Arbeitserziehungslager Nordmark

On the outskirts of Kiel, in the district of Russee, football pitches, a tennis court and a supermarket now cover ground where a Gestapo penal camp once stood. The Arbeitserziehungslager Nordmark operated from June 1944 until the fourth of May 1945, built to discipline the foreign forced labourers who worked Kiel's farms and armaments factories. What remains of its history lives in three information boards and memorial stones on the site, which you can read on this page alongside pictures of what stands there today.

In under a year, five thousand people passed through the camp and six hundred did not survive, most of them Soviet or Polish forced labourers. Over twenty barracks held prisoners and guards, two watchtowers overlooked the grounds, and a half-underground bunker contained forty-eight windowless solitary cells. Prisoners laboured ten hours a day from five in the morning, clearing rubble in Kiel, uncovering unexploded bombs and working for firms like the Holsten Brewery and the Nordland Fish Factory. In the war's final two weeks, some three hundred people were shot and buried in mass graves as the camp filled with eighteen hundred prisoners driven in on evacuation marches from Fuhlsbüttel and the Riga Ghetto. British troops arrived in May 1945 to find only a few half-starved prisoners.

The story did not end there. A mass grave surfaced during road works in the early 1960s, the first memorial boulder went up in 1971, and politicians struck the closing sentence from a 1985 memorial text that called for resistance to brutality and terror. In 2016, two hundred newly discovered names of death march participants were read aloud on the site for the first time, with families travelling from the United States and Sweden to hear them.