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)