On 28 August 1944, with the war closing on Germany from the west, Hitler ordered the construction of the Friesenwall — a fortified line along the North Sea coast that was already militarily beside the point when it was ordered. Sixteen thousand prisoners of war were assigned to it, along with six thousand concentration camp prisoners moved out of Neuengamme into hastily made satellite camps — Engerhafe, Meppen-Versen, Dalum, Schwesing, and Ladelund. The Ladelund camp opened on 1 November 1944 and was dissolved on 16 December, when the front had made the whole project absurd. It existed for six weeks. In that time it killed three hundred men.

A camp had stood on the site since 1938: a Reich Labour Service barracks for two hundred and fifty young men, unfenced and unguarded, put to drainage, reforestation, and a thirty-four-kilometre concrete road running parallel to the Danish border from Süderlügum to Flensburg. In October 1944 the barracks were wrapped in barbed wire and four watchtowers went up. The prisoners came by rail to Achtrup station in covered goods wagons and walked the last eight kilometres. Ladelund was chosen for exactly these conveniences: an existing camp, good roads, and a border to dig along. Most of the men were classified as political prisoners. They had been arrested across Europe as resistance fighters, as hostages, as forced labourers.

The largest group came from the Netherlands, and a great many of them from one village. On 1 October 1944, after Dutch resistance fighters ambushed a Wehrmacht vehicle near Putten, the German commander ordered a reprisal against the village. More than six hundred men and boys aged seventeen and older were rounded up. Five hundred and eighty-eight of them were sent through the Amersfoort transit camp to Neuengamme and on into the camp system, Ladelund among the destinations. Only a few dozen came home. The raid emptied a village of its men in a single day, and the graves at Ladelund hold some of them.

Everything had been sized for the labour service unit that preceded it. The kitchen and washblock served two hundred and fifty; more than two thousand men were now housed in unheated barracks fifty metres long and eight to ten metres wide, with eighty to a hundred and twenty men packed into rooms of under forty square metres. Only the barracks elder had a bed. The rest slept on the floor or on rough wooden frames, pressed together on scattered straw, without mattresses. Vermin and disease moved through them. Outside, in the North Frisian November, the men dug anti-tank trenches four to five metres wide and three to five metres deep, eleven and twelve hours a day, often standing in freezing water, beaten by Kapos and fed on rations that were starvation rations in their official version — and the commandant withheld even those. The death rate rose so fast that Neuengamme itself came to speak of Ladelund as a death camp.

SS-Untersturmführer Hans Hermann Griem ran the camp. He stole the prisoners' food, took pleasure in torture, shot men himself, and was frequently drunk. When Ladelund closed he went on to command the Emsland camp at Dalum until March 1945. British investigators opened the Ladelund case in 1945 and brought SS men and Kapos to trial from 1947, where they drew heavy sentences; Griem got away shortly before proceedings began. Flensburg prosecutors reopened the file in 1963 and traced him to Hamburg-Bergedorf in 1965; the Hamburg court opened its preliminary investigation on 16 January 1969. Griem died on 25 June 1971, shortly before the trial itself was to begin. He was never convicted of anything.

Pastor Meyer was not a bystander with clean hands. He had been an NSDAP member and a German Christian, and after the war he had reason to fear removal from office; his careful records also served him at the denazification he completed in 1948. What he did with them afterwards is the other half of the story. He sought out the grieving families himself, and by 1950 the graves at the edge of the churchyard had become the starting point for a memorial — the oldest concentration camp memorial in Schleswig-Holstein and one of the oldest in Germany, begun with survivors and with the relatives of the dead, at a moment when almost nobody in Germany wanted the subject raised. A document house was built within sight of the graves in 1989 and extended in 2006, and its exhibition was rebuilt in 2017 for 500,000 euros, carrying biographies of the prisoners in German, Danish, English and Dutch. The last barrack came down in 1970. At the edge of the former camp a memorial stone carries the opening line of the German constitution: the dignity of the human being is inviolable.