Germany on Friday inaugurated a memorial at the long-forgotten site of a World War II Nazi concentration camp where forced labourers built an aircraft factory deep inside a Bavarian forest.
At least 2,200 prisoners, many of them Hungarian Jews, died in the miserable conditions at the Muehldorfer Hart camp and were buried on-site in a mass grave. More than 70 years after the war ended, the state of Bavaria has finally put up a memorial of standing concrete slabs with photographs and text on the site’s grim history. A concrete path has also been laid, leading visitors through the vast area’s work camp to the mass grave.
“I am satisfied that finally, after so many years, we can remember the suffering of these men and their deaths in the middle of the forest,” said Franz Langstein, who heads the association “For Remembrance.” The group has fought for 20 years for the memorial to be built, he told AFP.
Some 10,000 detainees were forced to work in “inhumane conditions” in the camp from the summer of 1944 until April 1945, according to Langstein.
Their task was to construct a factory, including a concrete bunker, where the fighter jets which would be deployed for Adolf Hitler’s planned “ultimate victory” were to be built — but the plant was never finished. Conditions were so poor that “by the autumn of 1944, 10 to 20 people were dying each day… during winter, the number rose to 40 people,” said Langstein by the newly inaugurated concrete panels that recount the history of the camp through witness accounts and images.
Considered as an annex of the better known Dachau camp, the site was evacuated on April 28, 1945. After the war, a mass grave with the remains of 2,200 people was uncovered.
