Qualla: Esterwegen concentration camp

Esterwegen concentration camp: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit R.L. LIBERTE CHERIE, CC BY-SA 3.0. They were given spades. That is the object the song keeps returning to - not the wire, not the guards, but the spade and the ground it went into. Wir sind die Moorsoldaten und ziehen mit dem Spaten ins Moor: we are the peat bog soldiers, and we march to the moor with our spades. Prisoners wrote those words in August 1933 at Börgermoor, a camp a short distance from Esterwegen and part of the same system. The melody was composed by a prisoner named Rudi Goguel, the words credited mainly to Johann Esser, with the actor Wolfgang Langhoff. The song was first performed on 27 August 1933, at a prisoners' variety evening the camp administration had permitted. Within a few years men who had been released or who had fled the country were singing it in Spain, in Britain and in America. It is probably the most widely known song ever written inside a concentration camp, and it came out of these bogs.

Image: R.L. LIBERTE CHERIE | CC BY-SA 3.0

Esterwegen concentration camp: Hell at the Forest's Edge

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Scanned by Radzuweit, Public domain. Esterwegen opened in the summer of 1933, among the very first camps the new regime built, designed to hold two thousand men classified as political Schutzhäftlinge - "protective custody" prisoners, an official phrase meaning they had been imprisoned without trial for opposing the...

Image: Scanned by Radzuweit | Public domain

Esterwegen concentration camp: The Work

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Marvins21~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The official justification for the Emsland camps was land reclamation. The bogs of north-western Germany were, in the regime's telling, a resource waiting to be drained, cut and farmed, and the men in the camps were the equipment. Peat had real economic value, and the reclaimed g...

Image: No machine-readable author provided. Marvins21~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

Esterwegen concentration camp: The Prisoner in the Photograph

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jusos, Public domain. One man held at Esterwegen is known to almost everyone who studies the period, because a photograph of him survives from 1934. Carl von Ossietzky was a pacifist journalist and editor of the weekly Die Weltbühne who had already served time for publishing evidence that Germany was ...

Image: Jusos | Public domain

Esterwegen concentration camp: After 1936

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Scanned von Benutzer--Radzuweit, Public domain. The concentration camp closed in the summer of 1936, but Esterwegen kept working. Until 1945 it ran as a prison camp, holding political prisoners and, later, men taken under the Nacht und Nebel decree - people seized in occupied Western Europe and made to disappear deliberately, ...

Image: Scanned von Benutzer--Radzuweit | Public domain

Esterwegen concentration camp: The Ground Remembers Slowly

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Agp, CC BY 3.0. For decades the Emsland camps went largely uncommemorated. A documentation centre operated in nearby Papenburg from 1985, driven mostly by local people who believed the record ought to exist somewhere. Not until 31 October 2011 did a full memorial open on the site itself. The Ged...

Image: Agp | CC BY 3.0