The concentration camp at Neuengamme is just a few kilometers outside of Hamburg. In fact, it came into existence in 1939 as a result of a mutual agreement between the city of Hamburg and the Nazis. The city was in the middle of a building boom and needed lots and lots of bricks. The Nazis, meanwhile, wanted a place to put the people it deemed incompatible with society. The city owned some land nearby where there were large amounts of clay deposits, so it gave the land to the Nazis to build its camp, which in return gave the city bricks the camp's prisoners produced.
Neuengamme was a later camp than Dachau, which began in the early 1930s as a place for Hitler to isolate his political adversaries. Most of the Dachau prisoners initially were therefore German. By contrast, Neuengamme contained people pulled from society all over Europe. It also housed POWs from the Soviet front. Although most prisoners were not brought there for summary execution, as many were in Auschwitz, most were often summarily worked to death. Also, there was at least one instance when Soviet POWs were locked in a building and gassed with Xyclon B. Survivors from Neuengamme who were there at the time remember this occasion vividly. They'd all been assembled in the adjacent main square for roll call and could hear the screams of the dying soldiers.
But it was mostly a work camp, Neuengamme, with two main endeavors: a small munitions factory, and the production of bricks. One of the better jobs prisoners could have was in the munitions factory – it was indoor and the work was seated. However, if there was the least suspicion of slow or bad work, or sabotage, the omnipresent SS guards would kill the prisoner.
The production of bricks involved digging up the clay, hauling it to the factory where it was pressed into moulds, cut, and baked, and then loaded onto barges for shipment to Hamburg. Again, a "good" job to have was one on the inside of the brick factory, although the people who had to remove the bricks from the ovens did so without any protection. The outside jobs were the hardest: exposed and physically grueling. With poor clothing, meager rations, and forced effort at gunpoint, prisoners rapidly wasted away. In the summer they might last 2-3 months. In the winter, 2-3 weeks. The barracks were also overcrowded and unhygienic, with little ability to wash. Disease also claimed many lives, either directly or when the Nazis euthenized ill and therefore unproductive prisoners.
Prisoners also built many parts of the camp, including several that still remain today like the brick factory and the canal. Hamburg sits on the Elbe, which naturally flows about 600 meters from the camp. The Nazis decided it would be great to float the bricks to Hamburg, so they made the prisoners dig a canal connecting the factory to the river. A huge undertaking, requiring the manual digging through clay, it claimed many more lives than the SS's photos would suggest. Most of the pictures from the camp at that time show able-bodied men working without any coercion – a far from accurate representation.
Neuengamme also differs from Dachau in another way: Dachau was obscured from easy view by a large wall, whereas Neuengamme was merely separated from the surrounding area by a fence. Although the area is fairly rural, people could easily see what was going on. Or at least smell the stench from the crematorium eventually built. Or see the prisoners who were lead out on urban details, like ordinance recovery after the bombs started falling on the city. The prisoners would be made to dig through the rubble and disarm any unexploded bombs. An advantage to the job was that prisoners could sometimes scavenge food, but it was also dangerous. And everyone in the city could see these haggard people pass through the city, sometimes even riding the streetcars. Though people who lived through that time claim they didn't know what was going on, it's a specious claim.
After the camp was liberated by the British they used it temporarily as a facility to house displaced persons. In 1948 the then-mayor of Hamburg razed the wooden barracks and build a prison where they'd stood. In retrospect it looks like an incredibly insensitive act, though at the time it may have seemed more reasonable. The mayor himself, a Social Democrat, had fled the Nazi state. His thinking in building the camp seemed to be based on the impulse to remove reminders of this dark period in order to be able to move on.
However the survivors couldn't forget and didn't want others to either. And so began a decades-long process of trying to preserve the camp and its dark memories. It was a hard task. The Cold War had set in, and Germany was preoccupied and divided by that. Meanwhile, in the 1970s another prison was built on the grounds, this time over the clay pits. But finally in 2003 the camp became a monument. The staff tore down the first prison – which itself had been made by bricks produced in the camp – and turned some of the original brick buildings into museums. They also excavated the foundation of the building were the Soviet POWs had been killed. The staff decided not to rebuild the wood barracks, fearing that whatever they built would be far too sterile, and instead outlined the foundations where they once stood with those bricks from the dismantled prison. The staff also decided not to restore the camp leader's house.
A quaint wooden house adjacent to the grounds, Max Pauli, the prison commander, lived there with his wife and 5 children (or at least 4 of them – the wife died delivering the 5th, at which point her sister moved in). After the war he was tried and executed. The children went to live in other parts of Germany, changed their names, and have no contact with the museum staff. The house, however, remained occupied by whomever was heading the post-war prison. One of these people had a questionable sense of "humor," and had a new front gate made at the end of his driveway. One side of the gate includes an icon of a ladder, referring to "leader." The other contained the silhouette of the main buildings at concentration camps like Auschwitz. So his gate could be read as "camp leader," just as Max Pauli's front gate had decades earlier.
The museum staff chose not to show how Pauli had lived because they were concerned it would encourage neo-Nazis who like to come there and celebrate the history by making the Holocaust seem like a good, cushy situation they should try to recreate.
The neo-Nazis may be the exception – although the tour guide fears they are a growing exception – to German attitudes towards the Holocaust. But even in the mainstream there is inertia against effective memorialization. The museum is well-done and excellent, yet surprisingly new. And due to limited funding, only open limited hours. Also, the second prison is still there and operational. With its light gray concrete walls it looms there in eerie silence. Though still occupied, hardly a sound escapes from behind its walls. In 1990 the Hamburg major acknowledge that it had probably been a mistake to have built any prisons at all there, but it is a slow process to have it decommissioned.
It's hard to feel though, with a prison still there, that the trouble from the past has yet taken its proper place in history. The camp was built to isolate people from society, and that's what the prison continues to do. It does so more humanely, of course, and with due process protections unavailable during the Nazi reign. In fact, many German legal codifications and instruments exist as they do today in response to what had happened before, in order to guarantee that it not repeat. However, to look at a modern incarnation of a prison on the site of an earlier, horrific one, does not seem to suggest that as much was learned from the past as there ought to have been.
Posted 10/18, written 10/13