Qualla: Neuengamme concentration camp

Neuengamme concentration camp: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hao Liu, Public domain. In 1937 Hitler designated five cities to be rebuilt as showpieces of the regime, and Hamburg was one. Its Elbe waterfront was to be remade in dark clinker brick, and bricks on that scale need clay, kilns and labour. In September 1938 the SS-owned Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke bought a disused brickworks and half a million square metres of marshland at Neuengamme, southeast of the city; that December a hundred prisoners arrived from Sachsenhausen to build the camp that would make them. At least 42,900 people died in the system that grew out of it.

Image: Hao Liu | Public domain

Neuengamme concentration camp: Annihilation Through Labour

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SHGL Hamburg, CC BY-SA 4.0. The phrase is the SS's own — Vernichtung durch Arbeit — and it described policy, not consequence. Prisoners worked ten to twelve hours a day on rations so thin that most new arrivals were dead within three months, and dysentery killed more people here than any other disease. Men ...

Image: SHGL Hamburg | CC BY-SA 4.0

Neuengamme concentration camp: What People Held On To

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fumaro, CC BY-SA 2.0 de. Prisoners kept hold of each other anyway — small groups they defended, drawing, woodcarving, arguments about books, poems and songs recited from memory. John William, a French resistance fighter sent here in 1944 after helping to sabotage a factory at Montluçon, discovered his si...

Image: Fumaro | CC BY-SA 2.0 de

Neuengamme concentration camp: Twenty Children

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hao Liu, Public domain. Kurt Heissmeyer, an SS physician from Berlin, held a theory that had already been discredited: that injecting live tuberculosis bacilli would immunise the patient. He tested it on people the regime classified as racially worthless. In the autumn of 1944, twenty Jewish children we...

Image: Hao Liu | Public domain

Neuengamme concentration camp: The Ships in the Bay

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SHGL Hamburg, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 19 April 1945 the order came to clear the main camp. Over the following week more than nine thousand prisoners were taken out and loaded onto four ships in the Bay of Lübeck: the liners Cap Arcona and Deutschland and the steamers Thielbek and Athen. They were held in the holds...

Image: SHGL Hamburg | CC BY-SA 4.0

Neuengamme concentration camp: What the Ground Became

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Emily Mohney, CC BY-SA 4.0. In March 1946 fourteen camp officials went on trial before a British military court in Hamburg, the first of thirty-three trials of Neuengamme staff. Prisoners from six countries gave evidence about the 197 Soviet prisoners of war gassed in the arrest bunker on 25 September 1942,...

Image: Emily Mohney | CC BY-SA 4.0