The dynamics of destruction: The development of the concentration camps 1933-1945,” in Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: New Histories, edited by Jane Caplan, and Nikolaus Wachsmann, (New York: Routledge, 2010) 17-20. Elke Suhr, Die Emslandlager: Die Politische und Wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Emsländischen Konzentrations- und Strafgefangenlager, 1933-1945, (Bremen: 1985), 27.

19 were created or transformed into camps organized by the Wehrmacht. These camps would house prisoners of war and later in the war, German soldiers disciplined for defying military codes by deserting, for example. Thus, the camp system created by the Nazi regime was a complicated system that can be most easily delineated by the different organizations supervising each concentration camp.

The fifteen concentration camps in the Emsland established between 1933 and 1939 exhibit three phases of development.4 The first three camps at Esterwegen, Börgemoor, and

Neusustrum were built in 1933 and 1934 to house political prisoners under the supervision of

Himmler’s SS. These concentration camps imprisoned political opponents of the Nazi regime, such as communist and socialists. By 1934, the construction of camps at Aschendorfermoor,

Rhede-Brual, Walchum, Oberlangen, Versen, Bathorn and Fullen began. These camps served as prison camps under the supervision of the Ministry of Justice (Justizverwaltung). These prison camps assisted in the relocation of prisoners in the overfilled prison system in Prussia. The camps created in 1933 (Esterwegen, Börgermoor, and Neusustrum) were all transitioned to prison camps of this sort by 1933 to further alleviate the overfilled prisons in the state. Shortly after the Second World War began in 1939, the High Command of the Wehrmacht created five additional camps at Dalum, Groß Hesepe, Wietmarschen, Alexisdorf, and Wesuwe while also transitioning the camps at Oberlangen, Versen, and Fullen to camps under the Wehrmacht command.5 The Wehrmacht camps housed prisoners of war as well as resistance fighters from

4 See the map below in Figure 1 for the exact locations of the camps in the Emsland. Suhr, Die Emslandlager, 1-15.

5 The camps at Wietmarschen, Alexisdorf, and Bathorn lie outside of today’s borders of the Emsland as the state administrators established the region into its own regional administrative

20 occupied German territories within Europe. The classification and jurisdiction of different groups of the camps in the Emsland further highlights the complexity of the Nazi camp system within

Germany.

The camps created in the region must be understood through an analysis of a deeper examination of the region and the Nazi administration. In order to fully contextualize the

Emsland and the concentration camps created there by the Nazi regime, this chapter will begin by examining the complicated system of administrative governance in the Emsland, its unique agricultural position within Germany, and its society before and during the Nazi period.

Particularly important is the use of camp prisoners in the improvement of the marshes to ensure increased agricultural production, a need that can be linked to fears of First World War food shortages. Next, an analysis of the camps during the Nazi period until 1939 and the Second

World War expands on the complexities of the camp system in the Emsland and their specific characteristics.

government (Bad Bentheim) during the late 1970s. “Die Emslandlager 1933-1945.” Gedenkstätte Esterwegen, accessed January 19, 2014 http://www.gedenkstaette- esterwegen.de/index.php?con_cat=51&con_lang=1&sid= 5d735bfc3ab35468859d6a1f7e5f01b1

21

Figure 1. General map of the camps in the Emsland, 1933- 1945.6

6 “Die Emslandlager 1933-1945.” Gedenkstätte Esterwegen, accessed January 19, 2014 http://www.gedenkstaette-esterwegen.de/index.php?con_cat=51&con_lang=1&sid= 5d735bfc3ab35468859d6a1f7e5f01b1

22 The Emsland: Administration, Agriculture, and Society

The Emsland was formally created as a district with government functions in 1977, but informally the region has been referred to as the “Emsland” for centuries because the river Ems dissects the marshlands from north to south. Additionally, Lower Saxony did not become the administrative government in the region until 1946. Prior to these developments, the region was divided into several different principalities, such as Oldenburg and Schaumburg-Lippe, and free cities, including Hamburg, Bremen, and Bremerhaven, that were incorporated into the Prussian state by 1866. However, these specific regions maintained a considerable autonomy under the

Prussian state. In sum, the region has a complicated history of administrative governance.

The first attempts to consolidate the region under a more cohesive administrative unit did not come to fruition until the Nazi regime came to power in the 1930s. By January 30, 1934, the

Nazi regime passed the ‘Law for the Reconstruction of the Reich’ (Gesetz über den Neubau des

Reichs) that officially abolished the sovereignty of previous regional governments and established Nazi administrative districts (Gaue).7 The reconfiguration of the regional administration helped the Nazi regime within Germany reorganize the nation under the political administration of its party districts. The region of the current-day Emsland was formerly part of the Gau Weser-Ems, identified by the geographical markers of the region between the two rivers, the Ems and the Weser. The districts of Meppen, Aschendorf-Hümmling, and Lingen within the

Gau Weser-Ems compose the current-day borders of the Emsland.8 The law dissolved the

7 Jürgen Borchers et al., Die Gründung des Landes Niedersachsen, (Hannover: Niedersächsische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1986) 13-14, http://nibis.ni.schule.de/nli1/rechtsx/nlpb/ (accessed January 24, 2015).

8 See Appendix B for a map of the districts.

23 administrative duties of the principality of Oldenburg, one of the largest cities north of the current-day Emsland, yet maintained administrative duties of the regional administrative unit of

Osnabrück (Bezirksregierung). According to historian Enno Meyer, it is impossible to provide a political history of the region separate from the Weser-Ems Gau after the redrawing of administrative units, as insufficient sources exist that focus specifically on the former region of the free city of Oldenburg.9 Many of the concentration camps in the Emsland were created during the shift of administrative responsibilities to the Gau Weser-Ems.

Figure 2. The German Reich in 1945: The title of the map refers to the Großdeutsche Reich, or the larger German empire. The map illustrates the different political administrative units within Germany and its occupation zones by 1945.10

9 Enno Meyer, Zwischen Weser und Ems 1933-1945: Wie Sie Lebten, Was Sie Erlebten, (Oldenburg: Heinz Holzber Verlag, 1986) 8.

10 “Das Grossdeutsche Reich,” Putzger-Historischer Weltatlas-Auflage, 1965, in “The German Codes Page,” http://home.scarlet.be/p.colmant/german-codes.htm (accessed January 22, 2015).

24 Analogous to Nazi restructuring of the regional administrations within Germany, so too they purposefully worked to rationalize and improve the German economy, particularly the

Emsland’s agricultural sector. The Emsland, often considered a backwards and neglected region, was primarily dependent on agriculture. Unlike the Ruhr Valley and other industrial centers within Germany, it was viewed by many people within the German Reich as the “poor house of

Germany.”11 Early attempts to cultivate the agricultural wastelands (Ödländer) of the Emsland and similar regions began shortly before the First World War broke out, and led to the creation of community-based efforts to establish more effective cultivation methods than the individual owners’ mostly quite fruitless attempts. After the British naval blockade began after the beginning of the First World War, Kaiser Wilhelm II passed an emergency decree on November

7, 1914 that required owners of marshlands and other unused agricultural regions under the oversight of the Ministry of Agriculture to establish so-called “ground improvement cooperatives” (Bodenverbesserungsgenossenschaften). By September 1915, the Ministry of

Agriculture had instituted a total of 345 cooperatives that transformed 40,000 hectares of a total surface area of 156,173 hectares. Until 1916, the use of prisoners of war and military deserters to develop these regions was quite common in addition to the work begun under the cooperatives.

However, at this time their labor was shifted to directly support agricultural and industrial production due to the heavy losses experienced at the fronts, since the cultivation of the marshlands in the Emsland had produced no immediate results. After the Versailles Treaty passed in 1919, members of the “ground improvement cooperatives” sought to continue the

11 In German, the phrase is the Armenhaus. Christoph Haverkamp, Die Erschließung des Emslandes im 20. Jahrhundert: als Beispiel staatlicher regionaler Wirtschaftsförderungen, (Sögel: Verlag der Emsländischen Landschaft, 1991) 117.

25 system of support to improve the wastelands by promoting a bill brought to the Weimar parliament. The strain of the financial situation in Germany because of the Versailles Treaty compensations and other financial consequences of the First World War made further developments of such a project unfeasible.12

While a variety of attempts to improve the agricultural production of the Emsland continued in the 1920s, no venture flourished during the Weimar Republic. Yet some of the cooperatives created during First World War still attempted to develop the region, and bought a variety of machines, such as steam plows, in the 1920s to drain the marshes and peat lands.13

Although a variety of projects continued to be proposed and expanded to some extent, these schemes never flourished. The underdeveloped agricultural condition of the Emsland and its remote location made it a valuable region to some leading Nazi officials by the 1930s. In a newsletter to the Prussian regional presidents within Germany, Hermann Göring requested recommendations of locations of rural areas to create camps in Prussia for approximately 250 to

300 political “protective custody” prisoners (Schutzhäftlinge) in order to relieve the overfilled prisons. He noted that locations should have “the opportunity for prisoners to work on community projects” particularly including “work in marshes, deforestation of forested areas,

12 Much of the history of the Emsland is related to the new border distribution after the Thirty Years War, which shifted the border with the Netherlands. While agricultural development and monetary investment occurred on the Dutch border in the nineteenth century, no ventures on the German border matched this progress. Translations completed by the author. Margret Schute, Staatseigene Siedlungsgebiete im Emsland: Vorgeschichte – Hintergründe – Ablauf des Landwerbs, 1925-1942, (Meppen: Emsland Moormuseum Groß Hesepe, 1990) 22-25.

13 Suhr, “Konzentrationslager,” 83.

26 and the like.”14 Bernhard Eggers, the provincial president of the Osnabrück regional administration, who took over this position as a Nazi party member after his Catholic predecessor was suspended, noted in a return letter to Göring the possibility of utilizing the largely unused marshlands of the Emsland.15 Additionally, Eggers envisioned the industrial, agricultural, and infrastructural development of a region generally viewed as an economically distressed area within Germany. Whilst Göring’s eagerness to create a Prussian camp system for the overfilled and financially burdensome penitentiary system motivated the development of the camps in the Emsland by mid-1933, the necessity for the German state to make use of every inch of unused land, particularly for increased food production, became integral to the Nazi policies and can be tied to the experiences of food shortages during the First World War.16 In the case of the Emsland, this was particularly related to the ideologies of Blood and Soil (Blut und Boden), which maintained that every unused piece of land must be viewed as a mark of dishonor to the

German peoples.17 Thus, the initial motivation to develop camps in the Emsland is directly connected to its agricultural underdevelopment and Nazi ideological ambitions.

In 1933, the regional government of the Weser-Ems and local cooperatives within the

14 Letter from the Prussian Minister of Interior to the Osnabrücker heads of the provincial governments, March 17, 1933, Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv Osnabrück, Rep. 430, Dez. 502, acc. 11/6, in Elke Suhr, “Konzentrationslager,” 80-81.

15 Osnabrück was also part of the Weser-Ems Gau.

16 Walther Darré, Minister of Food and Agriculture, and Herbert Backe, who worked with Göring’s organization for the Four Year Plan, to their best abilities, prepared the German agricultural sector by 1939. For more on Germany’s “Battle for Food” during the Second World War, see Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food, (New York: Penguin Books, 2012).

17 Annette Wilbers-Noetzel, Die wohnräumliche und wirtschaftliche Engliederung der Flüchtlinge und Vertreibenen im Emsland nach 1945, (Sögel: Emslandischen Landschaft, 2004) 143.

27 Emsland region established a plan for specific areas to be developed, including camp locations.

Within a couple of months these groups designed detailed plans about the specific development areas and the supply of materials for the building of barracks for the prisoners in the camps. The plans called for the creation of four camps of 3,000 to 4,000 prisoners each who would develop a total of 20,000 hectares of wastelands. In the event of war, this region, therefore, would provide food products to the rest of the region and potentially nation.18 Additionally, the role of the camps to serve the region economically functioned as propaganda to generate support for the creation of such an extensive camp system. Newspapers in the region such as the Ems-Zeitung noted that the development of camps to cultivate the region agriculturally would spark the economic recovery of the entire region.19 According to a newspaper article, a bishop visiting the region in 1936 told the SA guards that the Emsland region was in a “sleeping beauty sleep”

(Dornröschenschlaf) until “Prince Hitler” awoke it.20 Therefore, it is clear that the development of camps in the Emsland is directly connected to the agricultural and economic necessity to develop the Emsland.

The mostly rural region of the current-day Lower Saxony included a variety of larger cities and urban areas and was generally considered a politically diverse region. The varied religious backgrounds played an important role in these differences. While much of the current- day state consisted of Protestants, certain areas, such as much of the Emsland, particularly the

Kreis Ashendorf-Hümmling, consisted predominantly of Catholics. This meant that the political

18 Suhr, “Konzentrationslager,” 81.

19 Ems-Zeitung, July 13, 1933, in Suhr, “Konzentrationslager,” 81.

20 Ems-Zeitung, December 23, 1936, in Suhr, “Konzentrationslager,” 82.

28 affiliations of these regions supported the Center Party, a party that traditionally represented those of Catholic denomination within Germany. This support was notably strong enough to withstand the movement towards other political parties, such as the Nazi party, during the economic crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s.21 Also of significance, the population of the remote, rural Emsland consisted primarily of agricultural workers as no industries were developed in this region until the 1950s. Most industrial development was situated in the southeast of current-day Lower Saxony with the exception of Wilhelmshaven and Onsabrück.

While only about 38.5 percent of labor in the state was in agricultural employment, this number would have been much larger in the Emsland. The region was “characterized by small and medium-sized family-run farms arranged in compact villages with close community ties.” The entire contemporary state did not develop large business interests in agriculture or industry during this period while even handicrafts had not yet taken on an industrial character.22

Therefore, compared to other parts of Germany, the diverse yet undeveloped nature of the current-day Lower Saxony was quite different than other regions within Germany, such as the industrialized Ruhr region, the urbanized area around Berlin, and the primarily agricultural state of Bavaria.

The Nazi party already received considerable support in parts of this region by 1929, particularly in the regions of Oldenburg and Brunswick.23 While other dominant parties such as the Center Party of the Catholic population and the National Liberals garnered a great deal of

21 Jeremy Noakes, The Nazi Party in Lower Saxony, 1921-1933, (London: Oxford University Press, 1971) 154.

22 Ibid., 2-6.

23 See Appendix B for more information on the statistical rise of the Nazi vote. Ibid., 222.

29 approval throughout the state, the Nazi party made significant strides in some regions throughout the state. The region of Oldenburg was one of the early strongholds of the Nazi movement, and, thus, the Nazi politicians in this area were able to begin the process of making the regional parliament ineffective, muzzling the press, and inserting a propaganda apparatus within the state.

Yet, by the November 1932 elections, the Nazi party in Oldenburg lost 10% of its vote, showing that a considerable amount of the voters were dissatisfied with the Nazi party policies at the time.24 Thus, although the Nazi regime succeeded in gaining power, the people of Oldenburg exhibited a degree of mistrust before the Nazi regime came to power on national scale the following year. While the Oldenburg example provides an interesting window into the early endorsement of the Nazi regime in the region, a broader understanding of political party support in Lower Saxony must be explored.

24 Ernst Schubert, “Von der Weimar Republik zur Gegenwart,” Niedersachsen (accessed January 17, 2015), http://www.niedersachsen.de/portal/live.php?navigation_id=6989&article_id=19815&_ psmand=1000, in Ordnungen im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit. Ernst Schubert zum Gedenken, edited by Peter Aufgebauer et. la, (Hannover: Verlag Hahnsche Buchhandlung 2006).

30

Figure 3. The Nazi vote in Lower Saxony in the July 1932 Reichstag election.25

Nevertheless, the Nazi regime in the region of the present-day Lower Saxony attempted to improve its relationship with those who voted against them quite strongly. Therefore, they implemented the industrialization projects in this region that eventually led to the development of the “Reichswerke (Herman Göring Werke)” (Reich’s Works, or Herman Göring Works) and a

Volkswagen Foundation in two regions near the Emsland. Even though this was part of their

25 The region of Oldenburg is in the 60-70 percentile while the three regions of the current-day Emsland (Ashendorf-Hümmling, Meppen, and Lingen) voted between 0-20 percent in favor of the Nazi party. Noakes, The Nazi Party in Lower Saxony, 276. See appendix B for information on the names of the different regions in 1932.

31 effort to win over support from the working class who traditionally supported the communist party (KPD) and the Social Democrats (SPD), the middle class in Lower Saxony supported the

Center Party and the Liberal Progressives. The Nazi party received most support in Lower

Saxony from the middle class. However, religion played an important role in voting patterns here as well. Although Protestant districts such as Leer voted to support the Nazi party with a 55 percent vote in the 1930 election, predominantly Catholic districts like Aschendorf-Hümmling voted only 8.3 percent in favor of the Nazi party. It must also be noted that Leer included a medium-sized town while Aschendorf-Hümmling was only agricultural. This phenomenon of ultra-Catholic support did not fit with the rest of the agricultural regions voting patterns as they generally supported the Nazi party more than industrial regions did.

Therefore, we see the resistance to Nazi support in Lower Saxony among two groups: the

Catholics living in a region dominated by Protestants and the workers.26 While the Catholic reasons for resistance was due to its diasporic status in the region, the workers, who supported the SPD and KPD, were another group of peoples from which the Nazi party needed greater approval. As explored above, the development of industries provided some additional voter support. However, many opposing groups maintained power by the time the Nazi party took control in January of 1933. In order to control the groups that resisted the Nazi regime at the beginning of their struggle for power in the early 1930s, a variety of measures were developed to incarcerate those opposing the state. This need initiated the development of concentration camps and other types of camps all across Germany and their later occupied territories.

26 Ernst Schubert, “Von der Weimar Republik zur Gegenwart.”

32 The Development of Camps, 1933-1938

During the Nazi period between 1933 and 1938, fifteen concentration camps were created in the Emsland region. The development of three camps in the Emsland beginning the spring of

1933 was similar to other developments throughout Germany that sought to house political opponents of the Nazi regime.27 After the Reichstag Fire on February 27, 1933, the creation of concentration camps began in the March and April. The camps in the Emsland were commissioned by the Prussian State of the Interior and run by SS units rather than by SA leaders as was the case for many early concentration camps that did not want to give their prisoners to the police or because the prisons were overfilled. The total number of inmates in Prussia alone was around 17,000 men and women. By June 22, 1933, the first 90 prisoners arrived to begin building the camps in the Emsland.28

The development of the Emsland camps is generally divided into three phases as identified by historian Elke Suhr.29 The first stage began in 1933 and ended in 1936. These camps were supervised by the SS and included political opponents of the Nazi regime. Three camps were created during this period in the Emsland – Esterwegen, Neusustrum, and

Börgermoor. The development of early Nazi camps did not follow a specific prototype. The camps ranged from SA torture cellars to the camps in the Emsland overseen by the Prussian state with about 3,000 prisoners by September 1933. The building of barracks and other types of housing was also often improvised based on what structures were already present at these

27 Kosthorst and Walter, Konzentrations- und Strafgefangenenlager, 67.

28 Ibid., 73.

29 Suhr, Die Emslandlager.

33 locations. The general treatment of prisoners was based on intimidation rather than murder, but there were a variety of ways each camp practiced forced labor and discipline. Thus, the early stages of camps throughout Germany were not a coherent system because they arose out of political necessity.30

The second stage of the development in the Emsland was the creation of prison camps supervised by the Germany’s Ministry of Justice (Reichsjustizministerium) to supplement the overpopulated prisons. The idea to develop camps to alleviate the stresses on the prison system in Germany was first developed by Herman Göring as detailed above. However, by 1934, the idea of creating a Prussian concentration camp system failed and Göring provided the camps for the Ministry of Justice. While these prisoners included criminals, many were imprisoned as political opponents of the state. The Ministry of Justice took over all but one camp (Esterwegen) during this period and created six additional camps in the region.31 However, by 1936 the concentration camp at Esterwegen was also dissolved and transferred to the jurisdiction of the

Ministry of Justice. While Heinrich Himmler and the SS directed the expansion of concentration camps in Germany, the trend in the Emsland shows that other camps under primarily Justice

Department jurisdiction also expanded during this period.32

30 Some of the early camps were called “concentration camps,” but the term was generally used ‘loosely’ as the meaning of it was unclear at this period. Wachsmann only references concentration camps within the SS concentration camp system that formed and expanded after 1934. He makes little reference to the Ministry of Justice run camps in this article. Wachsmann, “The dynamics of destruction,” 19-20.

31 While these prison camps were not concentration camps under the control of Heinrich Himmler and the SS, all guards were former SS and SA men. These prison camps, headed by the former commander of the Oranienburg Concentration Camp Schäfer, were given express permission not to follow the justice department regulations for imprisonment. Elke Suhr, “Konzentrationslager,” 73-74.

32 Wachsmann, “The dynamics of destruction,” 21.

34 When the initial camps were built, the Emsländer, or people of the Emsland region, had knowledge about the camps. It was not just those that supplied the camps that spread word about their existence but it was discussed liberally in the regional newspapers. A report from June 28,

1933 notes the creation of the camp in Börgermoor. It informed its readers of the creation of three camps in the region that would be part of one of the biggest camps in Germany. The article highlighted the use of regional companies to build the concentration camp sites. It noted that while the prisoners would participate in the cultivation and peat-operations they would also have freedom of movement (Bewegungsfreiheit). Newspapers within the region perpetuated the belief that the majority of the prisoners only required “a certain time of constant and state education.”33

The general image of the camps throughout Germany highlights that media coverage of camps before the war included only reports of them as labor camps for political prisoners. The general public across the nation was told that the camps were for rehabilitation and that they were merely temporary.34 As noted above, the use of the prisoners to cultivate the Emsland was advertised in newspapers quite well. However, the discussion of the freedoms of the prisoners is notable here.

The questions of their freedom were addressed but the reasons for their imprisonment were not mentioned at the same time.

Erwin Schulze, a prisoner at the Esterwegen and Börgermoor concentration camps, was initially housed at the Luckau Penitentiary. In an interview in 2007, he noted the cramped conditions at this prison, since he was required to share a small cell with three other inmates

33 Ems-Zeitung, July 31, 1934, in Suhr, “Konzentrationslager,” 67.

34 Robert Gellately Backing Hitler: Consent & Coercion in Nazi Germany, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) 50-54.

35 where one person slept in between two beds on a mattress on the floor. Due to this overcrowded environment, he was eventually transferred to one of the camps in the Emsland. Schulz says about his arrival at the Esterwegen concentration camp in 1935 that all the guards yelled and everything had to be done at a fast pace. He recalled that the inmate count was done several times a day. Schulze was imprisoned at the Aschendorf camp. After his imprisonment at the camps in the Emsland, he was transported to other occupation territories to work on military building projects to protect against an invasion. However, he was not released from the camp system at that time. The transportation of concentration camp inmates, according to Schulze, was quite common.35 His example provides an insight into the flexibility of the camp system to transport prisoners all over occupied Europe and thus be useful to the Nazi regime in as many ways as possible. The camps in the Emsland particularly exemplified the exploitation of labor during the Nazi regime.

The Emsland Camps and the Second World War

The High Command of the Wehrmacht (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW) supervised the last phase of the development of camps within the Emsland from 1939 until the end of the war. Under the Wehrmacht command, three additional camps were built during this period (Dalum, Walchum, and Groß Hesepe), and other camps in the Emsland were transferred to the OKW.36 During the war period, nine of the fifteen camps were redirected to serve as POW

35 Erwin Schulze, interview with Jugend Antifa. JAB J.K.D., Akademie Berlin. Berlin, January 20, 2007, accessed January 20, 2015, www.resistance-archive.org.

36 The excerpts from this work were located at the Esterwegen Memorial library. Willi Baumann, “Neuarenberg im Dritten Reich Teil VIII. Emslandlager,” in 1788-1988 – 200 Jahre Neuarenberg/Gehlenberg. Dorf –und Familienchronik, (Werlte: Arbeitskreis “200 Jahre Gehlenberg,” 1988) 507.

36 camps and during the later war period four of the camps were designated to incarcerate deserters as well as previously imprisoned political prisoners.37 The prisoners’ function in nearly all of the camps served the war effort, and they would supplement labor needs throughout the region in the agricultural sectors or some of the few industries that existed in the region.38 During the Nazi period, the camps in the Emsland, or Emslandlager, were supported in the region due to successful propaganda efforts to highlight how the camps helped cultivate marshlands and the regional economy, but the needs of the military and the nation required that their labor was needed elsewhere as the development of the agricultural system clearly failed. The OKW also oversaw the imprisonment of resistance fighters from occupied zones, especially from Belgium,

France, the Netherlands, and Norway. The campaign to imprison the resistance fighters is most commonly known as the “Night and Fog” (Nacht und Nebel) campaign. Under the “Night and

Fog” decree issued by Adolf Hitler on December 7, 1941, the prisoners were taken to Germany under the protection of ‘night’ and ‘fog’ to be tried by special courts (Sondergerichte) and placed into concentration camps (primarily the Gross-Rosen and Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camps) if they were not sentenced to death.39 However, due to the intensive bombings of the

Ruhr region, the Special Courts in Essen, a city just south of the Emsland region, oversaw most

“Night and Fog” prisoners from that point. Therefore, a host of these prisoners were also sent to

37 Andreas Lembeck, Befreit aber nicht in Freiheit: Displaced Persons im Emsland, 1945-1960, (Bremen: Interpress, 1997) 11.

38 Ibid, 73.

39 Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Night and Fog Decree,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, June 20, 2014, (accessed January 23, 2015), http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007465

37 the Esterwegen camp.40 The camps developed under the OKW and the “Night and Fog” campaign represent the final phase of the camps within the Emsland.

Life, Work, and Death in the Emsland Camps

One of the main goals of concentration camps and the development of prison camps in the Emsland involved the process of “reeducating” the prisoners. This, according to Nazi ideology, would be achieved by placing them in “inhuman conditions” (unmenschliche

Bedingungen). These conditions especially included forcing prisoners to work under harsh conditions to increase the economic productivity of the state, which was specifically laid out by

Göring as described in more detail above.41 While the early prisoners in the Emsland concentration and prison camps participated in the creation of barracks and the camps grounds, ranging from building fences to the guard quarters, they also cultivated and developed the region’s marshlands and peat regions by draining the marshes of water and cutting the peat, a fossil fuel that when burned works as a heat source. The prisoners in the camps in the Emsland were required to complete these tasks without existing technologies, such as steam-plows and dredgers. Instead, they used spades, hoes, and shovels. The lack of mechanization fit in well with the Nazi system of artificially creating low unemployment rates because it required more prisoners to complete each task. If the Nazis actually used modern mechanized technologies, they would have cut the need for laborers by more than half. As the former prisoner, William

Langhoff maintained, they worked “weeks on end with five to six hundred men on one piece of

40 Suhr, “Konzentrationslager,” 79.

41 Suhr, Die Emslandlager, 27.

38 land that two steam-plows would have mastered within four weeks.”42 The prisoners in the camps were expected to face all of these difficult tasks without appropriate attire, nutrition, and accommodations.43

The Ministry of Justice planned for the prisoners at the camps in the Emsland to develop the unused lands within the Emsland over a period of twelve years. The plan sought for the prisoners to cultivate around 50,000 hectares of land. As the Justice Department’s labor supply was needed in agricultural and industrial production by June 1938, the cultivation project of the

Emsland region looked less and less feasible. While the actual cultivation of the marshes remained incomplete, the development of roads in the region moved forward. Of the 370km of roads planned, the prisoners managed to complete around 155km by 1937.44 Although the

Emsland camps failed to further the cultivation of the marshes in the region during the Nazi period, the extensive development of roads and other infrastructure helped create a movement towards continuing its development after 1945. Primarily, the need to develop the Emsland after

1945 was related to the following four points that developed because of the Nazi policies during the Second World War. First, the Emsland provided necessary land for the German populations who fled from former eastern German territories and the Soviet occupation zone. Additionally, as the Netherlands successfully made territorial claims over some areas near and in the Emsland, the new West German state saw the need for the development and integration of this previously

42 Ibid., 83.

43 Ibid., 81-85.

44 Ibid., 186-190; 200.

39 neglected region.45 Though the value of the cultivation project within the Emsland during this period served the Nazi propaganda state more than the people in the region, not all prisoners who worked in the region were classified as prisoners at all times during their imprisonment in the

Emsland.

By September of 1941, around 49,000 POWs were in the camps in the Emsland. Around

30,000 of these prisoners participated in the agricultural or industrial jobs within the region. By

August of 1942, the OKW allowed the reclassification of many Polish POWs as “civilian workers” (Zivilarbeiter), which essentially meant they were now forced laborers instead of military prisoners. This development began because there was a need to make room for 20,000

French POWs. By the following summer, the number of French POWs dropped to 8,000, since many were reclassified as civilian workers in the German Reich. The peoples in the Emsland could request workers from the POW camps and as civilian workers. The treatment of West

European POWs was much better than East European ones. Many POWs from Western Europe after 1942 were not guarded on their way to their work, giving them a sense of freedom.

However, the local government in Aschendorf-Hümmling reminded its citizens that POWs were not allowed to socialize with Germans, meaning they could not attend churches, enter theaters, and visit pubs. The fact that the Emslanders had to be reminded of this shows us that their relationships with the POWs were quite close.46

However, the situation was quite different for East European POWs, especially Soviet prisoners. Soviet POWs arrived in the Emsland in the summer of 1941 because a need existed to

45 Wilbers-Noetzel, Die wohnräumliche und wirtschaftliche Engliederung, 143.

46 Lembeck, Befreit aber nicht in Freiheit, 12-14.

40 remove them from the region where they were captured. The Soviet POWs who arrived in the

Emsland already survived an unofficial, such as death by starvation, and an official selection process, for example, an execution, by the SS or the Wehrmacht. In the Emsland camps, these prisoners were treated with little more regard. The food rations the Soviet prisoners received were quite small, and the food they did receive had little nutritional value. The medical treatment for them was almost nonexistent. The directions for the treatment of Soviet prisoners matched the Nazi ideologies of the “Russian sub-humans” (russischen Untermenschen). For example, guards were instructed to shoot fleeing Soviet prisoners without a warning.47

A large number of prisoners travelled in and out of the camp system in the Emsland.

However, estimates of those that died in the Emsland camps generally hover between twenty thousand and thirty-five thousand of the approximately 80,000 men who were imprisoned in these camps.48 Polish Home Army and Canadian forces liberated the camps in the Emsland in

April 1945. The creation of the Emsland system parallels developments in the rest of Germany.

Historian Omer Bartov coined this development of concentration camps a ‘concentrationary

47 Ibid., 17.

48 While Elke Suhr provides very varying numbers (14,250-26,250), the official current memorial site flyer maintains that more than twenty thousand prisoners died in the camps. Andreas Lembeck argues that about 35,000 Soviet POWs died in the Emsland alone, which does not take into account any other deaths at the Justice camps and the concentration camps. The wide discrepancies in data exist because much of the fifteen camps information was not maintained. A large part of the materials of the archives focuses on the Esterwegen camp. Each of the fifteen camps was able to house around 2,000 prisoners, but during the war period many of these camps held several hundred more prisoners. Also, these numbers do not include figures for those who died as a result of the labor they provided in the region or the illnesses they contracted in the camps. Suhr, “Konzentrationslager,” 68-75. “Flyer Gedenkstätte Esterwegen.” Lembeck, Breifreit aber nicht in Freiheit, 17.

41 universe.’49 The term refers to the system of main concentration camps and their satellite camps that were established throughout Germany and Greater Germany (the territories annexed after

1939, such as the Sudetenland, other parts of Czechoslovakia, and Poland). The largest camp in the Emsland system was the concentration camp at Esterwegen, and it was one of the first camps in the official concentration camp system in Germany along with camps such as Dachau and

Sachsenhausen.50 Although the second and final stages of the developments of the camps in the

Emsland occurred under different administration, the systematic abuse of labor and torture of prisoners remained a constant in the Emsland and in Germany. Whereas this chapter examined the Nazi period and the development of prisoner camps within the Emsland, the following chapter focuses on the liberation of the camps, the development of the Emsland, and attempts of memorializing the Nazi past until the 1970s.

49 The concept of a ‘concentrationary universe’ is a very accurate description of the concentration camp system within Germany, especially when one considers the amount of camp and satellite camps that existed. It provides an insight into the massive amounts of camps created in the Emsland. Omer Bartov, “Ordering Horror: Conceptualizations of the Concentrationary Universe,” in Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (New York: Cornell University Press, 2003).

50 Suhr, “Konzentrationslager,” 66.

42 CHAPTER TWO

YEARS OF MIRACLES, YEARS OF SILENCES

After the Second World War, Germany was a country in shambles in many respects. Not only were entire cities, such as Hamburg, Bremen, and Dresden, nearly entirely destroyed, but more than seven million people from all over Europe were also displaced in Germany, most of whom were slave laborers or prisoners of war.1 Over six and half million ethnic German refugees driven out from former German territories were sent to Allied occupation zones.2 In order to avoid repeating the disastrous consequences of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First

World War and allow Germany to rebuild itself without much oversight as occurred in the 1920s, the Allied powers decided by October 1944 on a plan of occupation that sought to eliminate

Nazism, to remove German militarism from the political and economic organizations, and, finally, to incorporate a system of “reeducation” of the Germans, a main objective of the British occupation policy.3 However, by 1949, the Allied governments allowed for the creation of

German governments while still maintaining power over the West German states, where the

1 In fact, up to 50% of the larger cities in Germany were destroyed. Of the 131 towns and cities targeted for Allied carpet-bombing, more than 75% of them were destroyed. Lothar Kettenacker, Germany since 1945, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 5. For more information on the Emsland and the Displaced Person policies, see Andreas Lembeck and Klaus Wessels, Befreit aber nicht in Freiheit: Displaced Persons im Emsland, 1945-1950, volume 10, in Edition Themen by Dokumentations und -Informationszentrum Papenburg (Bremen: Interpress, 1997) 222. For a brief summary of this work in English, see the following pages in Lembeck’s book: 222-224.

2 Jürgen Borchers et al., Die Gründung des Landes Niedersachsen, (Hannover: Niedersächsische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1986) 18-19, http://nibis.ni.schule.de/nli1/rechtsx/nlpb/ (accessed January 24, 2015).

3 Kettenacker, Germany since 1945, 30.

43 British, Americans, and the reluctant French supported the creation of a West German state, and the Soviets supported the East German state, or the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

The creation of a divided Germany became a necessity, according to historian Tony Judt, largely because of Joseph Stalin’s “uncompromising rigidity and confrontational tactics.”4 Even though the Soviet leader was interested in a united but weak Germany, he wasted his advantage after the end of the Second World War because of his interest in letting Germany “rot until the fruit of German resentment and hopelessness fell into his lap.”5 When the Western Allies implemented a currency reform on June 1, 1948 and the new German currency, the Deutsche

Mark, was placed in circulation, the Soviet’s responded and implemented a similar reform through the creation of the East German Mark on June 23. The Soviets in Berlin attempted to establish this currency in West Berlin as well, but the West Berlin military government thwarted this effort, which led to the Soviet tightening of surface connections to the city, creating the

Berlin blockade, which lasted until May 1949. This event led France to join its German territories to the American and British “Bizone” in April of 1949. After Stalin’s failure in

Germany with the Berlin blockade, the Western Allies and Soviets convened a conference that lasted for a month where no common ground was found on the subject of Germany. A week into the conference, the West German parliamentary council in Bonn passed the “Basic Law”

(Grundgesetz) that provided an organizational framework, which created the Parliamentary

Council of the Länder (states) allowing for its sovereignty, except in the fields of foreign policy,

4 Tony Judt. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, (New York: Penguin Books, 2006) 127.

5 Ibid.

44 reparations and related matters.6 Within a week, Stalin announced similar plans for its East

German territories and the German Democratic Republic was formally created on October 7,

1949. The early politics of the Cold War were integral to the decision making to create two independent German states so shortly after the end of the war.

Figure 4. Germany after the Second World War, September 1, 1945.7

6 Judt, Postwar, 146-147; Kettenacker, Germany since 1945, 38.

7 IEG-Maps, Institute of European History, (Mainz: A. Kunz, 2005), in “Germany after the Second World War (September 1, 1945),” German History Documents and Images, http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/map.cfm?map_id=520 (accessed February 22, 2015).

45 While the two German states developed greater independence in the 1950s, the power of the Soviet and Americans was an ever-present influence and caused for concern for the East and

West German security. In many ways, the East and West German border became the forefront for the Cold War. The economic growth within West Germany, which would increase its security, was integral to American concerns in the region and throughout Europe. Support for this came through economic growth programs, such as the Marshall Plan, or the European

Recovery Program (ERP), completed in 1951.8 The Marshall Plan was especially important to the development of the Emsland, the nation’s Armenhaus, or “poor house,” because its fund allowed the Federal Republic of Germany to invest in the cultivation and development of the region.9 Additionally, by 1955, the West German government was able to rebuild a military and join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). While some nations, such as France, voiced concern about permitting the creation a German military (Bundeswehr) after the end of the Second World War, it allowed for further independence and growth of West Germany. The rebuilding of the Federal Republic was followed by a long period of economic prosperity within

8 Hannah Schissler, The Miracle Years: A Cultural History Of West Germany, 1949-1968, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

9 By the 1970s, the European Union further continued to support regional developments through the 1975 European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The Emsland was part of the first regions to receive economic development packages in order to “address the problem of economic backwardness and unevenness within the Community.” In some cases, the ERDF funds built upon the initial establishment of a regional group that sought to increase the economic situation in border regions. One of these regional groups, which included the Emsland, was called EUREGIO, which incorporated regions within the northwestern part of Lower Saxony and eastern regions of the Netherlands as early as 1958. Its goal was to increase economic as well as cultural development in border regions because their peripheral and socio-economic status often suffered because of the secluded nature of border regions. Judt, Postwar, 530-331; “Geschichte,” Euregio. http://www.euregio.eu/de/%C3%BCber-euregio/geschichte (accessed April 14, 2015). “Regional Policy: Commission Approves Nine Programmes Under Community Initiative Interregional.” European Commission Press Release Database. December 17, 1991. Last updated February 12, 2015. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-91-1163_en.htm (accessed on April 14, 2015).

46 the Emsland and throughout the rest of West Germany. Historians refer to this period as the

“miracle years,” largely pointing to the economic successes across the West German state.

However, this period was paralleled by an overall silence about the legacies of the Second World

War and the Nazi regime. In the case of the Emsland, for example, the labor provided by the

Emsland camp prison system, examined in the previous chapter, provided the foundation for further development in the post-1945 period. Some Emslanders today argue that it was the economic success of this period that allowed many people to push aside coming to terms with their past.10 The significance of the Emslanders viewing their economic success and development in the postwar period without a critical engagement of their Nazi past and about the forced laborers that toiled to make their region more productive highlights an amnesia about their regions history. This silence does not, however, indicate that no memory of the war existed, but it does demonstrate a significant silence about the fifteen concentration camps built and maintained in the Emsland for the entire duration of the Nazi regime.

While the previous chapter examined the Emsland during the Nazi period, this chapter highlights the developments in the Emsland politically, economically, and culturally until the late

1960s. The first two sections of this chapter examine the liberation of the region by the Polish

Home Army military forces, occupation policies under the British, and economic development strategies, particularly the cultivation and development of the Emsland. The final section

10 Particularly interesting is the point of view presented by a member for the Esterwegen Memorial Board of Trustees, Herman Bröring, who maintains that the Emsland region shifted from being one of the least productive regions in the nation to becoming part of the Wirtschaftswunder, or the German economic miracle, in the 1950s. He argues that this led to a lack of interest in coming to terms with their own past. Herman Bröring, “Der lange Weg zur Gedenkstätte Esterwegen oder eine Region auf der Suche nach ihrer Vergangenheit,” in Die Gedenkstätte Esterwegen: Ein Werkstattbericht, edited by Kaltofen, Andrea and Udo Mäsker, (Meppen: Druckhaus Plagge GmbH, 2012) 4.

47 highlights some attempts within the Emsland to engage with its Nazi past. While there were no serious organized attempts to critically discuss the Emsland and its role during the Nazi period before the 1970s, some individuals attempted to begin the process of critically engaging the

Emslanders with their recent history. These developments in the 1950s and 1960s particularly highlight how this period can be classified as “years of miracles” (economically;

Wirtschaftswunder) and years of silences (about the Emsland camps). The case of the Emsland serves as a local example of a broader phenomenon of similar miracles and silences across the rest of West Germany, but also shows that the region did not participate in the national commemorative events.

Liberation and Administration in the occupied Emsland

After the First World War, Germany was left under the auspices of the Weimar government to develop a democracy on its own, but after the Second World War, the Allies believed that Germany needed to be “denazified” and “reeducated” in order to form a democratic and stable nation at the center of continental Europe. While the first part of this section focuses on the British occupation policies towards Nazi criminals and the use of the Emsland camps, the second half examines the treatment of Displaced Persons (DPs) and German nationals. An analysis of the DPs and Germans groups during the occupation highlights the complicated relationship between the occupation troops, the DPs, and Emslanders. The relationships forged certainly solidified the belief of the native populations of the Emsland in the post-1945 period that the Nazi-period policies were not directly related to the difficult situations of the DPs. In turn, this led to the failure of the Emslanders to come to terms with their Nazi past. The occupation forces often served as intermediaries between the two groups, but more often than not

48 merely attempted to separate the Germans and the DPs entirely to avoid controversies. The presence of the DPs and the Emslanders’ perceptions about them, significantly contributed to the lack of critical engagement with the atrocities committed during the Nazi period not only in the

Emsland but also throughout Europe. Finally, the relationship between the DPs, the Emslanders, and labor within the region was another important connection to the growth of the Emsland economically in the 1950s. Similar to the labor provided by the Emsland camp prisoners during the Nazi period, the Emslanders did not see the supplemental labor produced by the DPs as directly connected to the agricultural development of their region.

The Emsland region fell under British-occupied territory by June 1945. Prior to Allied advances into Germany, much of the Emsland region was not affected by the bombing of cities accompanied with destruction and chaos. In fact, the closest city destroyed by Allied bombing was the city of Emden, located on the northern part of the Emsland border.11 However, a significant bombing took place at one of the concentration camps in the Emsland due to the proximity of German troops shooting at incoming Polish and Canadian forces from the West.12

Soon thereafter, British American, Polish and Canadian troops liberated the area and the camps in the Emsland in April 1945. As the 21st Army Group, composed of the 2nd British and the 1st

Canadian Army, under the command of General Bernard Montgomery approached the Emsland from the south, almost simultaneously other Canadian and Polish forces under the 1st Canadian

Army command approached the region from the west (the Netherlands). The Allied armies faced some resistance from Volksturm units, which were troops that consisted of very young adults and

11 Kettenacker, Germany Since 1945, 5.

12 Andreas Lembeck, Befreit, Aber Nicht in Freiheit, 28.

49 elderly men who were ordered to make a final stand against an Allied invasion, but it was rather weak. Most resistance occurred on the main road that connected the major population centers in the Emsland. Often times, the Volksturm units ordered the inhabitants to evacuate before burning any Nazi party documents. Sometimes this even involved the destruction of roads and railway bridges. In the British occupation zone, young boys and old men, serving with the Volksturm, destroyed up to 1,500 roads and 1,300 railway bridges in order to slow down the Allied attacks.13

While some inhabitants chose to stay in their houses, often times basements, many left the towns and villages where they buried some food supplies and personal items. By April 5th, the commanders of the northwestern German troops accepted the demands of a partial surrender of the German Reich. During the Allied advance through the Emsland, the troops knew to look for camps with large numbers of POWs and other types of prisoners. While little information exists on the liberation of most camps in the Emsland, the camp at Oberlangen is better known and provides an interesting example of the liberation experience of the regions concentration camps.14

Since December 1944, the Oberlangen camp housed more than 1,700 women in twelve barracks. These women had been part of the Home Army (Armia Karjowa) whoever took part in the Warsaw uprising in early 1944. When the 2nd Polish Army, positioned in the Netherlands, found out about large numbers of Polish prisoners held in the camps near the Dutch border on

April 12, 1945 only 10km away from their location, the Polish commander quickly led ten soldiers with four vehicles to the camp. After minimal resistance from the camp guards, the

13 Kettenacker, Germany Since 1945, 6.

14 Lembeck, Befreit, Aber Nicht in Freiheit, 24-25.

50 Polish soldiers freed 1,736 female soldiers between 17 and 25 years of age, four newborns, and

38 young boys between 11 and 16 years of age. While the Polish forces stumbled upon freeing these soldiers, the Allied command was quite familiar with the extent of camps in the Emsland and throughout Germany even though their estimations of prisoners was often times inaccurate.15

The large number of Poles in the region led to the creation of an anomaly, namely the overwhelming presence of a specific group of victims of the Nazi regime in parts of the

Emsland. The British occupation government allowed for the creation of a sort of Polish hub in the Emsland during the occupation period and even allowed for Poles throughout their region to be transported to the Emsland. The renaming of a DP city in the Emsland to Maczów established fears of the large number of Polish persons in the Emsland. However, fears that the Poles would begin to dominate the region and create a politically powerful enclave led policy makers of the occupation zone to disallow any further Polish DP transportation to the region, which was previously highly encouraged.16 While the early occupation policies were evolving throughout

1945, the British occupation forces were directed to establish reeducation policies throughout their zones quite quickly.

The British occupation zone provides some important perspectives on denazification and reeducation policies. While the British initially sought to reeducate the Germans in their sector through specific policies, but after 1947 they saw the Germans increasingly “as partners in the western alliance – a role envisaged by the British Foreign Office even before the war had

15 Ibid., 27-28.

16 Ibid.

51 ended.”17 Unlike the U.S. government, the British, because of their proximity to Germany and the potential costs of occupation, needed to develop a relationship that would have much longer lasting and stabilizing effects. Therefore, it is understandable that the British occupation forces and administration focused much less on reeducation and denazification but rather attempted to establish some sort of self-sufficiency. However, it was necessary for the occupation forces to prosecute the Nazi criminals in their zone in order to establish authority in the region. While the

International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg was the most well-known treatment of Nazi criminals, each occupation zone had its own specific zonal procedures. Some historians, such as

Tony Judt, argue that the Nuremberg trial was not merely about justice but also became part of the civic education, as it was publicized via cinemas and education centers throughout the occupation period.18 While these trials became part of the reeducation policies as much as they were part of the denazification policies, they were not always successful at sentencing Nazi criminals. Intriguingly, “at the Lüneberg trial of staff of Bergen-Belsen (September 17 -

November 17th 1945), it was the British defense lawyers who argued with some success that their clients had only been obeying (Nazi laws): 15 of the 45 defendants were acquitted.”19 The example highlights that even though denazification policies were attempted, they often times failed to actually prosecute and punish many of the Nazi criminals. This was an oversight that

17 Alan Bance, The Cultural Legacy of the British Occupation in Germany: The London Symposium, (Stuttgart: Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1997) 9.

18 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, (New York: Penguin Books, 2006) 53- 54.

19 Ibid., 54.

52 was eventually remedied by trials throughout Germany in the 1960s onward to prosecute the

Nazis.

In the summer of 1945, the British occupation forces transformed the concentration camps in the Emsland region into ‘Civil Internment Camps’ (CICs); some were used to house

Displaced Persons and others to intern Nazi party members and ‘suspect persons’ including women. Interestingly, the camps in the Emsland also detained security personnel who supported the Nazi regime in Nazi-occupied Europe, specifically personnel from the Netherlands and

Norway. The camp at Esterwegen became “No. 9 CIC,” and was guarded by Canadian troops.20

Beginning in January 1946, only “alleged war criminals” were interned at the Esterwegen camp.

Others were released or brought to other camp sites within the British occupation zone. While most of the inmates were awaiting trials, several were interned to stand by as witnesses for cases against others. The Esterwegen camp reached its high point during the occupation period in June of 1946, “slightly” overcrowded with a little over 2,500 incarcerated.21 By July of 1947, the inmates who were held as war criminals were transported to Hamburg where they would continue to await trial and sentencing. At this point, the camp at Esterwegen became another form of detention center. This time, however, it would house around 900 prisoners that needed to be held as witnesses for other trials. These prisoners were released quickly. By 1951, all prisoners were discharged and the Esterwegen camp officially closed.22

20 Later it was renamed to ‘No. 101 CIC.’ “Gedenkstätte Esterwegen: Das Lager Esterwegen,” Gedenkstätte website, (accessed January 19, 2014). http://www.gedenkstaette- esterwegen.de/index.php?con_cat=109&con_lang=1&sid=9fc7e2dfd2f4c9d8ec32242d417971d3

21 The capacity of the Esterwegen camp was around 2,000. Ibid.

22 Ibid.

53 While the Esterwegen camp was used to incarcerate Nazi criminals, other former concentration camps and entire cities in the Emsland housed the 40,000 DPs. Most of them were accommodated in cities, however.23 In the city of Lingen, 10 percent of the population was classified as DPs, and in the district of Ashendorf-Hummling, 28 percent were considered DPs.24

British occupation forces evacuated the entire city of Haren in 1945 and created a Polish DP city, changing its name to Maczków (a Polish name) until 1948 when its former inhabitants were allowed to return. Not surprisingly, the inhabitants of the city of Haren saw themselves as victims of the legacies of the Second World War and the Nazi regime; some continue to see themselves this way to this day. For example, the late 1940s, Haren newspapers referred to the occupation period as the ‘Polenzeit,’ or “the time of the Poles.”25 Instead of viewing the DPs as displaced persons because the Nazi regime had removed them from their homes, they were seen by the Emslanders as ‘homeless foreigners.’26 Such “selective remembrance” of the reasons for the presence of the DPs provides some insight into the reasons for the long road to the creation of a memorial at Esterwegen, but is also very fitting in terms of larger national trends.27 In fact, throughout Germany, many Germans were more interested in their own suffering, such as the fate of the “German women” who were often times without their husbands and needed to rebuild their lives after the war without the. The large of number of men who were being held by the

23 Andreas Lembeck, Befreit aber nicht in Freiheit, 9.

24 Ibid.

25 Diethard Pries, “Als Haren ‘Maczków’ hieß: Eine Stadt wurde an ein verdrängtes Stück,” Neues Deutschland March 11-12, 1995, in Lembeck, Befreit aber nicht in Freiheit, 8.

26 Ibid., 10.

27 Bröring, “Der lange Weg,” 4.

54 Soviets until 1955 also became part of German suffering. Therefore, the burden of the

Emslanders who felt the “homeless foreigners” inconveniencing them fits a larger national trend.

The Emslanders viewed themselves as victims and reconstructed the images of the Displaced

Persons as refugees.

While most of the DPs eventually left the transit camps to head home or to other countries, primarily the United States and Britain, some stayed in Germany and, more specifically, the Emsland region. Most that left for their homes on their own accord did so because they did not want to be swept up in the system of Allied military command, and they were, therefore, never properly recorded. Due to the proximity of the Netherlands, data on many of the Dutch leaving Germany under conditions of forced labor are uncertain.28 In the winter of

1946 to 1947 about 2,500 Polish DPs left for England.29 Those who stayed were then transformed from being labeled as “homeless foreigners” to being identified as “immigrants” by

Germans.30 More important, many newspapers, which discussed the position of the DPs in the early 1950s, focused on the fact that they were ‘homeless’ and entirely ignored how they got to

Germany in the first place.31 While many of the DPs eventually found themselves new homes or

28 Lembeck, Befreit aber nicht in Freiheit, 124.

29 Ibid., 223.

30 Lembeck uses the German word for immigrant, namely Einwanderer. This word is accurately translated as immigrant, but has a much wider connotation than this translation portrays. More truthful to the meaning of the word in German, it could also be translated as ‘one that wanders into a country.’ The connotation that the word wanders carries in this translation provides a deeper understanding of what Germans meant to portray when they mislabeled these DPs Einwanderer. Ibid., 10.

31 Ibid., 159-160.

55 returned to their old ones, it is important to note that Germans, specifically in the Emsland region, did not identify them as victims, but rather saw them as a nuisance.

By the mid-1950s most of the cities and camps had lost considerable parts of their DP populations, but the camps, specifically the Esterwegen site, would continue to be used until

1959 as transit camps for a different set of DPs, namely the Germans and some other groups that fled Soviet-occupied territories. During this time, several of the first barracks at Esterwegen were demolished. When the last of the DPs left the camps, the Esterwegen camp grounds were returned to Lower Saxony and some of the living quarters were used to house officials associated with the Lower Saxony Justice Department. In 1963, the Lower Saxony officially transferred the ownership of the former concentration camp site to the Federal Republic of Germany, which would use it as a depot for the Germany military, or the Bundeswehr.32 The Bundeswehr maintained ownership of this property until it was transferred to the Esterwegen Memorial Board of Trustees in 2001 after numerous years attempting to retrieve the property from them. While the following chapter details this process in much more detail, the following section examines the economic and political developments within the Emsland during the 1950s in order to further contextualize developments there that affected the Emslanders and their complicity with the Nazi regime.

32 The Bundeswehr (“federal defense”) is the combined Federal Armed Forces of German. In 1955, the West German government, or the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), joined NATO and rearmed itself, allowing for the creation of the Bundeswehr. James J. Sheehan, Encyclopedia Britannica, “Germany: Security,” online edition, last updated January 21, 2014,http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/231186/Germany/58050/Security#ref296921 (accessed April 27, 2014.

56 The Creation of Lower Saxony and the “Emslandplan”

After 1945, the northwestern part of Germany underwent a variety of structural redevelopments politically and economically. The Emsland region, while not officially created as a political administrative entity within the region, was placed under control of a new federal state, Lower Saxony, which was created with the support of the British occupation administration. This development changed the political administration of much of northern

Germany. Previously, the Prussian state and the principalities of Hannover and Oldenburg controlled the Emsland region. Additionally, it became quite obvious to the new administration that the Emsland faced some other major issues. Its economy needed extensive support after years of war and economic developmental neglect, and it received it when a special organization, called the Emsland GmBh (Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, or company with limited liability) was created in the early 1950s. Operating under the authority of the federal government and supported by Marshall Plan funding, the Emsland GmBh established the “Emslandplan,” whose mission it was to develop the region through several phases of cultivation and industrialization.33 The need to develop this region was recognized specifically by the reorganized West German state because the population increased considerably during this period.

For example, the population of the current-day borders of the Emsland equaled 120,965 in 1925, but by 1950 the population size increased to 197,256.34 This section examines first the creation of

33 Christoph Haverkamp, Die Erschließung des Emslandes im 20. Jahrhundert: als Beispiel staatlicher regionaler Wirtschaftsförderungen, (Sögel: Verlag der Emsländischen Landschaft, 1991) 115.

34 As of 2011, the region’s population is 313,452. About 65% of the surface area in the Emsland as of June 2011 is used for agriculture. Politically, the region is supportive of the CDU. In the 2011, election the CDU received 41 seats, the SPD 13, and the other parties took the final 12 seats. Emsland: Kurzinformationen über den Landkreis: Daten, Fakten, Entwicklungen, (Meppen: Landkreis Emsland,

57 Niedersachsen, or Lower Saxony, and then highlights the agricultural developments of the

Emsland.

Shortly after the German military capitulation, commanders of the occupation zones, began to exercise power over specific administrative decisions in their respective regions. In the

British occupation zone, commanders declared the state of Prussia, half of which was under

Soviet control, as nonexistent and reinstituted the previous administrative units of each region. In the region of the current-day Lower Saxony, the principalities of Hannover, Oldenburg,

Schaumburg-Lippe, and Braunschweig were reinstituted. The duties of the former Prussian state, however, were redistributed to the British occupation-zone developed “administrative advisement group of Lower Saxony” (Gebietsrat Niedersachsen) by the end of 1945. Through the work of the Social Democrat Hinrich Wilhelm Kopf, the British Occupation zone command voted for the plan that sought to combine all of the mentioned regions under one new state.35 The

Regulation Nr. 55 of the British Military command created the state of Lower Saxony on

November 8, 1946. Kopf served as the first Minister President of the newly formed Lower Saxon state.36 The creation of Lower Saxony unified for the first time a region that was thought to have considerable cultural similarities unlike the previous organization under the Prussian state.

Nonetheless, there was still a considerable disunity within this newly developed region as the peoples in each of parts did not entirely identify and support the state’s decisions. Because most of the leadership of the state parliament originated from the eastern part of the state, many people

2012) 3; 12-18. http://www.emsland.de/das_emsland/zahlenunddaten/statistik_aktuell/statistic_aktuell.html

35 The combination of these specific areas was one of a total of sixteen plans.

36 Schubert, “Von der Weimar Republik zur Gegenwart.”

58 from the western parts did not feel included because they disagreed politically with the rest of the states population.

A closer look at the Emsland will further explain the reasons for disunity within Lower

Saxony The Emslanders did not see themselves integral to the newly formed state for a variety of reasons. First, as already explored in the previous chapter, the Emslanders were predominantly

Catholic while the rest of the state was comprised of different Protestant denominations. Second,

Lower Saxony was since its inception politically dominated by the SPD, especially in the early years of its establishment. The Emsland, on the other hand, generally voted in support of the

CDU party. There are various reasons for this political split. However, the most logical connection is that the CDU party and its Bavarian affiliate party, the CSU, were generally supported by the Catholics throughout all of Germany. Finally, the Emslanders were not particularly enthralled with the formation of a new state due to its state parliamentary representation. Most of the Lower Saxon Landtag, the state parliament, was comprised of representatives from the eastern part of the state because the state parliament representation was partially decided by the size of the population, which was mostly located in the eastern parts of the state.37 Therefore, the new political administration after the end of the Second World War did not generally appeal to the Emslanders in the west.

37 Haverkamp, Die Erschließung des Emslandes, 117.

59 EMSLAND REGION

Figure 5. The establishment of Lower Saxony, 1946. On November 1, 1946, the regulation for the creation of Lower Saxony went into effect. It combined the former principalities of Oldenburg, Hannover, Schaumburg-Lippe, and Braunschweig. Prior to 1946, the Prussian state oversaw these regions.38

As rumors spread about the development of a plan to cultivate the region economically, however, the Emslanders became hopeful that their impoverished region would be turned into a more useful and integrated one. After various political representatives of the region highlighted the concern about the Emsland region’s condition to the potential leaders of a West German state in the late 1940s, the Federal Republic of Germany voted in favor of the creation of the Emsland

GmBh which would oversee the cultivation and development of the Emsland economy. In many

38 Ibid.

60 respects, the development of the Dutch marshes that began at the turn of the twentieth century still overshadowed this region. A Dutch newspaper, the Telegraph, noted in 1929 that the lack of development in the Emsland compared to its development on the Dutch border showed that

“where culture ends, Germany begins.” With the development of the Emsland, its people finally felt some sort of official support for its underdeveloped nature and “backwardness.” While previous attempts during the First World War, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi period represented partial attempts to cultivate and develop the Emsland economy, the creation of the

Emsland GmbH (1951) provided a concrete step towards true improvement within the region.39

When the representatives at the West German national parliament voted on May 5, 1950 to support the so-called “Emslandplan,” an important step towards the development of a previously neglected region began. Importantly, the Emslandplan was the first economic program of the Federal Republic of Germany that led to similar programs. The program’s development until the late 1980s is generally divided into three phases. In the first phase, which lasted until 1965, the cultivation of the wasteland and marshes led to larger amounts of agriculturally usable lands and the development of infrastructure allowed for better roads. More electrical power became available and the water conditions were also improved. Notably, the cultivation of the wastelands and marshes during the Nazi period did not actually produce much land cultivation of the wastelands and marshes, but did lead to some road improvement.40

39 State Archive Osnabrück, Rep. 430, Dez 501, ac 26/43, Nr. 256, Niedersächsische Heimatstätte GmbH, “Moor und Ödlandkultivierung in Hollland und Deutschland,” (1929) in Haverkamp, Die Erschließung des Emslandes, 28. “Emslandplan,” Das Emsland (accessed January 23, 2015). http://www.emsland.de/das_emsland/kreisbeschreibung/emslandplan/emslandplan.htmlIbid., 104-108.

40 As noted in Chapter 1, the prisoners in the Emsland established 155km of the 370km of roads planned to be developed between 1933 and 1937. Suhr, Die Emslandlager, 41.

61 Around 1,250 new settler properties as well as about 5,000 part-time jobs were created during this stage. Many of these developments sought to accommodate the large numbers of refugees from the former eastern German territories. The second phase included the expansion of industrial and trade ventures to supplement the surplus laborers, who had previously been a part of the agricultural sectors but became unneeded because of the incorporation of new agricultural technologies. The final phase, beginning in the 1970s, coincided with fears of an economic downturn. This led to an attempt to establish a magnetic transit railway. The “Transrapid” train opened in 1984, but closed by 2006 due to the death of 28 people. By 1989, the Emsland GmbH was dissolved after it accomplished its goals. Between 1951 and 1989, the West German government invested around two million Deutsche Marks leading to the development of 128,000 hectares of ground, 17,000 hectares of drained marshes, and the creation of 800 kilometers of roads within the Emsland.41 Thus, the Emsland flourished substantially during this period as is depicted by the consistent increase of the population over this period along with the physical developments of the region.42

Other forms of economic development in the region are indicated by the current employment sectors in the Emsland. Today, around sixty-five percent of Emslanders work in manufacturing, construction, health and social work, and the repair and maintenance sector.43

This is a profound change from Nazi-era employment when the majority of the Emsland

41 Haverkamp, Die Erschließung des Emslandes, 11. “Emslandplan.”

42 See Appendix B. The population grew from nearly 200,000 in 1950 to around 313,000 by 2011. Emsland: Kurzinformationen über den Landkreis: Daten, Fakten, Entwicklungen, (Meppen: Landkreis Emsland, 2012) 12. http://www.emsland.de/das_emsland/zahlenunddaten/statistik_aktuell/ statistic_aktuell.html

43 Emsland,16.

62 population was employed in the agricultural sector. Today’s use of the land in the Emsland, however, indicates its continued importance. Around sixty-five percent of the land in the

Emsland is used for agricultural purposes while only eight percent is used for manufacturing purposes and office building sites.44 This also indicates the development of technologies in the agricultural sector, as extensive amounts of land are able to be cultivated with only three percent of the population dedicated to its labor. However, this data excludes the participation of family members on farms, as they are not often listed directly as employees of the farms. These economic and material improvements, many of which began in the early postwar period, were not viewed by the Emslanders in connection with the involvement of camp prisoners participation in the beginnings of the regional development. While their labor did not substantially improve agricultural production in their region, their presence during the Nazi period and the consequences of the Nazi regime decisions and the war, led to profound changes in the region that prompted the economic integration of the region. Yet, the lack of the recognition of this until much later highlights the failure of the Emslanders to come to terms with their past and the specific connections between their region’s developments.

The Moorsoldaten and Other Memorialization Attempts

The Second World War left many Germany cities utterly destroyed. The cities of

Braunschweig, Emden, Hannover, Hildesheim, Osnabrück and Wilhelmshaven in Lower Saxony suffered particularly. The city of Emden, located northwest of the Emsland borders, experienced the destruction of 74 percent of its housing stock while the city of Osnabrück, located southeast

44 Ibid., 18.

63 of the Emsland borders, was firebombed.45 The human rights violations in the concentration, prison, and POW camps between these two cities in the Emsland were even more destructive.

Most people in the Emsland, as was the case with many Germans throughout the Federal

Republic, identified with their own losses first, particularly in the 1950s.46 While no large organizational memory of the camps in the Emsland developed during the 1950s to the 1960s, there were a variety of more individualistic attempts to commemorate the victims of the Nazi regime.

Most former concentration, prison, and POW camp inmates were unable to leave the region. Therefore, many of these people formed groups, held meetings, and created sites of memory to represent their suffering. Sites at Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen and many others that commemorate some of the largest concentration camps in Germany have some sort of memorial plaque or structure that was part of some of the initial memorialization in the late

1940s and 1950s.47 While no such items were created at the Esterwegen Memorial or other camps that are part of camps in the Emsland, some of the former inmates, particularly the political prisoners who identified as the Peat Bog Soldiers (Moorsoldaten), explored further in

45 Schubert, “Von der Weimar Republik zur Gegenwart.”

46 For a further discussion on the German preoccupation with their status as “victims,” see Robert Moeller’s War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) and Frank Biess’s Homecomings Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

47 Marcuse, “Holocaust Memorials: The Emergence of a Genre,” American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (2010), 55-60.

64 the next chapter, did form groups and held regular meetings until the late 1950s.48

The organization of meetings began with the visit of a former prisoner to the Börgermoor cemetery, often referred to as the Teufelsberg Friedhofen (Devil’s Mountain Cemetery), where the camp victims were buried. When a former prisoner visited the cemetery on January 5, 1955, he witnessed the lack of care this cemetery received.49 He noted broken wooden crosses and the wild growth of grass and weeds. The cemetery was clearly left in ruin without much care. Within a week this former inmate called for the formation of an organization for the Peat Bog Soldiers and other former inmates of the Emsland camps. Within the same year in September 1955, around 600 former inmates from the camps met in Esterwegen and created a formal organization called “Emsland Camp Community of Peat Bog Soldiers” (Emsland-Lagergemeinschaft-

Moorsoldaten, henceforth, Camp Community of Peat Bog Soldiers). Lower Saxony terminated their contract at that time to care for the cemeteries of the Emsland camps. The Camp

Community Peat Bog Soldiers met the same month coincidentally to further discuss the need for care of the cemetery. After this event the organization and news about the cemetery fell into obscurity and were not mentioned again until 1961 when another former prisoner visited the cemetery with his son and found it in a similar state of disrepair. He published his call for the

48 Herman Bröring, “Der lange Weg zur Gedenkstätte Esterwegen oder eine Region auf der Suche nach ihrer Vergangenheit,” 4. The title of this work translates to “The long way to the Esterwegen Memorial or a region in search for its past.”

49 His name is unknown. It may be the first chairman of the organization of the Peat Bog Soldiers, B. Kruse, however, there is no suggestion of this specifically in any evidence available about this organization.

65 maintenance of the cemeteries in an article in a local newspaper called Tat.50 The reporter of this article examined the care for the cemetery and brought to light a man who lived in the region that solely cared for the cemetery, as no other local community took up the responsibility and the state ended its contract. When asked why he placed such a burden on himself, he noted that he provided the money for the upkeep of the location because he wanted to preserve the memories of the torture and deaths that occurred in the camps in the Emsland during the Nazi period so that it would never occur again and fall into forgetfulness.51

While the attempts of the former inmates to maintain the cemeteries were admirable, not much came of their efforts and the organization fell into obscurity until the 1980s, except for one other meeting in 1969. It was not until 1963 that the discussion of creating a memorial site for the Emsland camps became public. In Papenburg, a large town that is near to the site of the

Esterwegen camp, an unidentified medical doctor called for the creation of a Christian memorial supported by a Chapel of Atonement. Even though this may have appealed to the sizeable

Catholic tradition in the Emsland region, the Christian memorial was never established.52

Although this attempt failed to create any sort of movement within the region, within a couple of years two journalists with the Ems-Zeitung spoke out against the lack of memorials in the region

50 Werner Boldt and Elke Suhr eds., “Das Schweigen wird lauter: Vom Kampf um den Moorsoldatenfriedhof bis zur Enstehung des Dokumentationszentrums Emslandlager,” Pressespiegel und Dokumentation (1985) 2. Gedenkstätte Esterwegen Archive.

51 The title of this collection of newspaper articles translates to “the silence gets louder.” “Der Teufelsberg im Börgermoor: Wann endlich bekommt der KZ-Friedhof ein würdiges Aussehen?”Tat July 7, 1961, in “Das Schweigen wird Lauter,” edited by Walter and Suhr, 8. Fitje Ausländer, “Protokoll der Sitzung der Arbeitsgruppe der Chronisten vom 16.6.2000 im Dokumentations- und Informationszentrum (DIZ) Emslandlager in Papenburg,” June 6, 2000, http://www.ostfriesischelandschaft.de (accessed January 28, 2015).

52 Ibid., 5.

66 and stepped up as leaders in the movement to create a memorial plaque.

The next appearance of the memory of the camps in the Emsland was a brief squabble over the construction of a plaque commissioned by Lower Saxony commemorating the victims of National Socialism in the Emsland camps in the late 1960s. When the nature of the plaque was publicized in the local newspaper, Ems-Zeitung, many were distressed because it ignored the victims of the camps in the Emsland that were placed there by the Nazi regime’s Administration of Justice. In his report on the development of the Esterwegen Memorial in 2008, Herman

Bröring, the Chair of the Board of the Esterwegen Memorial noted,

Larger numbers of the public responded when two junior journalists of the Ems-Zeitung (the Ems Newspaper), Hermann Vinke, a native of the Emsland, and Gerhard Kromschröder took up the issue. They broached the issue of the repressed history of the Emsland Camps. In the 1960s their concern received added impetus when the Interior Ministry of Lower Saxony erected a memorial stone with the inscription: “In memory of the victims of National Socialism who died in the Concentration Camp Esterwegen. Their human remains have been laid to rest in the cemetery of Versen.” Especially Vinke und Kromschröder saw in this an inappropriate attempt to differentiate amongst the inmates of the Emsland Camps: between those sentenced by a civil court of law and the victims of National Socialism.53

It seems odd that this failure to note that these were not victims of the Nazis became integral here, primarily because most of the people were likely held in custody because they were denounced to the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei), a Nazi government tool. 54 Because prison camps, where inmates were forced to work in on the land of farmers, existed before the Nazi

53 The issue of the classification of different victims of the Nazi period generally focuses on the different types of victims, such as Jews, communists, homosexuals, and Sinti and Roma. Most discussion of commemorations does not focus on the dispute of commemorating victims of concentration camps versus victims of the Nazi prison system. Herman Bröring, “The Long Road to the completion of the Esterwegen Memorial: a region in search of its history,” in The Esterwegen Memorial Report: A Workshop Report, (Meppen: Druckhaus Plage GmbH, 2012) 4.

54 Ibid.

67 period, some Emslanders may have believed that they were not true victims of the Nazi regime as they were “criminals.” However, historical scholarship of the Nazi regime by the 1960s examined the Gestapo system and the unfair sentencing of people as “criminals” in the prison system, which explains the uproar against the plaques. While the attempt to commemorate the

Emsland camps in the form of a plaque was successful, the fact that many in the region thought it misrepresented who were targeted in the camps and stood up for a more accurate commemoration is noteworthy and shows a shift from the 1950s when such a public stance would have been unheard off.55

The developments within Germany were influenced by national and worldwide events, such as the Eichmann Trial in Israel and the commencement of the Auschwitz trials in Germany.

Yet, a variety of other factors also impacted the progress of West Germans’ critical engagement of their past during the Nazi period. The beginning of the 1960s saw the end of the ‘formative years’ of the Federal Republic of Germany. At this point, the West German state had recovered substantially from the destruction and economic disaster caused by the Second World War. In

1963, the German chancellor, Ludwig Erhard announced “the end of the postwar period” at the same time that the post-war German leader, Konrad Adenauer, stepped down from the political arena.56 The 1960s saw the elaboration of a discourse on German guilt in an environment of political stability and economic prosperity. However, while many historians have suggested that the period of the 1960s onwards highlights an end to the period of the ‘Germans as “victims”

55 There are many questions that exist about this plaque. Herman Bröring is the only source that discusses the creation of this plaque. It is not mentioned in any other sources.

56 Ruth Wittlinger, “Taboo or Tradition: The ‘Germans as Victims’ Theme in the Federal Republic of Germany until the mid-1990s,” in Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, edited by Bill Niven, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006) 65.

68 theme,’ historian Ruth Wittlinger has shown that it was never fully eclipsed in West Germany.

For example, the theme of the expelled Germans as victims continued to be highlighted in academic works, television shows, and within literary material between the 1960s and 1990s even though the period is generally known to be devoted to Germans ‘coming to terms’ with their past (Vergangenheitsbeweltigung).57 The continuity of the identifications with German victimhood are important, yet initial attempts to come to terms with the Nazi past in the Emsland provides a clearer window into the development of the Esterwegen Memorial in 2011.

By the late 1960s, the journalist Hermann Vinke organized the creation of a club named the Democratic Club Papenburg to act against the discriminatory nature of the plaque erected earlier in the 1960s. On June 14, 1969, the club wrote over the plaque in red paint to support a concurrent meeting of Peat Bog Soldiers, the organization of victims of the camps in the

Emsland that met a couple of times in the 1950s. The following month, members of the

Democratic Club Papenburg, destroyed the writing on the plaque with hammers and chisels. By

July 5, 1969, the police became involved in the investigation. The police removed the stone for reparations; however, the plaque was not returned to the site. Thus, the removal of the memorial stone at the end of the 1960s because it was not viewed as appropriate led to its disappearance.58

No further mention was made of the stone by memorial organizations or local newspapers.

The people of the Emsland were not the only ones that noticed the lack of memorial activities occurring in the Emsland. On November 15, 1966, the television show Report provided an account of the Emslanders’ relationship with their Nazi past and summarized that, “the

57 Wittlinger, “Taboo or Tradition?,” 73-75.

58 Boldt and Suhr, “Das Schweigen wird lauter,” 2-12.

69 Emslander [sic] did not learn anything from the past.”59 The politicians were especially offended by such an assessment. The mayor of Papenburg used the term “uncomfortable” to describe the connection between his city and concentration camps expressed in the show.60 While this show did not spur much movement in the region as organizational support for a memorial did not appear until the 1970s, the report showed the Emsland’s collective amnesia towards the Nazi era, and opened the eyes of many people outside of the Emsland to the lack of engagement with their past that occurred in other regions as well. Interestingly, the U.S. television mini-series

Holocaust in 1979 played an important role throughout Germany, including Emsland, to encourage memorial organizations, and events. This was not the case in the 1960s in the

Emsland region, however, as the individual attempts of commemoration largely failed to fulfill their purposes.

The period between the late 1940s and late 1960s saw an immense transformation in the

Emsland. The Emsland GmbH cultivated and developed the region economically. This change surpassed any previous modification occurring in the region under the Weimar Republic and the

Nazi regime. However, the Nazi era growth and the expansion of the Emsland economically after the Nazi period were left unrecognized by the people in the Emsland. Most Emslanders and West

Germans alike were unable to fully come to terms with their own past during this time.

Therefore, the fact that the people in the Emsland saw the development of a Polish enclave and

59 Ibid., 2.

60 “Die Vergangenheit nicht nutzbar gemacht,” Ems-Zeitung, November 11, 1966, in “Das Schweigen wird Lauter,” edited by Boldt and Suhr, 13.

70 the DPs in general as criminals and unwelcome without realizing the reason why they were in

Germany in the first place is quite representative of broader studies of Germans during the time period. As Frank Biess notes, this was a period of selective remembrance when Germans saw themselves as victims first in order to come to terms with their own past.61 Yet, on the other hand, the 1960s saw a continued dialogue of German guilt nationally that was not successfully transplanted locally. The Germans in the Emsland were not willing to fully engage critically with horrors of the Nazi past within their own region as exemplified by the lack of memorial efforts.

Chapter 3 examines the movement away from selective remembrance and the dialogue of

German victimhood in the Emsland. It attempts to highlight the critical engagement of people in the region with their Nazi past that was nationally paralleled with the move towards an increasing institutionalization of German guilt rather than a dialogue of Germany guilt.62

61 Biess, Homecomings, 12.

62 Wittlinger, “Taboo or Tradition?,” 67.

71 CHAPTER THREE

FROM TWO PATHS TO ONE MEMORIAL

The post-war uses of the former Esterwegen concentration camp site as a Displaced

Persons camp and a depot site for the Bundeswehr since 1963 provides some insight into the reasons why a memorial site at Esterwegen was not established immediately after the war.

However, it fails to explain the overall amnesia surrounding the role of the Emsland in the Nazi concentration camp system and its lack of remembrance. Only the coalition of “Moorsoldaten” represented any memory of the camps, but these people had only met one other time since 1954.

In 1966, Report, a documentary German television show, criticized the people of the Emsland region for their lack of engagement with their past, but this did not spur much activity.1 Instead, an event outside of the Emsland in the 1970s incited a more extensive reaction that began the process of memorialization. The naming of a newly formed university in Oldenburg, a larger city north of the Emsland, became particularly controversial because one of the options under review was the name of a prominent former inmate of the Esterwegen concentration camp, Carl von

Ossietzky.2 The decision to name the university prompted a student group, faculty and community members to investigate the region’s history.3 These groups sought to develop a history for the Emsland and create sites of memory there for atrocities that occurred during the

Nazi period. Additionally, the newly formed regional government, the Kreis Emsland, became

1 These items are more specifically discussed in chapters 1 and 2. The “Moorsoldaten” coalition and the Report television documentary are detailed in Chapter 2.

2 A map of the region is provided in Chapter 1.

3 The 1950s can be viewed as a period of selective remembrance while the 1960s with the Eichmann and Auschwitz trials sparking interest signaling a period of more serious engagement with the Holocaust.

72 increasingly interested in developing a historical study of the subject. Thus, two paths of development for the creation, analysis, and understanding of the camps in the Emsland become evident.

This chapter will explore the creation of a memorial site at Esterwegen and demonstrate how the controversy of the naming of the university at Oldenburg, the creation of the

Documentation and Information Center (Dokumentations- und Informations Zentrum, or DIZ), and increasing financial contributions by the regional Emsland government and Lower Saxony contributed to the development of a memorial site in 2011. The politicized nature of the memorial culture in the Emsland and Lower Saxony were crucial factors behind the long, complex road toward the final establishment of the Esterwegen Memorial. Additionally, this chapter will explore how an architectural analysis of the space at the Esterwegen memorial reflects its evolution, as a symbol of the Emsland’s growing willingness to incorporate the Nazi past into the region’s present identity.

Naming the Oldenburg University: The Controversy

Carl von Ossietzky was a prisoner sentenced by a civil court of law during the early Nazi period. Ossietzky, however, was not an ordinary inmate. He was none other than the 1936 Nobel

Peace Prize laureate and his incarceration caused international outrage. Ossietzky was imprisoned under the Nazi regime because of his contribution to and role as the editor of the

Weltbühne, or The World Stage, a weekly magazine that discussed politics, culture, and art. The editors of the Weltbühne were accused in the spring 1931 of committing treason and espionage because an editorial in their magazine exposed state secrets to the rest of the world.4 Ossietzky

4 Ibid., 14.

73 served eighteen months in prison and was finally released by December 1932. However, after the

Reichstag (National Parliament) Fire in late February 1933, he was incarcerated again by the

Nazis and placed under “protective custody.” His previous imprisonment and opposition to the

Nazis expressed in the Weltbühne likely supported the Nazis’ classification of him as a political enemy needing “protection.” By February 1934, Ossietzky was transported to the Esterwegen camp, where he suffered not only physically from the labor he was required to do, but also psychologically because he was unable to write very much. He was imprisoned at the

Esterwegen concentration camp until he was transferred to a hospital in Berlin due to injuries sustained in the concentration camp until his death in 1938. In 1935, Thomas Mann, the German novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, recommended Ossietzky for the Nobel

Peace Prize and through international support from many prominent figures in the Unites States,

Britain, and other countries he was awarded the prize. Josef Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister under the Nazi regime, asked Ossietzky to reject his nomination. Many called for his release and when he became the first German citizen in 1936 to win the Nobel Peace Prize Hitler was outraged and likely embarrassed that he accepted the award.5 The Nazi government did not allow the press within Germany to discuss Ossietzky’s prize. He was one of the many political prisoners of the Nazi period who perished due to conditions in the concentration camps because he openly disagreed with Nazi policies and government decisions.6 Similar to some other political prisoners incarcerated by the Nazi regime, Ossietzky’s experiences were left unexamined for quite some time after 1945.

5 Elke Suhr, Carl von Ossietzky: Eine Biographie, (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1988) 211.

6 Ibid., 197-210.

74 After the Second World War, Carl von Ossietzky and his story were ignored in both the

Emsland and Germany at large until the foundation board at a newly created university in

Oldenburg sought to name the institution after him in 1973. A regional newspaper, Die

Nordwest-Zeitung (NWZ), tested local opinion to this proposal by polling its readers. The newspaper provided a variety of options to its readers. Several names relevant to the historic city were included as well as the choice to simply name the university after the city. The poll revealed that two-thirds of the participants would have chosen to name the university

“Universität Oldenburg.”7 The political parties in Lower Saxony quickly joined the consensus expressed by this newspaper poll and shortly thereafter the university was named the University of Oldenburg instead. However, this was not the last time that the name of the university in

Oldenburg would be considered. Only some fifteen years later, a new request was issued.

By 1980, the state parliament officially denied requests to rename the university. Thus, the use of the NWZ poll as a representation of public opinion, while surely not a true representative public opinion in the region, was quite successful. The university was not renamed the Carl von Ossietzky Univeristät Oldenburg until 1991 when the Lower Saxon parliament voted to amend a university law that allowed the board of trustees of universities to choose their own names. The state parliament created this amendment after years of student protests, increasing especially in the 1980s, to force the university to rename itself after Carl von

Ossietzky. On October 3, 1991, the Lower Saxon parliamentary president, Gerhard Schröder, participated in the renaming of the university, and even apologized to Ossietzky’s daughter,

Rosalinde von Ossietzky, who was present for the ceremonies, in the name of the Lower Saxon

7 Ibid., 14-15.

75 parliament, for what Lower Saxony had done to her father’s name. Today the university website notes that “by naming itself after Carl von Ossietzky, the University of Oldenburg underlined science's responsibility towards society and the role of science in public discourse.”8 Thus, the university framed its mission around its obligation to engage actively and responsibly in society, true to the legacy of Carl von Ossietzky. While it took nearly seventeen years to rename the university, it seems the university has now embraced the incorporation of Ossietzky in its university mission. However, it was the controversy of the initial naming of the university that influenced students and others within the community to commemorate the history of the

Emsland during the Nazi period.

The “Arbeitskreis Carl von Ossietzky”

Activity within the city of Oldenburg and the university in the 1970s developed increasing support for an effort to research and discuss the history of the Emsland during the

Nazi period. Due to the controversy over the naming of the university, a group of students, community members and some faculty from the university formed the “Arbeitskreis Carl von

Ossietzky” (Working Group Carl von Ossietzky) in April 1979. This development was inspired by a seminar on Carl von Ossietzky by Herman Vinke, a journalist of the Ems-Zeitung. Their first goal was to establish an informational board at the Esterwegen camp cemetery by

September 1979, marking the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War.9

8 The website is the English translation of the University profile. They use the word “science” and not the more complicated German word “Wissenschaft.” “Profile of the University,” Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, May 20, 2014 (accessed August 23, 2014), http://www.uni- oldenburg.de/en/profile/; “

9 Werner Boldt and Elke Suhr eds., “Das Schweigen wird lauter: Vom Kampf um den Moorsoldatenfriedhof bis zur Enstehung des Dokumentationszentrums Emslandlager,” Pressespiegel und Dokumentation (1985) 2. Gedenkstätte Esterwegen Archive.

76 However, in July 1979, the larger regional government of the Weser-Ems denied their request to establish another informational board, claiming one sufficed. However, the text for the first board was sparse: “Here rest the unknown dead that perished during the despotism of the

National Socialists in the Esterwegen camp and other camps in the Emsland.”10 Missing was any detailed information about the camp’s history and its relation to the larger history of the Nazi regime. The Arbeitskreis believed the existent informational board did not sufficiently represent what had occurred in the Emsland from 1933 to 1945.

In September 1979, 5,000 people participated in a memorial ceremony where the

Arbeitskreis set up the forbidden informational board. The audience applauded the group’s decision to contest the lack of memorial plaques at the Esterwegen cemetery. By October 7, the

Weser-Ems regional government bowed to public pressure and due to pressure from the public approved the informational board.11 Thus, the large local involvement and support during the memorial ceremony provides insights into the pursuit of more detailed interaction with the history of the Emsland during the Nazi period. Interestingly, the type of grassroots movement that developed in the Emsland, driven by students and faculty, is similar to many other initiatives within Germany during the time period, such as the Naturschutz programs and anti-nuclear energy developments that created a coalition between locals, students and intellectuals.12

Historian Konrad H. Jarausch notes the establishment of these coalitions was related to the

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Konrad H. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) 177.

77 failures of elected officials to respond to certain “civic needs.”13 The protest over the informational board corresponded with the West German television broadcast of the American mini-series Holocaust in 1979, which according to historian Robert G. Moeller is “frequently cited as a high point in West Germans' confrontation with the individual face of mass extermination.”14 However, the popular enthusiasm for the Arbeitskreis’s actions led directly to greater governmental support by the leading politically left-leaning Social Democrats

(henceforth, SPD) government in Lower Saxony.15

In his yearly press conference in January 1980, the president of the regional government of Oldenburg, Dr. Joseph Schweer, ensured that concrete discussion for the creation of an information center at Esterwegen would ensue. In order to be adequately prepared for such developments, the Arbeitskreis worked diligently to create a concept proposal for such an information center. The concept proposal outlined the development of a permanent exhibition, a library, and an archive as well as two positions for the scientific and educational care of the center. But the hopes for the creation of the site were soon extinguished by Lower Saxony. In

March 1980, the Lower Saxony parliament deemed that a sufficient memorial site already existed at Bergen-Belsen and that instead argued for the development of a study examining the history of the region, as well as informational boards that would inform the public of the history

13 A comparison between the national and local development of these types of groups is provided in the following chapter. At this point, it is necessary, however, to partially address the correlation of the Emsland’s development to other movements during the same time period.

14 Robert G. Moeller, “War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany,” The American Historical Review 101, no. 4 (1996): 1037. www.jstor.org/stable/2169632.

15 While the comparison of the development of memory of the Emsland with different national trends is necessary, Chapter 4 provides a more detailed discussion.

78 at the Esterwegen cemetery.16 Since the survivors of the Bergen-Belsen camp erected monuments and memorial stones in 1945, the Bergen-Belsen memorial has been considered an international site of remembrance. By 1966, a more permanent Document Center had been erected; however, no permanent educational or academic staff operated the center.17

The SPD led-state government of Lower Saxony supported research into the region’s history during the Nazi period, but rejected the creation of an additional memorial museum such as Bergen-Belsen. The status of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial as an international site of remembrance for victims of the camps and the presence of a Document Center may have led the parliament members to oppose the creation of another memorial for a number of reasons. First, some may have viewed the creation of another memorial within Lower Saxony as too deep of an engagement with the Nazi past. Second, the costs of creating and maintaining another memorial may have led to additional concerns than initially displayed in newspaper articles at the time.

The economic downturn experienced globally in the 1980s likely affected the decision to move against such funding. The second oil crisis in 1979, high unemployment rates (1.8 million), and increasing inflation rates (5 percent) were part of the economic concerns of the 1980s. The end of the years of the German Economic Miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) in the mid-1970s also

16 “Schweer: In Kürze Konkreters über KZ-Dokimentationszentrum.” Ems-Zeitung, January 1, 1980. In “Das Schweigen wird lauter: Vom Kampf um den Moorsoldatenfriedhof bis zur Enstehung des Dokumentationszentrums Emslandlager.” Werner Boldt and Elke Suhr ed. Pressespiegel und Dokumentation (1985) 22. Gedenkstätte Esterwegen Archive.

17 “The Memorial,” Stiftung Niedersäschsische Gedenkstätten, http://bergen-belsen.stiftung- ng.de/en/history/place-of-remembrance/memorial.html (accessed January 31, 2015).

79 contributed to the economic issues in the nation.18 Finally, the changes occurring in the SPD in the early 1980s split the party into two camps – the old working-class supporters and the younger generation that supported underprivileged minorities. The split in the party eventually led

Helmut Schmidt, the German chancellor from 1976 to 1982, to confront the liberal Free

Democratic Party (henceforth, FDP) ministers, who were in a coalition with the SPD government. Schmidt’s call for the FDP ministers to resign or be dismissed led to a “constructive vote of no confidence” and the election of Christian Democratic Union (CDU) federal chairman

Helmut Kohl as the new chancellor on October 1, 1982.19 The movement of the FDP, who traditionally supported the SPD, is sometimes referred to as the Wende (The Turn), describing the political shift to the right in the German politics in the early 1980s.20 The decision to support the creation of a memorial at the Esterwegen site was in the hands of the national parliament as the property belonged to the Bundeswehr. When the German national parliament reviewed the request of the Arbeitskreis to establish a permanent documentation center at the former

Esterwegen concentration camp site, its final decision highlighted that its efforts to establish a center in the nearby city of Papenburg was “obviously underway,” and that its determination to collect and develop a history of the region’s Nazi period “earns the respect and the

18 Eric Solsten, “Chapter 5: The Domestic Economy: The Economic Miracle and Beyond,” in Germany: A Country Study, 3rd edition, (Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1996) 254-258.

19 Lothar Kettenacker, Germany since 1945, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 148- 149.

20 The Wende is more commonly referred to the “monumental changes” that occurred in Germany in 1989 that led to the unification of the East and West Germany. Moeller, “War Stories,” 1040.

80 acknowledgment of the German Bundestag.”21 However, the reason for its denial of the creation of a place of memory was specifically related to the necessity to maintain the Bundeswehr site at

Esterwegen to house “Reservelazarrettgruppen” (Reserve Hospital Troops).22 Therefore, a variety of factors contributed to the national parliament’s ambivalent support of the creation of another memorial. The memorial at Bergen-Belsen served the purpose of remembering the Nazi past on a national and regional level in the eyes of the politicians of the Lower Saxon parliament, and the national parliament was not able to give into demands to transfer the property of

Esterwegen site from the Bundeswehr. While the Bergen-Belsen memorial explored the history of the Nazi period and the camp at Bergen-Belsen, it did not explore the local history of other regions in the Emsland.

Before the SPD lost many of its seats in the Bundestag, the German national parliament, and the seat of the chancellor, the Emsland experienced significant objections over the failure of the state government to consider providing a more developed memorial for the victims of

National Socialism in the Emsland. These concerns were generally voiced through the local newspapers, such as the Ems-Zeitung, and through the discussion with representatives at the state parliament.23 In an important tactical move, the oppositional efforts by the Arbeitskreis led to the

21 German Parliament, Resolution Recommendation and Report of the Home Affairs Committee (4th committee), “Errichtung eines Dokumentations- und Informationszentrums auf dem Gelände des ehemaligen Konzentrationslagers Esterwegen,” by Axel Wernitz, Werner Broll, and Günther Tietjen, 10/3950 (Bonn: Deutscher Bundestag Dokumentations- und Informationssystem, 1985) 2.

22 “Errichtung eines Dokumentations- und Informationszentrums,” 4.

23 “Gedenkhalle bei KZ-Esterwegen für NS-Opfer nicht ausreichend,” Ems-Zeitung April 18, 1980, in “Das Schweigen wird lauter: Vom Kampf um den Moorsoldatenfriedhof bis zur Enstehung des Dokumentationszentrums Emslandlager,” edited by Werner Boldt and Elke Suhr, Pressespiegel und Dokumentation (1985) 25. Gedenkstätte Esterwegen Archive.

81 creation of an action committee. By 1981, many of its members maintained that the informational boards did not adequately replace a memorial site. Therefore, the Arbeistskreis created an association that called for the creation of a documentation and information center for the camps in the Emsland. The association’s name was “Aktionskomitee für ein

Dokumentations- und Informationszentrum Emslandlager,” or the Action Committee for a

Documentation and Information Center Emsland Camps, henceforth Aktionskomitee

Emslandlager. Members joining this group included former camp prisoners, members of the

Arbeitskreis, professors and students from the Universität Oldenburg, the journalist Herman

Vinke, and notably the daughter of Carl von Ossietzky.24 The Aktionskomitee Emslandlager established an “International Workcamp” in July 1981 where 160 teens participated in learning about the camps in the Emsland. The teens also helped set up informational boards and participated in maintaining the camp cemeteries.25 It was followed by another workcamp the following year and a third one by 1984. The goal of the Aktionskomitee Emslandlager was not limited to creating a center for the Emsland camps, but also to the development of an international center in the Emsland particularly engaging high school students outside of

Germany.

In order to establish its goal to create an information center about the camps in the

Emsland, the Aktionskomitee Emslandlager sought to establish a permanent location. In April

1984, the Aktionskomitee announced that the establishment of a Dokumentations- and

24 Werner Boldt and Elke Suhr eds., “Das Schweigen wird lauter: Vom Kampf um den Moorsoldatenfriedhof bis zur Enstehung des Dokumentationszentrums Emslandlager,” Pressespiegel und Dokumentation (1985) 2. Gedenkstätte Esterwegen Archive.

25 Ibid., 3.

82 Informationszentrum (DIZ) house in Papenburg would begin by the end of the year.26 The decision to settle for a center in the city of Papenburg, instead of at the site of the concentration camp, was not a sufficient action to the Aktionskomitee. As no efforts to gain access to the

Esterwegen site were successful as explored above, however, a house in Papenburg, a city twenty-five kilometers west of Esterwegen, became the best alternative to suit the

Aktionskomitee.27

By 1985, the parliament of the Lower Saxony unanimously approved the expansion of its financial support to the Bergen-Belsen Memorial site. This allowed for the development of a larger Document Building, the provision of visitor services, and the hiring researchers and educators. The experts began their work at the memorial in 1987 and the new Document

Building opened in 1990.28 The support for the expansion of the Bergen-Belsen memorial shows that the parliamentary representatives were ready to commit to developing the memorial culture in Lower Saxony by the mid-1980s, only a few years after it rejected the Emsland memorial proposal. While the expansion of the DIZ was well under way at this point, it would require further funds to develop its goal to educate the peoples of the Emsland about the Nazi past. The shifts that occurred in the Emsland and Lower Saxony in the 1980s highlight the integral changes in the memory culture of the Nazi period of this period.

On a national scale, a variety of events in the 1980s within the historical community and

26 Ibid.

27 “Arbeiten für DIZ beginnen: Papenburg: Haus wird eingerichtet – Bürger sollen mitarbeiten,” Ems-Zeitung, April 3, 1984. In “Das Schweigen wird lauter: Vom Kampf um den Moorsoldatenfriedhof bis zur Enstehung des Dokumentationszentrums Emslandlager,” edited by Werner Boldt and Elke Suhr, Pressespiegel und Dokumentation (1980) 35. Gedenkstätte Esterwegen Archive.

28 “The Memorial,” Stiftung Niedersäschsische Gedenkstätten.

83 Germany highlighted some key controversies that explain the changes occurring on a regional and local level in Lower Saxony and the Emsland. On the 40th anniversary of the end of the

Second World War, the president of the German parliament, Richard von Weizsäcker, noted in his speech to the German Bundestag that while Germans certainly have no reason to participate in the victory celebrations of May 8, 1945, they had every reason to view it as the “end of a wrong track of Germany history, which saved the germ of hope for a better future.”29 This speech was preceded by the Bitburg controversy when U.S. President Ronald Reagan visited a military cemetery in Bitburg, where German soldiers, among them SS men, were buried, with German

Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU) to commemorate the end of the Second World War. While

Reagan and Kohl also visited the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, the visit, seeking to strengthen the relationship between the United States and West Germany, created a host of conflicts within these two countries.30 Kohl’s decision to ask Reagan to visit this particular cemetery led to accusations against him that he allegedly sought to distance himself from the

Holocaust. Therefore, the criticism of the CDU that it generally distanced itself from memory of the Holocaust while the SPD sought to highlight it developed even further. Lastly, these events were all simultaneous to what is commonly referred to as the Historikerstreit (Historian’s

Controversy), where prominent historians in West Germany argued about “the place and

29 “Weizsäcker Rede zum 8.Mai 1985,” Deutscher Bundestag, archived on February 2, 2006, http://webarchiv.bundestag.de/archive/2006/0202/parlament/geschichte/parlhist/dokumente/dok08.html (accessed February 6, 2015).

30 Eighty-two U.S. Senators urged President Reagan to cancel the visit to Bitburg and the U.S. House of representatives wrote a letter to Chancellor Kohl asking him to withdraw his invitation. “82 Senators Ask Reagan to Cancel His Cemetery Visit,” New York Times, April 27, 1985, Lexis Nexus. http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2052/lnacui2api/api/version1/getDocCui?lni=3S8G-BDY0-0007- J4VP&csi=270944,270077,11059,8411&hl=t&hv=t&hnsd=f&hns=t&hgn=t&oc= 00240&perma=true (accessed February 3, 2015). Moeller, “War Stories,” 1041.

84 significance of National Socialism and the Holocaust in the narrative of German history.”31 The events occurring in the mid-1980s greatly influenced the support of memory projects supported by state organizations in Germany.

By the early 1990s, the DIZ further expanded in a variety of ways. It renovated its location in Papenburg by 1993 and received financial support by Lower Saxony by 1994. These developments coincided with the reunification of the Federal Republic of Germany and the

German Democratic Republic. Additionally, the West German economy recovered considerable by the late 1980s.32 The next section will explore the development of the DIZ and their work on memory of the Nazi period. The integral role of state and regional governments is similar to that of the development of the Arbeitskreis. While regional support continued, state support increased and led to important developments.

The DIZ House

As prospects of gaining access to the former concentration camp site disappeared, the

Aktionskomitee Emslandlager focused on obtaining and renovating a house in Papenburg to serve as a memorial museum until further options became available. In April 1984, members began rebuilding the house in Papenburg, the “Van-Velen Anlage,” part of a house used for historical-ecological training, and a regional newspaper article encouraged participants in the demolition of the barracks at Esterwegen to come forward.33 In order to show support of the

31 Moeller, “War Stories,” 1041

32 In 1988, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose 3.7 percent and the following year it rose another 3.6 percent. In 1989 Germany, unemployment rates decreased 7.1 percent. Solsten, Germany, “The Economic Miracle and Beyond.”

33 “Arbeiten für DIZ beginnen: Papenburg: Haus wird eingerichtet, Bürger sollen mitarbeiten,” Ems-Zeitung, June 3, 1984. Gedenkstätte Esterwegen Archive.

85 Aktionskomitee’s efforts, the regional government established funding for them. The Kreis

Emsland supplied the Aktionskomitee Emslandlager with “Arbeitsbeschaffungsmassnahmen

(ABM)-Kräfte,” or employment procurement measures positions. These positions were persons defined as unemployed and whose salaries were supplemented by the unemployment budget.34

The subsidization of a permanent position greatly helped as the funding for such positions was entirely supported by the Aktionskomitee Emslandlager donations.

In addition to creating a physical site in the Emsland to learn about the camps during the

Nazi period, the DIZ established an annual newsletter to inform its members about the DIZ and its projects. In 1986, the DIZ association published its first newsletter. Its goal was to create increased awareness of DIZ activities, remind subscribers to donate, and connect former inmates and share stories. The first newsletter noted that in its first year of opening the DIZ house received almost 450 visitors. Many of these participants not only viewed the exhibits at the DIZ house, but also participated in the “Rundfahrt” (tour) to former concentration and prison camp sites in the Emsland and the Esterwegen cemetery. The newsletter noted the organization was particularly enthused at the number of school groups, teachers, and youth group leaders interested in the DIZ and incorporating the history of the Emsland during the Nazi period into their programs.35 The development of such an instrument of communication within the DIZ association shows the growth of the organization.

The DIZ group was in need of a new location by the early 1990s for a variety of reasons.

34 “Emslandlager-Initiative bekommt jetzt ABM-Kräfte: Raum für Austellung und Bibliothek,” Ems-Zeitung, March 28, 1984. Gedenkstätte Esterwegen Archive.

35 Aktionskomitee für ein Dokumentations- und Informationszentrum Emslandlager e.V, “DIZ- Nachrichten,” Dokumentations- und Informationszentrum (DIZ) Emslandlager 1 (1986): 1. Gedenkstätte Esterwegen Archive.

86 Three of its employees shared a small office, and the exhibit space limited the amount of history of the camps that could be adequately presented to its visitors. Additionally, the lack of storage space did not allow the organization to create a larger archive in order to house historical materials.36 The construction costs for the remodel of the DIZ house was about 800,000 Deutsche

Mark.37 In 1990, the city of Papenburg and the district of the Emsland paid for the remodel of the

DIZ house, a sign, DIZ employees informed the Ems-Zeitung, of the perceived value of the organization and its work in the region.38 However, by 1993, the DIZ funds were unable to supplement the positions that the ABM money previously provided. The minister president of

Lower Saxony, the head of the state parliament, Gerhard Schröder (SPD), announced his intention to support the position of the DIZ manager to help maintain the DIZ organization. The

Kreis Emsland also noted that it would sponsor an auxiliary position at the DIZ. Schroeder’s initiative further inspired the regional government of the Emsland to fully support a position at the DIZ for employees. Thus, the CDU-led Kreis Emsland and SPD-led state of Lower Saxony came together at this stage to support memorial work in the Emsland, clearly a significant move as the parties generally stand in opposition.39

By the early 1990s, the state parliament’s and district’s decision to support the memorial

36 “Größere Gedenkstätte für ,,Moorsoldaten:” Neubau in Papenburg 1991 fertig?,” Ems-Zeitung, June 30, 1990. Gedenkstätte Esterwegen Archive.

37 800,000 Deutsche Mark converts to a little over 493, 000 US dollars. In order to convert the Deutsche Mark (DEM) to U.S. Dollars, the period average from January 1, 1990 to January 1, 1995 was used. “Historical Exchange Rates,” OANDA, www.oanda.com /currency/historical-rates/ (accessed February 5, 2015).

38 “Größere Gedenkstätte für ,,Moorsoldaten”.”

39 “Zusage von Schröder: Land bezahlt den DIZ-Leiter: Ministpräsident besuchte das Dokumentationszentrum,” Ems-Zeitung, August 14, 1993. Gedenkstätte Esterwegen Archive.

87 group in the Emsland had dispelled the DIZ’s financial concerns. The movement towards support of the DIZ group must be understood in terms of the reunification of the two German states. Not only would support for creating the memorial museums generate jobs, it would continue to reengage Germans critically with their past. The recovering strength of the SPD during this time period significantly supported the DIZ and similar organizations in Lower Saxony, especially represented by the creation of ABM positions in the 1980s and their continued subsidizing of these jobs in the 1990s. This allowed for further commitment of workers to the DIZ’s efforts and showed a renewed effort by both the Kreis Emsland and the Lower Saxon government to support the existence of a regional memorial project, specifically allowing the organization to continue to compile testimonies of the victims of the Emsland camps.

The Kreis Emsland and the Emslandlager

In addition to some of the support by Lower Saxony, the Kreis Emsland, or district of the

Emsland, also established its own efforts to trace the history of camps in the Emsland, in addition to the support already provided to the efforts by the Aktionskomittee Emslandlager and the DIZ by the regional government. In 1981, it commissioned Erich Kosthorst from the university in

Münster, a city east of the Kreis Emsland, to begin developing the history of the camps. This led to the publication of Erich Kosthorst and Bernd Walter’s three-volume study and over three- thousand-paged publication of Konzentrations- und Strafgefangenlager im Dritten Reich Beispiel

Emsland: Dokumentation und Analyse zum Verhältnis von NS-Regime und Justiz published in

1983, which provided a documentation and analysis of the camps and their relationship to the

88 judiciary in the region. 40 Additionally, Elke Suhr, who was completing her dissertation at the

Oldenburg University, published a detailed study of the Emsland camps the following year.41 By

1986, Kohorst and Walter published an abridged pocket book for teachers to guide their use of the three-volume work in their classrooms.42 Their documentation and later studies by other later historians were key to shaping the development of the memorial site at Esterwegen.43 The sponsoring of Kosthorst and Walter’s study by the district of the Emsland showed its willingness to support research of the Emsland history during the Nazi period. This support can also be viewed as an attempt to establish itself as a regional power since it was a newly established political entity within the region.44

The differences between the Kreis Emsland and the Arbeitskreis can be seen in the lack of a united effort to develop the history of the Emsland. Herman Bröring, who participated as a member of the community in the Arbeitskreis in the 1980s, maintains that “it is, however, necessary to point out, that politicians in the Emsland were not prepared to leave this difficult topic in the hands of a group of people whose ideology was characterized as ‘leftist’.”45 The

40 Erich Kosthorst, and Bernd Walter, Konzentrations- und Strafgefangenlager im Dritten Reich Beispiel Emsland: Documentation und Analyse zum Verhaeltnis von NS-Regime und Justiz, volume 1-3, (Duesseldorf: Droste Verlag GmbH, 1983).

41 Elke Suhr, “Konzentrationslager-Justizgefangenenlager-Krigsgefangenlagerim Emsland 1933- 1945,” in Vefolgung, Ausbeutung, Vernichtung: Die Lebens- und Arbeitsbedingungen der Häftlinge in deutschen Konzentrationslagern 1933-1945, edited by Ludwig Eiber, (Hannover: Fackelträger, 1985).

42 Kosthorst and Walter, Konzentrations, 7.

43 Elke Suhr, “Konzentrationslager Emsland,” 6.

44 The Kreis Emsland was officially created in 1977. This will be further discussed in the previous chapter or the introduction.

45 Andrea Kaltofen, and Udo Mäsker, ed, “Die Gedenkstätte Esterwegen: Ein Werkstattbericht,” (Meppen: Druckhaus Plagge GmbH, 2012) 7.

89 Arbeitskreis, comprised of mainly university students and faculty, was viewed as politically left- leaning in a region generally dominated by conservative groups. While their work would eventually receive support from the Emsland as described in more detail above, the Kreis

Emsland concerns about their political affiliations shaped the relationship. In fact, the DIZ only became a working-group partner of the organization in 2008 with the creation of the foundation of the Esterwegen Memorial.46 Therefore, the Kreis Emsland commissioned the development of a historical study of the camps in the Emsland separately from the work completed by the DIZ group.

Surely the newly formed regional government of the Kreis Emsland considered their role in shaping the development of the history in the Emsland as integral to achieving legitimacy in the region. By the mid-1980s, the Kreis Emsland became more interested in participating in the development of the DIZ group, placing aside their earlier ambivalence toward the organization.

By January of 1984, the regional director of Emsland, Karl-Heinz Brümmer, invited the DIZ to meet and offered the cooperation of the “Landkreis,” the Emsland regional government.47 The reason for the support of the Emsland at this time seems to be connected to the specific advantages that the creation of the memorial might have. The advantages behind this offer for the

Emsland, as spelled out by Brümmer, include that the students would be able to visit an exhibit that would supplement the information taught to them from the Kosthorst and Walter study.48

46 Ibid.

47 “Differenzen über Informationszentrum,” Ems-Zeitung, January 1, 1984. In “Das Schweigen wird lauter: Vom Kampf um den Moorsoldatenfriedhof bis zur Enstehung des Dokumentationszentrums Emslandlager,” edited by Werner Boldt and Elke Suhr, Pressespiegel und Dokumentation (1985) 36.

48 Ibid.

90 However, by April of 1984, the Aktionscommittee moved forward with its plans to create a DIZ house in Papenburg without the support of the city of Papenburg or the Kreis Emsland.49

The Development of Esterwegen Memorial, 2001-2011

While there had been several attempts to gain access to the former Esterwegen Nazi camp area, the Bundeswehr maintained control of its depot site until 2001. In April 1982, the SPD defense minister Hans Apel announced interest in handing over the military depot at Esterwegen to the development of a memorial site, but this was recanted the following year by his successor

Manfred Wörner, a member of the CDU.50 Wörner stated that due to “new” stationing plans the

Bundeswehr required the Esterwegen site.51 Additionally, when the Bundestag (German parliament) discussed the issue in December 1983, the general agreement was that a memorial at

Esterwegen was not necessary, as a memorial already existed in Lower Saxony, the Bergen-

Belsen Memorial.52 While there was a precedent for the Bundeswehr to remain in control of the site, a little less than ten years after the reunification of the two Germanys and the end of the

Cold War, the Bundeswehr restructuring did not require the Esterwegen depot any longer and the

49 “Arbeiten für DIZ beginnen: Papenburg: Haus wird eingerichtet, Bürger sollen mithelfen,” Ems-Zeitung, April 3, 1984. In “Das Schweigen wird lauter: Vom Kampf um den Moorsoldatenfriedhof bis zur Enstehung des Dokumentationszentrums Emslandlager,” edited by Werner Boldt and Elke Suhr, Pressespiegel und Dokumentation (1985) 37.

50 “Dokumentationszentrum auf Bundeswehrgelände: SPD beharrt auf Forderung-Parlamentarisch Anfrage,” Ems-Zeitung, April 6, 1983, in “Das Schweigen wird lauter: Vom Kampf um den Moorsoldatenfriedhof bis zur Enstehung des Dokumentationszentrums Emslandlager,” edited by Werner Boldt and Elke Suhr, Pressespiegel und Dokumentation (1985) 29.

51 Ibid.

52 “Bundesregierung bekräftig: Keine Gedenkstätte in Esterwegen: “Zentrales Mahnmal in Bergen-Belsen genügt” – Debatte im Bundestag,” Ems-Zeitung, December 3, 1983. In “Das Schweigen wird lauter: Vom Kampf um den Moorsoldatenfriedhof bis zur Enstehung des Dokumentationszentrums Emslandlager,” edited by Werner Boldt and Elke Suhr, Pressespiegel und Dokumentation (1980) 35.

91 site was relinquished to the Kreis Emsland.53

By June 2000, the Bundeswehr announced its closing of the depot at the site of the former concentration camp in Esterwegen and its plan to sell the land to the county of Nordhümmling.

However, the government of the district of Emsland would not support this decision and quickly moved to appropriate the sale with their own goal of creating a memorial at the site.54 By

November 2001, the Emsland district representatives successfully signed a document returning the property to them.55 After 2001, the DIZ hosted international “workcamps” to excavate the site in order to accurately return it to its original state. It is unclear what pushed the Emsland district to commit to the idea of taking over the former concentration camp site. However, their previous financial support of the DIZ provides some answers. In addition, the district of Emsland created an academic committee that they would consult in the creation of the Esterwegen

Memorial. Some of its members included Historian Dr. Bernd Faulenbach from the Ruhr-

University at Bochum, who was named the head of the committee because of his extensive participation in other memorial processes, as well as Professor Bernd Walter, who published the initial study of the camps in the Emsland in the 1980s.56 The historian Bernd Faulenbach played an integral part in the formation of a board of directors because he participated in key roles during the establishment of a national memorial concept within Germany during the late 1990s.

53 Andrea Kaltofen and Herman Bröring, “Die Gedenkstätte Esterwegen,” in Emsland-Jahrbuch 2013: Jahrbuch des Emsländischen Heimatbundes, volume 59, (Sögel: Verlag des Emsländischen Heimat Bundes, e.V., 2013) 34.

54 Ibid., 35.

55 Elke Suhr, “Konzentrationslager Emsland,” 8.

56 Andrea Kaltofen, and Udo Mäsker, ed, Die Gedenkstätte Esterwegen: Ein Werkstattbericht, (Meppen: Druckhaus Plagge GmbH, 2012).

92 Additionally, other prominent historians active in memory studies and regional and national policies comprised the rest of the board seats.57

On July 15, 2008, the Lower Saxon Ministry of Interior established the document that officially created a foundation for the Esterwegen memorial, called the Esterwegen Memorial

Foundation. This step allowed the foundation to function under the authorization of the state as a civil organization. The foundation’s purpose was to develop and oversee the creation of a memorial to commemorate the concentration and prison camp at Esterwegen and the other fourteen camps in the Emsland in cooperation with the DIZ. By August 2008, the district of

Emsland turned the property of the former Esterwegen concentration and prison camp site over to the Esterwegen Memorial Foundation. 58 On this same day, the foundation’s executive committee under the management of Andrea Kaltofen officially commenced the duties of the

Esterwegen Memorial Foundation. This was a step that had been long awaited since the initial announcement had been made in 2001 to create a memorial site at Esterwegen on the site of the former camp. While the Bundeswehr initially transferred all property to the district of Emsland, the step towards the creation of the Esterwegen Memorial Foundation legitimized and legalized the process of the development of the memorial. Additionally, the development of the board allowed it to accept donations and develop fundraising strategies. By late 2008, the foundation gained an array of sponsors, which were most likely secured over several years since the

Emsland announced its plan to create a memorial commemorating the Nazi concentration camps in the region. Nearly six million euros were donated for this project from a variety of sponsors,

57 Andrea Kaltofen and Herman Bröring, “Die Gedenkstätte Esterwegen,” 38.

58 Ibid., 24.

93 including the Bundeswehr (€2.5 million), the district of Emsland (€1.2 million), the Lower

Saxony Memorial Foundation (€1 million), the state of Lower Saxony (€400,000), and some other smaller donations from regional and local foundations (totaling €650,000).59 The decision to create a foundation in 2008 and its subsequent donations by a variety of sponsors suggests that the regional and local support for a memorial to commemorate the history of the Emsland during the Nazi period had finally arrived.

The motives and timing of the financial support of the different government organizations necessitates further analysis. Firstly, the large sum provided by the Bundeswehr may be attributed to its resistance to allow a memorial to be founded at the site at Esterwegen for such an extensive period of time because they required their continuous use of the site since 1963 as a military depot. However, it is unclear what the reasons behind such a large donation may have been. Second, the district of Emsland, as another main contributor, sought to establish a memorial in its region with the support of Lower Saxony Memorial Foundation and other sponsors during this period because the general trend in the nation was to establish and support such projects. The increasing role of Germany in the European Union and as a world leader may be considered to be part of the increasing interest in coming to terms with its past. However, a sort of memory boom in the 2000s cannot be seen as sole reason for these developments. The immense contributions in 2008 also show extent to which local and regional businesses were willing to participate in the processes of remembrance. But what brought about such support if it was not necessarily related to political events? The generational gap between the Nazi period and the generations active in memorial work in the 2000s appear to be a major factor, as many of

59 Andrea Kaltofen, and Udo Mäsker, ed, “Die Gedenkstätte Esterwegen,” 26.

94 these Germans began their participation in memorial projects during the 1970s and 1980s. These people are generally referred to as members of the 1968er generation. It was their children, the

1989ers that continued to actively work in the field of memory during the 2000s. Interestingly, as historian Harold Marcuse concludes, the guides of the 1989er generation “forged stronger connections to the Nazi period” although they are most removed from it.60 The members of the

1989er generation, therefore, became important actors in the movements in the 2000s to establish and develop memorial works.

On October 31, 2011, the Esterwegen Memorial opened its doors and became a

“European place of memory.”61 During the opening ceremony, attended by representatives of the

Kreis Emsland, the DIZ, former camp inmates and community members, a former inmate noted the importance of the establishment of the memorial site at Esterwegen and began his speech by addressing the attendees as “dear humans” (Liebe Menschen) instead of the customary German greeting “sehr geehrte Damen und sehr geehrte Herren,” or “ladies and gentlemen.”62 The

Director of the Esterwegen Memorial Foundation, a representative of the Kreis Emsland, Dr.

Andrea Kaltofen noted that this was a very moving moment during the opening ceremony. The strong popular response to the memorial site can be seen in its large amount of visitors since the opening of the memorial. As of 2013, nearly 57,000 persons had visited the Esterwegen

60 Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933- 2001, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 402.

61 The language of referring to the site as “European place of memory” is not based on any official title. However, the role of the Esterwegen Memorial Foundation and other organizations around the world is further explored below. Andrea Kaltofen and Kurt Buck, “Die Gedenkstätte Esterwegen,” Gedenkstätten Rundbrief Stiftung Topographie des Terrors 172, no. 12 (2013): 29.

62 Interview with Andrea Kaltofen on July 29, 2014.

95 Memorial, including school groups, adult groups and individual visitors.63

The Esterwegen Memorial is affiliated through the Lower Saxony Memorial Association and its director and staff continue to participate in discussions of memorials around Germany through the affiliation with organizations such as the Topography of Terror Foundation (Stiftung

Topographie des Terrors).64 The connection to this organization was established when the DIZ began participating in the early versions of the journal in the mid-1980s when it was referred to as Aktion Sühnezeichen/Friedensdienste e.V. (The Foundation of Actions for

Reconciliation/Peace Services). The organization officially changed its name in 1992 to Stiftung

Topographie des Terrors (Topography of Terror Foundation). It is important to note that the organization became more official as it moved away from the e.V. (eingetragener Verein, or registered, not-for-profit organization) designation, generally given to clubs, and towards the labeling of a Stiftung, or foundation. Since 1994, the city of Berlin and the Federal Republic of

Germany are official sponsors of the Topography of Terror Foundation.65 Not only does the connection with this organization show the widespread network system that the organization of the DIZ and the Esterwegen Memorial are a part of, it highlights an extensive memorial system across Germany.

The rise of this foundation parallels the rise of the development of the DIZ group in the

1980s. This connection shows that the development of memorial groups in the Emsland is

63 Kaltofen and Buck, “Die Gedenkstätte Esterwegen,” 39.

64 This organization also created a website that lists all of the Holocaust memorials. Kaltofen and Buck, “Die Gedenkstätte Esterwegen.” Thomas Lutz, “About Us,” Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, http://www.gedenkstaetten-uebersicht.de/en/about-us/ (accessed January 20, 2015).

65 “Die Stiftung Topographie des Terrors,” Stiftung Topographie des Terrors http://www.topographie.de/stiftung/ (accessed February 5, 2015).

96 directly connected to larger memorial developments throughout Germany. The Topography of

Terror Foundation grew considerably in the 1990s and 2000s. This can be particularly noted upon the review of the organizations Gedenkstätten Rundbrief (Memorial Leaflets) from the

1980s to the present. Not only did these leaflets grow in size to the size of a journal, but also the variety of contributions of different memorials across Germany and Europe suggest that the organization grew in terms of memorials affiliated with it.66 Additionally, the Topography of

Terror Foundation is associated with the “Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas”

(Foundation Monument for the murdered Jews of Europe) and the “Task Force for International

Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research,” which provide financial and material support. The extensive international network provides the Esterwegen Memorial a broader international status. While the reasons for the development of a memorial culture in

Germany are discussed above, it is important to note that the 1990s and 2000s saw increasing financial support from government organizations. Without this support, mostly initiated in the

1990s, these organizations, the Esterwegen Memorial Foundation and the Topography of Terror

Foundation, would not have developed and flourished to the extent noted above.

The Memorial Site: An Analysis

The Esterwegen Memorial Foundation requested that the two architects, Hans-Herman

Krafft and Hans-Dieter Schaal, participate in the creation of a “state of the field” document for the Esterwegen Memorial Foundation. Their insights are especially useful to further highlight how the board of trustees developed the memorial site. Particularly interesting is Schaal’s perspective because not only did he participate as the architect in the creation of the Esterwegen

66 Gedenkstätten Rundbrief, 14-172 (1986-2013). Esterwegen Memorial Library.

97 Memorial, he was integral in the remodeling process at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial.67 This shows the extent of a network of memorial sites across Germany not only across memorial sites but also a network of key designers and architects who shared ideas and brought about a high degree of commonality in the spatial and symbolic representation of the camps. Schaal utilized two of the depot halls that the Bundeswehr left standing for the two main exhibition halls of the memorial site. While the front part of the memorial was entirely remodeled, he maintained the open structures of the former depot halls and specifically highlighted the existent concrete floors and walls. The memorial site is filled with pictures and informational placards about the experience in the camps in the Emsland. Additionally, a scale-model of the camp at Esterwegen is exhibited at the center of one of the rooms. This model attempts to represent the extensive marshlands that surround the memorial site today, just as they did during the Nazi period.68

Similarly, the Bergen-Belsen memorial, remodeled in 2007, utilizes a comparable representation of concrete walls and floors. Schaal does not specifically note the resemblance between both memorials. However, while the Bergen-Belsen exhibit is much larger, the way information and pictures are displayed is strikingly similar to the Esterwegen Memorial.69 This reveals a profound connection among memorial sites within Germany.

67 Hans-Dieter Schaal, “Das Informationszentrum der Gedenkstätte Esterwegen: Neubau des Eingangsgebäudes, Umnutzungzweier Bundeswehrdepothallen und die Ausstellung,” in Andrea Kaltofen, and Udo Mäsker, ed, Die Gedenkstätte Esterwegen: Ein Werkstattbericht, (Meppen: Druckhaus Plagge GmbH, 2012) 17.

68 This information was collected from personal experience during a research trip by the author in the summer 2014.

69 “A Place of Remembrance,” Gedenkstätte Bergen-Belsen, Stiftung Niedersächsische Gedenkstätten, accessed January 15, 2015, http://bergen-belsen.stiftung-ng.de/en/history/place-of- remembrance.html.

98

Figure 6. A scale-model of the Esterwegen Camp. A former prisoner of the camp donated the model to the DIZ. He represented the fences and the guard posts as larger than in real life to highlight how they created terror and fear.70

Figure 7. The outside landscaping Figure 8. The inside of the memorial at at the Esterwegen Memorial.71 Esterwegen Memorial.72

70 Interview with Kurt Buck on July 29, 2014.

71 Courtesy of the Esterwegen Memorial. Kaltofen and Mäsker, ed, “Die Gedenkstätte Esterwegen,” 25.

99 Moreover, Schaal was particularly fascinated by the identification of the prisoners who cultivated the marsh as Moorsoldaten, or “Peat Bog Soldiers.”73 These inmates created the “Peat

Bog Song” that represented their difficult labor and life in the concentration camp that became famous during the Nazi period throughout the “concentrationary universe.”74 Therefore, Schaal ensured their integral representation in the creation of the memorial. The presence of the song, in particular, helps reflect that the site at Esterwegen is not only a site of memory but also a site to mourn those “Peat Bog Soldiers” whose legacy reverberated throughout the entire concentration camp system. Schaal’s aesthetic choices reveal that the Esterwegen Memorial is committed to represent collective suffering as in the “Peat Bog Soldiers” song. The representations of the song and the scale-model camp structure highlight a connection between the economic and agricultural cultivation of the Emsland and the camps during the Nazi period. In many ways, as explored in Chapter 1, the development of the Emsland from a rural, sparsely populated region, to its present day industrial and agricultural development is integrally connected to the Nazi period and these marsh soldiers.

In addition to the large exhibition room that details the history of the Emsland during the

72 Ibid., 17.

73 The German term for this is Moorsoldaten. The song, or the Moorsoldaten Lied, was not only popular in the concentration camps, but was also used in the postwar period by Hannes Wader and a famous German punk rock band of the 1980s, Die Toten Hosen. See Appendix A for the translated version of this song. Hedwig Ahrens, “Seit 80 Jahren ziehen die Moorsoldaten,” Nord Deutscher Rundfunk – NDR, August 27, 2013(accessed March 30, 2014) “http://www.ndr.de/geschichte/chronologie/nszeitundkrieg/moorsoldaten109.html

74 Schaal, “Das Informationszentrum,” 14-17. Omer Bartov coined the term “concentrationary universe” referring to the massive network of concentration camps and their sub-camp systems. Bartov, Omer. “Ordering Horror: Conceptualizations of the Concentrationary Universe.” In Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories. New York: Cornell University Press, 2003.

100 Nazi period, the current memorial site also hosts an adjacent room that examines the post-war treatment of the Nazi camps in the Emsland. This room is lit much brighter than the Nazi-period exhibit. Whereas dimmed lighting sets the scene of the main exhibit, the postwar period room is naturally lit and thematically addresses some key events in the postwar period of the Emsland.

The room is followed by a place to host travelling exhibits and pathways to a set of seminar rooms primarily used to provide presentations for large groups, particularly student groups.

Additionally the memorial site houses a library, a set of offices, and an archive.75

The memorial regularly hosts a variety of school and adult groups. Most student groups that visit the memorial site at Esterwegen originate from Lower Saxony. However, student groups from the northern section of North-Rhine Westphalia also frequent the memorial site.76

Many adult groups requesting group tours are Heimatvereine, or local history associations.77

There are also a variety of individuals that visit the memorial individually. There are a significant number of tourists from the Netherlands as well as those visiting the region from elsewhere in

Germany. A variety of individuals visit the memorial at Esterwegen even though most are from within the region or the bordering regions of the Emsland. The regional and transnational attraction of the memorial therefore is quite significant as its remote location could have made a too distant location to most individuals, groups, and organizations.

75 This description is derived from the author’s own visit to the memorial in July 2014.

76 Interview with Kurt Buck on July 29, 2014.

77 Most villages and towns have Heimatvereine. Their mission is to investigate the history of their area. While word “Heimat” is difficult to translate into English, it generally refers to the home region that can refer to a national or local level. “Heimatverein.” April 25, 2014. http://www.heimatverein- exten.de/index.php/heimatverein (accessed October 31, 2014).

101

Figure 9. Walking-tour of the Esterwegen Memorial. Part of a flyer for the Esterwegen Memorial that provides directions to a walking-tour of the site.78

Instead of having to use the concentration camp grounds as a site to house the memorial museum building, the adjacent grounds also used by the Bundeswehr were utilized to locate the exhibits, the library, and office spaces. Thus, the design for the concentration camp grounds entirely utilized the space of the former concentration camp site. Visitors enter the grounds by walking through the main lobby of Esterwegen Memorial. Visitors approach a large bronze wall and walkway signifying the entrance of the former concentration camp grounds. Informational placards detail each specific location at each site such as the guard towers, the barracks, and more. The landscape architect, Hans-Herman Krafft, designed the grounds surrounding the

Esterwegen Memorial site. Figure 9, pictured above, shows a site of one of the former barracks.

Krafft and the Esterwegen Memorial board chose not to rebuild the twenty barracks on the

78 Flyer Gedenkstätte Esterwegen. Bundesarchiv Berlin, Y 12/A 441, Stiftung Gedenkstätte. http://www.gedenkstaette- esterwegen.de/index.php?con_cat=131&con_lang=1&sid=9fc7e2dfd2f4c9d8ec32242d417971d3 (accessed January 19, 2014).

102 Esterwegen grounds, but instead planted trees at the sites to represent the spatial footprint of the barracks structures.79 However, these trees, according to Krafft also represent inmates that were placed in each of these barracks at the Esterwegen camp.80 The decision not to rebuild the barracks and instead represent them symbolically through nature is a unique form of representation of the former concentration camp grounds.81 The representation of the prisoners through trees symbolizes the presence of the victims of the camp system in the Emsland at the current-day memorial. Some visitors may interpret the presence of the trees as a sort of rebirth of these victims, thus creating a message of hope and redemption. While the purpose of providing such detailed outlines of the true extent of the camp of the concentration camp grounds was to help visitors visualize the dimensions of the camp, it also served “to remind of the harshness, the inhumanity, as well as the isolation, the forsakenness of those imprisoned, without however degenerating into a false and irritating pathos.”82 The representations of the realities of life at concentration camps are often a controversial debate. While many see the aesthetic representation as false, others find that the direct display violence is too harsh. The Esterwegen

79 During 1935 and 1936 when the Esterwegen camp served as a camp for the Administration of Justice, each of the 20 barracks housed around 65 prisoners if all barracks were in use. However, inmate reports noted that barracks housed around 130-160 prisoners, which signifies that not all twenty barracks may have been used to potentially improve the guards abilities to monitor them more easily. Dirk Lüerßen, “,,Wir sind die Moorsoldaten”: Die Insassen der frühen Konzentrationslager im Emsland 1933 bis 1936,” (PhD diss., Universität Osnabrück, 2001) 54. DART-Europe E-theses Portal. http://www.dart- europe.eu/

80 Hans-Herman Krafft, “„Interpretation und Reduktion” – die Arbeit an der Freiraumgestaltun für die Gedenkstätte Esterwegen,” in Andrea Kaltofen, and Udo Mäsker, ed, “Die Gedenkstätte Esterwegen: Ein Werkstattbericht,” (Meppen: Druckhaus Plagge GmbH, 2012) 12-13.

81 While the standard does not generally involve the rebuilding of barracks, no representation of trees is known at other concentration camp sites.

82 Ibid., 13.

103 Memorial board’s decision to rebuild the concentration camp grounds aesthetically generally followed many precedents used in other memorial sites, while at the same time creating their own innovative symbols to honor the inmates.

The development of the grounds for the memorial site does not impose upon the way the grounds developed in the postwar period. The Esterwegen Memorial Foundation’s use of the existent Bundeswehr depot building also shows their efforts to incorporate the postwar history of the site in the memorial site’s development. Thus, the architectural decision-making in the creation of the memorial site reflects a conscious effort to incorporate what already existed. The

Esterwegen Memorial utilizes a variety of methods to represent the history of the camps. The aesthetic design of the grounds contradicts the less visually appealing designs in the main exhibition. The board attempted to incorporate new trends in the field of history, such as memory studies, in its secondary exhibit about the postwar period of the site.

The controversy about the naming of the university in Oldenburg sparked the discussion of the camps in the Emsland. This prompted groups of students, faculty members of universities, and community members to create the Arbeitskreis and develop the DIZ. Concurrently, the newly formed district of the Emsland began its process of establishing studies on the history of their region during the Nazi period. The political and economic environment of Germany heavily influenced the funding of the regional and local government organizations to memorialization projects, such as the DIZ. The following chapter will further explore how the memorialization process of the Emsland compares to the memorials established in the immediate postwar period and to other commemoration controversies that occurred simultaneous to the memorial

104 development of the Emsland memory culture. This will provide a necessary comparison to understand how the Emsland’s process of negotiating its Nazi past illuminates and challenges national-level narratives about German memory of the Nazi era.

105 CHAPTER FOUR

NATIONAL AND LOCAL MEMORIES COMPARED

The story of the road to memorialization in the Emsland is dominated by the presence and actions of the students and faculty of the University of Oldenburg. The subsequent organization, the “Arbeitskreis Carl von Ossietzky,” and its development into a memorial organization, the Documentation and Information Center (DIZ), helped archive evidence and establish the collection of oral histories Esterwegen Memorial builds upon today. The story of the long road to memorialization of the camps in the Emsland highlights the particular influences of the “Arbeitskreis,” the DIZ, and further local and state participation, which developed into a more dynamic public engagement with the Nazi past in the Emsland throughout the 1980s,

1990s, and 2000s. While national events influenced interest in this past, it was local developments and controversies that acted as driving forces in the creation of the DIZ house.

Additionally, the Lower Saxon parliament’s decision to fund DIZ staff along with the support of the regional government in the 1990s allowed for the organization to accomplish its work without the constant fear of insufficient funds from the organization’s member contributions.

This having been said, the move towards the creation of an actual memorial museum at a former concentration camp site in the Emsland was brought into motion by the regional government’s initiative in buying the former concentration camp grounds from the German military in the early

2000s.

In order to contextualize the Emsland developments with the rest of Lower Saxony and

West Germany, it is necessary to provide an analysis of the creation of other memorials. The first section of this chapter will focus on comparing the memorialization stages at large concentration

106 camps within Germany during the 1950s and 1960s, while the second section highlights the development of memorials throughout Lower Saxony, comparing both the creation of larger memorial sites, such as the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, and sites similar in size to the Esterwegen

Memorial. Both of these sections provide an analysis of how these memorial sites were established differently, often times within similar national narratives. Finally, the chapter concludes with a brief overview of trends in memorialization of former concentration camps in

Germany, a necessary comparison to understand how the Emslanders and other Germans have negotiated their Nazi past. While this chapter illuminates the key aspects of memorialization about the Nazi past, similar to Klaus Neumann’s work Shifting Memories, it cannot represent the entirety of West “German” and unified “German” memories, as the creation of memorials does not always provoke a critical engagement with the events they seek to commemorate.1

Memorialization in the 1940s and 1950s

The memory of the Second World War in the 1940s and 1950s in the Federal Republic of

Germany was dominated by representations of German victimhood. While many Germans and most of the West German parliament accepted that the Nazi regime persecuted millions of Jews and other victims, these groups focused publicly more on crimes against non-Jewish Germans.

The representation of German victimhood for the approximately twelve million refugees

1 The term “German” is used with caution, as it is difficult to discern a unified German memory. Memorials and the process of their creation may directly involve a variety of individuals, but that does not signify that all “Germans” actively participated in this process. Some may have viewed the process with indifference while others may have actively engaged with the developments. However, this chapter and the thesis are much less concerned with the individual, or personal reflections about the Nazi past, and much more about the public memories and attempts of memorialization. For a similar work on the subject that primarily focuses on east Lower Saxon memorials and some East German examples, see Klaus Neumann, Shifting Memories: The Nazi Past in the New Germany, (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000) 4-6.

107 expelled from Eastern Europe at the end of the war figured most prominently throughout this period. These refugee populations made up a total of sixteen percent of the West German population in 1950. In addition to the victimization of the men, women, and children who needed to adjust their new life in West Germany after the war, around three million German soldiers were held as prisoners of war by the Soviets until the 1950s, with reportedly more than a million dying before they were released.2 By no means does this imply that there was no remembrance of the Nazi crimes within Germany during this time. But instead of being part of a public debate, such as the conversation within Germany about the refugees and the POWs, specific groups of victims often created their own small, personalized memorials to commemorate their losses at former concentration camps and other types of prison camp sites.

While exceptions existed in the early Federal Republic that brought the Nazi atrocities to the forefront, such as the Nuremberg War Crimes trials, there was no critical public engagement with participation of Germans in these crimes against humanity outside of the attempts by the victims to create memorials. By the 1960s though, this changed considerably on a national level as the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt began and significant publicity was given in West Germany to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Between 1965 and 1966, the first memorial museums at former concentration camp sites were established in Dachau, Neuengamme, and Bergen-Belsen.

Yet, it was not until the 1980s and 1990s, especially due to German reunification, that these establishments hired full-time staff, incorporated an educational curriculum, and received further

2 Robert Moeller, War Stories: The Search For A Usable Past In The Federal Republic Of Germany, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) 2-4. Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Bill Niven, ed., Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006).

108 funding from their respective German states, or Länder.3 The national commemorative events in the 1980s, such as the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War and U.S.

President Ronald Reagan’s visit to the Bitburg cemetery and the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, highlight further West German engagement with its Nazi past. This time period was also clouded by controversy, as the Historikerstreit (Historians’ Debate) about the appropriate interpretation of genocide occurred in the mid-1980s demonstrates.4 To further highlight the specific trends in the development of memorial sites at larger, former concentration camp sites, this section examines two memorials, namely at Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, and traces their memorial history until the 2000s.

The Bergen-Belsen Memorial

The memorial at Bergen-Belsen developed in stages that mirrored those of other memorials across Germany, as detailed below. When it was liberated on April 15, 1945, the

British occupation forces evacuated the entire camp and burned down the barracks in an attempt to eradicate the spread of diseases. However, the British army did not burn down every corner of

3 This does not mean that the narrative of German victimhood disappeared. As Ruth Wittrich shows, this theme continued to be highlighted within German memory culture until the 1990s, when it was revived again after this as the “taboo” of remembering the Ruth Wittrich, “Taboo or Tradition: The ‘Germans as Victims’ Theme in the Federal Republic until the mid-1990s,” in Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, edited by Bill Niven, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006) 63, Ulrich Baumann’s compilation of information about these sites of memory extends well beyond Germany and into Europe. He and the other authors provide an extensive overview of the history and remembrance of each cite noted on their site. While their list is not exhaustive, some examples provided by them, especially in the case of Lower Saxony, are used in this chapter to help contextualize other memorial developments in the region. Ulrich Baumann et la., “Information Portal to European Sites of Remembrance,” Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, translated by Barbara Kurowska, last edited June 2011, http://www.memorialmuseums.org (accessed March 5, 2015).

4 Claudia Koontz, “Between Memory and Oblivion: Concentration Camps in German Memory,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, edited by John R. Gillis, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) 269.

109 the camp, but instead sought to preserve some remains of the former concentration camp. They created signs that reminded people, particularly Germans, that 10,000 unburied dead were found there upon liberation and that another 13,000 died after liberation because they were victims of the “New German Order in Europe and an example of German Kultur.”5 This type of commemoration highlights the British military’s need to provide an insight into what they found in Bergen-Belsen upon their arrival in April. The former camp inmates were removed to a nearby military training area in Bergen-Hohne, where they stayed in the guard barracks. By 1946, the

“DP camp” became an exclusively Jewish camp, with about 12,000 residing Jewish DPs. It was this group of victims that formed the Central Jewish Committee British Zone and that came together in 1946 to create a memorial for the victims of the Nazi terror in 1946 at the former concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen.6

5 A photograph of the sign can be found at the following site, http://isurvived.org/Bergen- Belsen_liberation.html (accessed March 4, 2015). Harold Marcuse, “Holocaust Memorials: The Emergence of a Genre,” American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (2010), 64. Harold Marcuse, “The Afterlife of the Camps,” in Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: New Histories, edited by Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachsmann (New York: Routledge, 2010) 197.

6 Susanne Lengner and Erika Prätsch, Gedenkstätten in Niedersachsen: Spurensuche Erinnerungen wachhalten, (Hannover: Niederächsisches Ministerium für Bundes- und Europaangelegenheiten Referat für Presse und Öftenlichtkeitsarbeit. 1993) 18. “A Place of Remembrance.” Gedenkstätte Bergen-Belsen Stiftung Niedersächsische Gedenkstätten. Accessed January 15, 2015. http://bergen-belsen.stiftung-ng.de/en/history/place-of-remembrance.html. Marcuse, “Holocaust Memorials,” 65. Marcuse, “The Afterlife of the Camps,” 196-197.

110

Figure 10. The 1946 Jewish memorial. Figure 11. 1952 Bergen-Belsen memorial. The inscription reads “Israel and the The stone obelisk, which was dedicated world shall remember / thirty thousand in 1952, stands 25 meters tall. It is Jews / exterminated in the concentration situated “in front of a 50-meter-long camp / of Bergen-Belsen / at the hands wall with inscriptions from fourteen of the murderous Nazis / Earth conceal countries; a Sinti inscription was added in not the blood / shed on thee! / First 1982.”7 anniversary of liberation / 15th of April 1946 / 114th Nissan 57051 / Central Jewish Committee / British Zone.”8

The 1946 memorial stands two-meters high and marks the words “shall remember” in red inscription. The other side of the memorial uses the same text provided in Figure 10 in Hebrew.

The Hebrew side also provides a mosaic of trees at the top of its inscription. This, along with the

7 Photo taken by author, July 2014. Marcuse, “Holocaust Memorials,” 66.

8 Photo taken by author, July 2014.

111 red lettering, according to historian Harold Marcuse, “indicates that the survivors had not yet derived a specific meaning from the experience that they wished to represent.”9 By mid-1950, the British occupation forces dissolved the DP camp and the memorial was left without the protection of the Jewish organization. However, the memorial is maintained today in almost identical condition from the day of its creation in 1946. In that same year, the British occupation tasked German POWs to create a twenty-meter obelisk, pictured in Figure 11. In April 1952, seven years after the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen memorial, West German president Theodor

Heuss officially dedicated the memorial, which served as the only national memorial to the

Holocaust until the 1968 completion of the Dachau memorial. The obelisk stands in front of a wall fifty meters long that incorporates inscriptions from fourteen of the forty countries whose citizens died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.10 These two memorials stand in contrast to the 1999 memorial, pictured below in Figure 12. Unlike the two 1946 memorials, which avoided any language that identified specific victims, this plaque specifically engages with the variety of groups targeted by the Nazis. The foundation’s decision to create a memorial that includes the commemoration of specific victim groups not only highlights the changes in the field of memorials and memorial organizations, but also shows the changes in academic scholarship, as historians continued to move away from the political history of the Nazi regime and the administrative creation of the camps and camp life and towards their cultural history,

9 Marcuse, “Holocaust Memorials,” 65.

10 Notably, it was not Konrad Adenauer that attended this dedication as he attempted to maintain a distance from such commemoration events during his time as the chancellor of West Germany. The obelisk had to be rebuilt in 1958 due to weather damage. Ibid.

112 which included establishing studies of the different types of groups targeted by the Nazis and placed in the concentration camps.11

After the DP camp was dissolved and the grounds were handed over to Lower Saxony in the 1950s, the state remodeled the grounds into a “park-like landscape,” and with the support of national funding, opened a memorial at the site in 1952. However, it was not until 1966 that a documentation house with a permanent exhibit was developed and was made available to the public. Part of the reason for the state’s decision to commission a historical study of the camp was related to the publication of the Anne Frank diaries in the first half of the 1950s and the many “pilgrimages” people took to the site of her death thereafter.12 Additionally, this development came in the wake of much more attention to the legacies of the Nazi past and failures to appropriately commemorate it due to the national attention of the Eichmann trial in

Jerusalem and the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt. However, the creation of the 1966 memorial did not create permanent positions for academic or educational staff.

11 Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachsmann, ed. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: New Histories, (New York: Routledge, 2010).

12 Marcuse, “The Afterlife of the Camps,” 196.

113

Figure 12. A 1999 plaque placed next to the obelisk shown in Figure 11. The plaque specifically commemorates the victims of the Nazis in the Bergen-Belsen camp. It notes the following groups: political opponents, Jews, Sinti and Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, victims of the destructions of justice (Opfer der Zerstörung des Rechts), and POWs. Notably, the plaque does not commemorate any victims from specific countries, aside from the inscription of the Soviet POWs, it uses the languages of “many countries” or “other countries” in the Soviet POW case. 13

13 Photo taken by author, July 2014. The placement of stones on memorials and gravestones is part of the Jewish tradition of shiva. The stone indicates to others that a person visited the site and can participate in the mitzvah tradition. The stones serve as a symbol of the deceased person lasting presence.

114 By the early 1980s, the state parliament voted to provide more funding to the site to expand the “Document Building” and create a permanent visitor center. This decision was made after the state parliament’s rejection of the creation of a memorial in the Emsland, the second largest camp system in Lower Saxony.14 However, the agreement to provide additional funding to Bergen-Belsen also anticipated the commemoration events in the mid-1980s for the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War.15 By 1990, when the expansion project was completed, the Bergen-Belsen Memorial opened a more extensive and larger “Document

Building,” which included a new exhibition on the history of the POW camp and post-1945 history of the camp. Another redesign followed 2007 further extended the history of the postwar period to a commemorative section.16 While the expansion of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial completed in 1990 highlights regional motives to improve the memorial culture in Lower Saxony whilst avoiding the creation of a new memorial in the Emsland, the 2007 renovation demonstrates both a national and regional trend. In the 2000s, memorial expansions and

“Placing the Stone,” shiva.com, LLC. www.shiva.com/learning-center/commemorative/stone/ (accessed March 10, 2015).

14 “Schweer: In Kürze Konkreters über KZ-Dokimentationszentrum.” Ems-Zeitung, January 1, 1980. In “Das Schweigen wird lauter: Vom Kampf um den Moorsoldatenfriedhof bis zur Enstehung des Dokumentationszentrums Emslandlager.” Werner Boldt and Elke Suhr ed. Pressespiegel und Dokumentation (1985) 22. Gedenkstätte Esterwegen Archive.

15 U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s visit to the Bergen-Belsen Memorial and the Historikerstreik (Historians Controversy), discussed in more detail in the previous chapter, preceded the increase in funding for the Bergen-Belsen Memorial expansions. For a detailed discussion on the political and public controversies about Reagan’s visit in 1985, also see Sasha Kanick, “The Politicization of Holocaust Memory: A Comparative Study of the use of Holocaust and World War Two Memorials by American and German Heads of State in 1985 and 2009,” master’s thesis, Washington State University, 2012.

16 Chapter 3 provides a more detailed analysis of the state parliament’s decision to fund an expansion of the Bergen-Belsen memorial and reject an Emsland memorial. “A Place of Remembrance.” Baumann, “Remembrance: The Bergen-Belsen Memorial.”

115 creations of new memorials throughout Germany became part of sort a “memory boom.”17

During the 2000s, for example, Lower Saxony, as shown in Appendix D, experienced a significant growth in memorial museums. Nearly half of the memorials listed on the official state of Lower Saxony website were developed during this time.

While the development of a memorial museum at the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp truly began to take shape in the 1980s when state funds were appropriated to support full-time staff at the memorial, it was during the same time that the Esterwegen memorial took a similar shape with the opening of the privately funded DIZ house. Although the state parliament funded the national site of commemoration at Bergen-Belsen, it was not willing to allocate funds to yet another site in the same state. Interestingly, the development of memorials at former concentration camp sites took a similar turn in other states. The next section traces the development of the memorial in Dachau, located in the southeastern state of Bavaria, to explore how the two sites relate.

The Dachau Memorial

The Dachau Memorial was established in many ways similarly to the Bergen-Belsen

Memorial. However, two important exceptions differentiate their developments. First, the former

17 While historian Jay Winter often refers to a twentieth century “memory boom,” which he defines as the “efflorescence of interest in the subject of memory inside the academy and beyond,” this thesis maintains that a “memory boom” specifically occurred in Germany in the 2000s in concentration camp memorials as shown particularly in the case of Lower Saxony in Appendix D. However, this appendix only lists examples in Lower Saxony and ignores memorial developments of former concentration camp sites throughout the other German states and does not include the development of other Holocaust and World War II memorials. Therefore, while the appendix only provides a glimpse into the memorial developments throughout Germany, it does show that considerable developments occurred in the 2000s and should, therefore, be classified as part of a “memory boom.” Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century, (New Haven: Yale University, 2006) 1-13.

116 site of the Dachau Memorial was used by the state of Bavaria as a residential settlement for refugees from former East German territories in the post-1945 period. Secondly, and related to the first exception, the role of former prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp was much more significant, as they lobbied heavily to attempt to utilize more and more of the former concentration camp as a memorial space. Before the site was given to the Bavarian government, the United States army used the concentration camp and SS camps to intern around 30,000 officers in the Nazi party and German military. The site was even used to house a variety of personnel trials. However, by 1948, with the intensifying Cold War conflict between the United

States and the Soviet Union, the United States quickly ended its “denazification” program in order to improve relationships with West Germans to gain their support. The property of the former concentration camp site at Dachau was transferred to the Bavarian state government quickly thereafter.18

Whilst initial decisions targeted the grounds for use as a “correctional institution,” the

Bavarian government decided instead that the site should serve as a residential area for the ethnic

German refugees, some of whom fled the Soviet occupation, others who were expelled from eastern territories. This group of these ethnic Germans was primarily comprised of 2,000 ethnic

Germans from Czechoslovakia and inhabited the Dachau site, referred to as Dachau-East, until

1964, when attempts to memorialize the site came into conflict with Bavarian parliament policies of using it as a refugee settlement. The acceptance of this shift of usage was primarily prompted by the increasing numbers of visitors to the part of the site that housed a variety of memorials

18 Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 3.

117 placed there in the later 1940s and early 1950s by the victims of the camps. By 1962, the annual review of visitors to the site showed that visitor numbers had tripled from 100,000 to more than

300,000 visitors. The movement to transform the areas used by the refugees to a memorial site was completed by 1965. However, only a few icons remained from the initial concentration camp, including a guard tower, the gatehouse, the crematorium, a service building, and two reconstructed barracks. The new memorial, designed by former inmates under supervision of the

Bavarian government, received its final touches with the addition of two memorials, a Protestant chapel and a separate Jewish memorial building. Until the late 1990s, the memorial changed very little outside the demographic profile of the visitors, which tripled again to a million visitors in the early 1970s and included more school groups and generations born after the end of the war.19

In the late 1990s, Dachau underwent a restoration period and the site was remodeled to take visitors through the actual routes that victims walked through the gates at Dachau.20 The restoration reflected the change in how the concentration camp site of Dachau during the Nazi period was portrayed to visitors in order to represent the victims and their journey accurately.

While Dachau underwent a renovation in the late 1990s that reflected the memory shifts in representation of the Nazi period to include the victims and exclude the idea of German victimhood, its remodeling project came almost ten years after remodeling projects occurred at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial. However, the memorial culture of each of the German states that the memorials are located within must first be considered. First, Lower Saxony historically has

19 Ibid., 4.

20 Ibid., 334. Marcuse’s work was published the same year, so unfortunately he was unable to bring this part into his conclusion.

118 been politically dominated by the SPD while the state of Bavaria, the location of the Dachau

Memorial, has been governed by the CSU, the Bavarian affiliate of the CDU. As shown in the previous chapter, the CDU nationally opposed the integration of a critical memorial culture of the Nazi past in Germany on all levels of government unlike the SPD. This is an important regional difference that highlights how their political affiliations affect memorial culture regionally.

Another important note on Dachau and Bergen-Belsen is that they are represented as sites of Holocaust remembrance. Particularly interesting, in the case of Dachau is its memorial statue that remembers the victims of the death marches.21 Though the Esterwegen Memorial is not a site of the Holocaust, it has been associated with Holocaust by organizations such as Yad Vashem and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum because of its integral role in the Nazi terror system.

While the Dachau Memorial and the Bergen-Belsen Memorial houses a variety of representations of victims, such as Jews, homosexuals, and a variety of religious and political prisoners, its camps were initially deemed sites of the Holocaust because both camps received

Jews from the death marches at the end of the war and, therefore, the sites were participants in the atrocities of the Holocaust. The analysis of these two national sites shows the involvement of the state and national politics in the development of memorials at these sites. In order to more fully explore how the national sites of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau are different from the smaller memorial sites, the next section of this essay examines a variety of smaller memorials in Lower

Saxony.

21 “KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau,” Stiftung der Bayerische Gedenksätten, accessed April 27, 2014, http://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/

119 Other Memorial Projects in Lower Saxony

While the memorialization of concentration camps at Dachau and Bergen-Belsen shows the development of memorials beginning in the 1960s, the memorialization of small concentration camps did not occur in many cases until the late 1980s to the 2000s. Even though this section does not examine these memorials in as much detail as the Esterwegen example, a brief overview of some instances in Lower Saxony shows that the roads to memorialization for these smaller sites were often times very similar. Of the memorials examined in this chapter and other smaller ones in Lower Saxony, the Esterwegen Memorial was one of the earliest attempts to commemorate the camp system in Lower Saxony next to the Bergen-Belsen memorial.22 Like in Esterwegen, local and regional groups initiated these memorials in the 1990s and 2000s to address the much-neglected topic of the terrors of the Nazi regime on a local level. While the

1980s are representative of the creation of small-scale memorials across the region, the 1990s highlight an attempt to articulate a national memorial site concept. This led to a major review of

German sites of memory and increased funding at the state level, as exemplified by the actions of the state of Lower Saxony.23 In the 1990s, the German focus on creating a national memorial was particularly related to the unification of the two Germany’s. This section will review three different Lower Saxon developments that include memorials in the towns of Salzgitter-Drütte,

Sandbostel, and Moringen in order to provide a comparison to smaller memorial organizations that developed largely outside of national narratives and national assistance.

22 For dates of the establishment of other memorials in Lower Saxony, see Appendix D. The table provides information about the memorial sites, the dates the memorials were established, and what they directly sought to commemorate.

23 Baumann, “Information Portal to European Sites of Remembrance.”

120 Memorials in Lower Saxony

Sandbostel

Bergen-Belsen Esterwegen

Salzgitter- Drütte

Moringen

Figure 13. Memorials in Lower Saxony.24

Memorial and Documentation Center Salzgitter-Drütte

The concentration camp Drütte was one of the first satellite camps for the Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg in 1942. The city of Salzgitter was founded during the same year to launch a steel company under the “Herman Göring Reichswerke” in order to supplement the German war needs. The camp’s at 3,000 Soviet, Polish, and French prisoners in the

24 This map shows the locations of the memorials discussed in this chapter, not including the Dachau Memorial as it is located in the most south eastern state in Germany called Bavaria. The author edited the image to show the memorials in Lower Saxony discussed in this chapter. “Keyword Picture,” Keyword Picture, http://www.keywordpicture.com/keyword/lower%20saxony%20map/ (accessed on March 28, 2015).

121 concentration camp lacked adequate accommodations, hygienic materials, and food, and were required to participate in difficult and often dangerous work. While the SS guards reported around 680 deaths during the time the camp was used, this does not represent an accurate figure since sick prisoners and those unable to work were sent to other concentration camps. The prisoners were evacuated from the camp on April 7 to 8, 1945. On their way to Bergen-Belsen, an Allied air attack killed many of the prisoners on the trains. However, others were able to flee the SS guards under cover of the chaos ensuing the attack. Germans in the nearby town of Celle participated in a “Hasenjagt” (hare-hunt) to find the prisoners, killing many who were able to flee the convoy. The survivors of this hunt were forced to participate in the death marches to continue their way to the Bergen-Belsen camp.25

Salzgitter is, therefore, a direct product of the Nazi period. When the city celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 1982, the celebration sparked a dialogue in the region about its history during the Nazi regime. During the same year, Gerd Wysoki published a book on prisoners in wartime production in the Third Reich in the Salzgitter- Drütte concentration camp (Häftlinge in der Kriegsproduktion des Dritten Reiches). By the following year, individuals from Salzgitter created the “Arbeitskreis Stadtgeschichte e.V.” (Taskforce for City History). This group evolved into the “Drütte Documentation Center Committee” by 1985 to work towards erecting a memorial at the steel works factory. Attempts to create a memorial, however, were unsuccessful as the “Peine-Salzgitter AG,” that took over the steel works company, opposed such plans.26

However, the work council (Betriebsrat) of the company established the first memorial

25 Lengner and Prätsch, Gedenkstätten in Niedersachsen, 29-30.

26 Ibid., 31. “AG” stands for Aktiengesellschaft, which refers to a company with shares.

122 celebration on April 11, 1985. The logs of the work council meetings show that the workers wanted a memorial in spite of the resistance of the management. This annual celebration is continues until today.27

By 1992, an agreement was made with the management board, the work council, and the memorial organization that gave the Drütte Documentation Center Committee one of the former barracks for the concentration camp prisoners to use as a memorial center. On April 11, 1994, the “Drütte Concentration Camp Memorial Site and Documentation Centre” officially opened its doors to the public that provides a permanent exhibition of the Drütte concentration camp.28 It is unclear where this organization received its funding, yet the Arbeitskreis provided the organization with ABM-Kräfte, which are positions supplemented through state funds, since the

1990s. Since 1994 the organization was able to expand its memorial to include additional sections of the former concentration camp, and is currently undergoing a reevaluation of its exhibit.29

Sandbostel

In September 1939, a POW camp was created near Sandbostel, a small village east of the

Emsland. These camps near Sandbostel housed around ten thousand POWs, but over the time of its existence around one million POWs from around forty different nations cycled through the

27 “Geschichte: Kampf um die Gedenkstätte,” Gedenk- und Dokumentationsstätte KZ Drütte. http://www.gedenkstaette-salzgitter.de/gedenkstatte/anmeldung/ (accessed March 10, 2015).

28 Ibid. For information about this site in English, see Baumann, “Remembrance: Drütte Concentration Camp Memorial Site and Documentation Center.”

29 Elke Zacharias, “10 Jahre Gedenkstätte – Idee und Realisierung.” PDF in Gedenk- und Dokumentationsstätte KZ Drütte. http://www.gedenkstaette-salzgitter.de/gedenkstatte/anmeldung/ (accessed March 10, 2015).

123 camps. The initial prisoners included Polish soldiers and British sailors. By 1941, large numbers of French and Soviet soldiers entered the camps at Sandbostel. By early 1945, the Sandbostel camps were evacuated and prisoners were sent to other concentration camps. However, the camps were then filled with prisoners from other Neuengamme satellite camps. On April 29,

1945, the British army liberated the 10,000 prisoners held at the Sandbostel concentration camp.

Shortly after liberation 3000 died due to starvation, disease, and previous injuries. The British occupation forces ordered Germans from the surrounding areas to help bury the dead and take care of the remaining sick former prisoners. Similar to the Bergen-Belsen camp, the British troops burnt down several, but not all barracks due to the fear of the spread of diseases.30

The British occupation forces interned SS men, Nazi party members, and former concentration camp guards at the Sandbostel camp until 1948. By 1952, after years of sporadic uses of the camp as a satellite for another prison in Celle, the former grounds served as “a reception camp for adolescent refugees from the GDR.”31 When this was no longer a necessity for the Lower Saxon authorities, the Sandbostel camp area was transferred to the German military, the Bundeswehr, until 1974. During this time former concentration camp grounds were privatized and developed as an industrial area.32 However, unlike the Drütte and Esterwegen example, no local initiatives succeeded in the late 1970s or 1980s even though there were several calls for the creation of a memorial, especially after the publication of Stalag X B Sandbostel by

30 Lengner and Prätsch, Gedenkstätten in Niedersachsen, 9-10.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid. Baumann, “Nachnutzung,” Gedenkstätte und Stiftung Lager Sandbostel. http://www.stiftung-lager-sandbostel.de/sls/nachnutzung.html (accessed March 10, 2015). “Documentation and Memorial Site Sandbostel: Remembrance.”

124 Klaus Volland and Werner Borgsen.33 It was not until the 1992 that a memorial foundation was founded. It coincided with the placement of the remaining barracks at Sandbostel under a landmark protection by Lower Saxony. However, the “Documentation and Memorial Site

Sandbostel” association did not open a documentation center at the Sandbostel site. Initially, the organization opened a center in the nearby larger city of Bremervörde. Yet, by July 1, 2007, the association had succeeded in establishing a documentation center and memorial on the former camp premises.34

Moringen

The concentration camp at Moringen, located in the southeastern part of Lower Saxony was established in April 1933. It was the first concentration camp in the state of Prussia, created shortly before the Esterwegen concentration camp. Most prisoners were political opponents of the Nazi regime and already by June 1933 the camp evolved into a concentration camp exclusively for women. With the creation of a new women’s camp in 1938 in another region in

Prussia (Lichtenburg), the Moringen camp was dissolved. However, from 1940 until the end of the war, the camp was reopened and housed adolescent boys and young men, ages ten to twenty- five. After the end of the war, the camp buildings were repurposed as a regional hospital, mainly housing elderly asylum-seekers and alcoholics. After 1950, the hospital became the “Lower

Saxon Provincial Protectory at Moringen” and was primarily used as a psychiatric clinic.35

33 Klaus Volland and Werner Borgsen, Stalag X B Sandbostel: Zur Geschichte eines Kriegsgefangenen- und KZ-Auffanglagers in Norddeutschland 1939-1945, (Bremen: Edition Temmen, 1991).

34 Baumann, “Documentation and Memorial Site Sandbostel: Remembrance.”

35 Lengner and Prätsch, Gedenkstätten in Niedersachsen, 37. Baumann, “Remembrance: Moringen Concentration Camp Memorial.”

125 There were no attempts to critically engage with the Moringen camp until the 1980s, much like Drütte and Sandbostel. in 1980 the Evangelical Church first placed a memorial stone commemorating the victims of the camp at the local cemetery in 1980. However, by 1986, a memorial plaque was placed at the hospital entrance to remember the camp and its former victims. Additionally, in 1988, the Evangelical Church in Moringen established a new cemetery section for the fifty-eight adolescent victims of the youth concentration camp. The actions by the church are likely the result of a group of congregation members.36 Even though this commitment might reflect other Evangelical church engagements with the commemoration of the Nazi past in

Germany, it seems that such specific action was due to the involvement of dedicated individuals.

In 1989, residents from Moringen and former prisoners of the camps, who had been meeting regularly since 1983, created an association called the “Camp Community and Moringen

Concentration Camp Memorial” association, which opened a memorial in 1993 with the help of the city of Moringen, the regional government of Northeim, and the state of Lower Saxony at the town’s former gatehouse.37

While many similarities between the development of memorials at Moringen, Sandbostel, and Drütte exist, none of them were able to create a memorial organization until the 1980s.

Esterwegen, on the other hand, had already created an Arbeitskreis by 1979. This was due to the attention brought to the Emslanders and Oldenburgers over the naming of the university in

Oldenburg. The DIZ organization was also able to open a memorial to commemorate and

36 A more detailed account of the creation of this development at the cemetery could not be found.

37 Ibid., 39.

126 educate visitors about the camps by 1985. The former concentration camps discussed above did not have such a memorials until the 1990s. However, many of the locations of the former concentration camps were reutilized for other West German national or regional needs. This was not the case for Bergen-Belsen. It was, instead, immediately used as a site of remembrance in some capacity and then expanded in the 1960s, much like the Dachau example. While the former concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen and Dachau were commemorated at earlier stages, likely because of the size of the camps during the Nazi period and because of their postwar national and international notoriety, the states, especially Lower Saxony, saw that the use of big camps as memorials “absolved” regional authorities, and perhaps residents, of responsibility to engage critically with their Nazi past for decades.

While the first section of this chapter focused on comparing the memorialization of large concentration camps within Germany, such as Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, the second section of the chapter briefly highlighted three memorials in Lower Saxony. Even though the two larger concentration camp site memorials were developed much earlier than the smaller ones (about a twenty-year time difference exists), both sites did not establish a more extensive memorial museum and educational staff until the 1980s when the smaller memorials started to form memorial organizations and build memorials. One difficulty that the Bergen-Belsen and Dachau memorial did not face was access to the former concentration camp sites for memorials. Two sites, Esterwegen and Sandbostel were utilized by the German military. Drütte and Sandbostel were privatized for industrial development. The issue of gaining access for memorial sites was, however, much more difficult for the Emsland memorial organization. It was not until 2001 that

127 the organization was able to access the site, and then took another ten years for a memorial museum to be opened at the site. Therefore, while these memorials all follow the national narrative of memorial work in Germany, the smaller organizations, outside of Esterwegen, developed rather belatedly and only progressively expanded in the 1990s. Additionally, the smaller memorials discussed above were driven by grassroots interests and activism for commemoration activities of the Nazi past which likely led to their delayed development.

However, the national trends in the late 1980s and 1990s, especially with German reunification, proved to be a crucial turning point for commemoration of small memorial organizations. While the similarities between the smaller memorials of former concentration camps highlights the difficult and often long process of creating memorials, their existence was secured by the national trends to support such projects commemorating the Nazi period in Germany. These same trends also influenced the further expansion and development of larger memorials. Thus, the small and large memorials experienced very different memorial paths that were both influenced by the immense increase in support of memorial culture at the end of the twentieth century in Germany.

128 CONCLUSION

Memory studies have heavily focused on tracing the “big picture” development of how collective memory has evolved when studying German memory of World War II and the legacies of its atrocities. While such studies are integral to an initial understanding of the larger developments in Germany, it is necessary to show how smaller sites of memory developed.

Some historians have analyzed the development of larger sites of memory, but only very few of these smaller sites have actually been historically studied. This thesis has provided further historical analysis of an important regional memorial site and its development in postwar West

Germany. As few efforts exist that track the development of this specific memorial site or other similar ones, this study represents a significant addition to the initial analyses of how smaller memorialization processes work at the regional and local level compared to larger projects.

Because it is necessary to place the concentration camp at Esterwegen within the larger history of the former camps of the Nazi regime, the first chapter focused on examining the development and structure of the camps. The camps’ in the Emsland, including the Esterwegen concentration camp, primarily role was to provide labor for the agricultural and economic development for region. Therefore, the first chapter established the economic, social, and political profile of the Emsland, paying particular attention to the region’s fundamental lack of economic and agricultural development. Not only did this supply the reason for the placement of camps in the region, the potential for war made Nazi leaders very intent on creating a Germany that would be self-sufficient economically, a fear driven by the failures of the German government during the First World War. The economic and agricultural development of the

Emsland became a large concern for the West German government after the fall of the Nazi

129 regime in the postwar period. The proposal to use Marshall Plan funds to substantially improve the regional economy succeeded, and for the first time Emslanders actually saw how government support could improve their region. It is because of the successes of the West German government that the peoples in the Emsland region saw their economic development through the eyes of the “Economic Miracle” rather than note any connections to previous developments made by the prisoners of the Nazi terror system. Their complicity within that process was entirely dismissed until individual attempts in the 1960s and 1970s sought to establish an official memory within the region of it.

However, none of these were successful in establishing a memorial of substantial character. While national developments in the 1960s and especially in the 1970s moved towards creating an official collective memory of the Nazi past in Germany, the Emsland did not see much development. By the late 1970s and 1980s, a group from the nearby city of Oldenburg was able to establish an organization supported by former victims of the camps in the Emsland. It was this organization, examined in Chapter 3, which substantially changed the playing field of memory work in the Emsland. Yet, it must also be noted that the government of the newly formed district of the Emsland also attempted to create more critical engagement with the Nazi past through the commissioning of a study on the Emsland camps. Their collaborative efforts in the late 1980s and 1990s increased the financial support of the memorial museum created by the

DIZ organization. Their continued relationship allowed them to come together to develop a memorial by the late 2000s that was opened in 2011.

The final chapter of this thesis connects the developments within the Emsland to other memorial in Lower Saxony and at two memorials that commemorated larger, former

130 concentration camp. The analysis of these types of memorials showed that the involvement of local groups played a much larger part in the development of them as in the cases of Bergen-

Belsen and Dachau. Even though these differences persist, it seems that the culture of memory in the Emsland followed a very similar broad trend as the rest of West German memorial foundations commemorating the Nazi past at former concentration camp sites. Importantly, the developments of memorials at Dachau and Bergen-Belsen that occurred in the mid-1960s are often overvalued. As the analysis in Chapter 4 showed, both memorials received limited funding and really only developed with full-time education staff and researchers in the 1980s when the smaller memorials were being developed often times independent from state support until the

1990s.

While this thesis extensively analyzed the development of a memorial in the Emsland, additional studies may further highlight the developments of memorials at the other former concentration camp sites in Lower Saxony discussed above and in Appendix D. Additionally, a further study of how memorials of smaller concentration camp sites developed in other German states might show differences among them. Such a study would require the need for extensive travel throughout Germany at different memorials and archives that were not possible logistically for this thesis. Historians Klaus Neumann and Harold Marcuse have offered a useful start for more in-depth analyses of memorials in West Germany. However, further research might highlight differences that are not visible in the specific scope of their work. Finally, another direction the analysis of local memorials of former concentration camp sites could take includes a study of non-German memorial sites. While the historian Jay Winter explored such an examination of memorials in his own work as described in the Introduction, no such work has

131 been explored for the development of memorials at former concentration camp sites across

Europe.

This study of the Esterwegen Memorial highlights how an analysis of local involvement in the process of commemorating the Nazi past in Germany cannot be restricted to an analysis of larger former concentration camp sites. These sites typically do not allow for much local inclusion as the national and state governments are integral in their developments. The development of the Esterwegen Memorial was a complex and multi-faceted process. The involvement of student groups, academics, and even local journalists, as the Emsland case highlights, was not always accepted within the Emsland. The inspiration for local and popular support to reclaim the memory of their region’s Nazi past developed in the wake of the

Auschwitz trials in Germany and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. However, it was the failure to name the nearby university in Oldenburg in the 1970s after a former concentration camp inmate in the Emsland that spurred regional memorial developments.

The creation of the DIZ organization and its efforts took nearly ten years to be accepted and supported by the regional and state governments. Additionally, the pattern of local actions to develop memorial organizations, which took in many cases until the 1990s and 2000s to receive state or national funding, can be seen throughout the rest of Lower Saxony. Yet, in the case of the Emsland, the regional government was involved and supportive of memorial developments while state and national efforts in the 1970s and 1980s focused on supporting memorial efforts at larger former concentration camp sites. The efforts to secure the Esterwegen site to create a permanent memorial at a former concentration camp site were not secured for another ten years, and it was the regional government of the Emsland that finalized this purchase. Finally, through

132 the collaborative efforts of the DIZ and the district of Emsland, a memorial opened its doors by

2011, another ten years later. The seemingly slow process of creating memorials at smaller former concentration camp sites, such as the Esterwegen camp, were only through the united efforts of the DIZ, representing popular support for memorializing the legacy of the camps, and the regional government of the Emsland. This highlights in particular how even though there were increased efforts to commemorate the Nazi period in Germany starting in the 1980s at local levels, genuine improvement and support by state governments at all levels took much longer to secure.

Today’s memorial at Esterwegen has a similar design as the Bergen-Belsen Memorial.

While the two memorials used the same architect, who created a space that utilizes the starkness of concrete floors and walls to clearly highlight information about the camps, the Esterwegen

Memorial incorporates the postwar history of the former concentration camp site into its memorial design, such as the incorporation of the characteristic Bundeswehr building. Because the 2007 remodeling of Bergen-Belsen Memorial document building led to the construction of a new structure, this type of postwar history is not present at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial. The example of the memorial design of these two sites portrays not only the degree of connection between national and regional memories, but also provides an insight into the autonomy and unique characteristics that influenced the creation of the memorial site at Esterwegen. Therefore, the designs of memorials emphasize differences among memorials of smaller and larger former concentration camp sites.

The creation of the Esterwegen Memorial expands the trend of German engagement with its Nazi past in an era of increasing German power within the European Union. Questions are

133 often raised within European media about continued and increasing German dominance in the

European Union. These questions often address a concern for the return of German aggression making particular connections to the Nazi regime, its terror system, and the Holocaust. These concerns might drive the creation of further memorials within Germany and place these sites at the center of a defense against such accusations, highlighting a particular political use of memory within Germany for an international purpose.

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Borchers, Jürgen. Die Gründung des Landes Niedersachsen. Hannover: Niedersächsische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1986. Accessed January 24, 2015. http://nibis.ni.schule.de/nli1/rechtsx/nlpb/.

142 “Geschichte.” Euregio. Accessed April 14, 2015. http://www.euregio.eu/de/%C3%BCber- euregio/geschichte

Holocaust Encyclopedia. “Night and Fog Decree.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. June 20, 2014. Accessed January 23, 2015. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007465.

“Placing the Stone.” shiva.com, LLC. Accessed March 10, 2015. www.shiva.com/learning- center/commemorative/stone/

Sheehan, James J. Encyclopedia Britannica. “Germany: Security.” Online edition. Last updated January 21, 2014. Accessed April 27, 2014. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic / 231186/Germany/58050/Security#ref296921

Schubert, Ernst. “Von der Weimar Republik zur Gegenwart,” In Ordnungen im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit. Edited by Peter Aufgebauer et. la. Hannover: Verlag Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2006. Accessed January 17, 2015. http://www.niedersachsen.de/portal/live.php? navigation_id=6989&article_id=19815&_ psmand=1000.

143 APPENDIX A: DAS MOORSOLDATEN LIED

The Moorsoldaten Lied, or the Peat Bog Soldier song, presented below is the original version of the song. Post-1945 uses of the song further modified the text.1

Die Moorsoldaten Peat Bog Soldiers

Wohin auch das Auge blicket. Far and wide as the eye can wander, Moor und Heide nur ringsum. Heath and bog are everywhere. Vogelsang uns nicht erquicket. Not a bird sings out to cheer us. Eichen stehen kahl und krumm. Oaks are standing gaunt and bare.

Wir sind die Moorsoldaten We are the peat bog soldiers, und ziehen mit dem Spaten ins Moor. Marching with our spades to the moor. Wir sind die Moorsoldaten We are the peat bog soldiers, und ziehen mit dem Spaten ins Moor. Marching with our spades to the moor.

Auf und nieder geh´n die Posten, Up and down the guards are marching, keiner, keiner kann hindurch. No one, no one can get through. Flucht wird nur das Leben kosten, Flight would mean a sure death facing, vierfach ist umzäunt die Burg. Guns and barbed wire block our view.

Wir sind die Moorsoldaten We are the peat bog soldiers, und ziehen mit dem Spaten ins Moor. Marching with our spades to the moor. Wir sind die Moorsoldaten We are the peat bog soldiers, und ziehen mit dem Spaten ins Moor. Marching with our spades to the moor.

Doch für uns gibt es kein Klagen, One day we shall rise rejoicing. ewig kann nicht Winter sein, Winter will in time be past. einmal werden froh wir sagen: One day we shall rise rejoicing. Heimat du bist wieder mein. Homeland, dear, you're mine at last.

Dann zieh´n die Moorsoldaten No more the peat bog soldiers nicht mehr mit dem Spaten ins Moor. Will march with our spades to the moor Dann zieh´n die Moorsoldaten No more the peat bog soldiers nicht mehr mit dem Spaten ins Moor Will march with our spades to the moor

1 Das Moorsoldaten Lied translates to the “Peat Boag Soldier Song.” Wolfgang Langhoff, Die Moorsoldaten. 13 Monate Konzentrationslager. Unpolitischer Tatsachenbericht, (Stuttgart: Verlag Neuer Weg, 1995). “Peat Boag Soldiers,” last edited July 26 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peat_Bog_Soldiers#cite_note-5 (accessed November 15, 2014).

144 APPENDIX B: THE REGIONAL ADMINISTRATIVE GOVERNMENTS (KREISE) IN LOWER SAXONY IN 1932

Figure 14. The regional administrative governments (Kreise) in Lower Saxony in 1932. 2

2 Noakes, The Nazi Party in Lower Saxony, 275.

145 APPENDIX C: ALLOCATION OF SEATS

IN THE LOWER SAXON STATE PARLIAMENT SINCE 1947

Total Seats after the State Total Party Parliament Elections Seats CDU SPD FDP GRÜNE Others3 1947 149 57 65 13 0 14 1951 158 35 64 12 0 47 1955 159 43 59 12 0 45 1959 157 51 65 8 0 33 1963 149 62 73 14 0 0 1967 149 63 66 10 0 10 1970 149 74 75 0 0 0 1974 155 77 67 11 0 0 1978 155 83 72 0 0 0 1982 171 87 63 10 11 0 1986 155 69 66 9 11 0 1990 155 67 71 9 8 0 1994 161 67 81 0 13 0 1998 157 62 83 0 12 0 2003 183 91 63 15 14 0 2008 152 68 48 13 12 11

Table 1. The Allocation of Seats in the Lower Saxon State Parliament Since 1947.4

3 Others: 1947: KPD 8, Z 6 1951: BHE 21, SRP 16, Z 4, DRP 3, KPD 2, DSP 1 1955: DP (pol.) 19, BHE 17, DRP 6, KPD 2, Z 1 1959: DP 20, BHE 13 1967: NPD 10 2008: LINKE 11

4 “Sitzverteilung im Niedersächsischen Landtag ab 1947,” Landesbetrieb für Statistik und Kommunikationstechnologie, 2008, (accessed, January 15, 2015), http://www.nls.niedersachsen.de/Tabellen/Wahlen/Sitzeab47.html

146 APPENDIX D: MEMORIALS IN LOWER SAXONY

This appendix’s purpose is to clarify the memorial sites that exist in Lower Saxony, Germany, and to expand on the purpose of the memorial sites. The official state website notes that the work of creating memorial sites is not merely a state’s responsibility, but that it is rather a “zivilgesellschaftlicher Auftrag,” or responsibility for civil society.5

Name of Memorial Translation of Year Type of Memorial Name Established Commemoration Gedenkstätte Ahlem der Memorial of the 1987 Concentration camps at Region Hannover Ahlem in the region of site and in region Hannover Gedenkstätte Bergen- Memorial Bergen- 1952 Concentration Camp Belsen Belsen and DP-camp at site Gedenkstätte KZ- Memorial of the sub- 2000 Concentration camps at Außenlager Schillstraße Concentration Camp site and in region Braunschweig at the Schillstraße Braunschweig KZ-Gedenkstätte im Concentration Camp 1989 Concentration camps at Torhaus Moringen Memorial at the Gate site building Moringen Gedenkstätten Memorial 1998 – Concentration camps at Augustaschacht und Augustaschaft and Augustaschacht; site and crimes by the Gestapokeller Osnabrück Gestapo basement in 2001 - Gestapo Osnabrück Gestapokeller Dokumentations- und Documentation and 1984 Concentration camps Informationszentrum Information Center of in region (DIZ) Emslandlager, the camps in the Papenburg Emsland in Papenburg Gedenkstätte Esterwegen Memorial at 2011 Concentration, justice Esterwegen department, and POW camps at site and in region Gedenkstätte Salzgitter- Memorial at Salz- 1994 Concentration camps at Drütte Gitter Drütte site and in region

5 This appendix only reviews the memorial sites listed on the state of Lower Saxony’s official website. A brief overview is provided by on this part of the website, which provides additional links to each memorial webpage. The translations provided are the authors. Portal Niedersachsen, “Gedenkstätte,” (accessed March 28, 2014). http://www.niedersachsen.de/land_leute/geschichte/gedenkstaetten/ 19981.html

147 APPENDIX D: MEMORIALS IN LOWER SAXONY (CONTINUED)

Dokumentations- und Documentation and 2007 Concentration camps at Gedenkstätte Sandbostel Memorial at site Sandbostel Stiftung Lager Foundation of the 2004 POW camp at site Sandbostel camp at Sanbostel

Bildungs- und Education and 1992 Victims of euthanasia Gedenkstätte "Opfer der Memorial of the programs NS-Psychiatrie" in Victims of the Nazi Lüneberg psychiatry in Lüneberg Gedenkkreis Wehnen e. Memorial Circle at 2004 Victims of euthanasia V. Wehnen programs Geschichtslehrpfad Historical didactic 1999 Concentration camps at Lagerstraße/U-Boot- exhibition at the site Bunker Valentin Lagerstraße/U-Boat Bunker at Valentin

Dokumentations- und Documentation and 2004 Concentration camp at Lernort Baracke Education Center at site Wilhelmine the Wilhelmine Barracks Gedenkstätte für die Memorial for the 1990 Victims of Justice Opfer victims of the Nazi system in the prison nationalsozialistischer Justice system in the Justiz in der JVA6 prison at Wolfenbüttel Wolfenbüttel

Table 2. Memorials in Lower Saxony. This list of memorials only incorporates memorials commemorate the Nazi regime and its terror system.

6 JVA is an acronym for Justizvollzugsanstalt, which translates as “penal institution” or “prison.”

148