It’s hard to believe, standing in the middle of a Kleingartenanlage on Sonnenallee, that this was where a Nazi concentration camp once stood. On one side is a bus stop, the other a football field. Thousands of people walk past daily, most of whom have no idea what took place on the land beneath their feet. After all, among the trees and vegetables where Jewish women lost their lives to the Holocaust and fingers to the Krupp company that stole their labour, there are only small, almost hidden clues to its full history.
Despite its prominent location, most people aren’t aware that there was a former civilian forced labour camp on Sonnenallee
When people think of concentration camps, they tend to imagine the sprawling, campus-like variety typical of Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Sachsenhausen or Ravensbrück. These were all built at the edge of cities, known about by residents but kept beyond the view of the general public. Locals often saw the prisoners, whether they were being marched to and from railway stations or sent out in work details to perform arduous manual labour, including the retrieval of unexploded ordinances.
These main camps were the central nodes of the concentration camp system. In addition to administering work within the main location, each main camp also managed an often-overlooked subcamp system. Every main camp had up to 100 subcamps (also known as satellite camps) within its orbit. Some had more. In most cases, these were set up adjacent to or directly within the grounds of armaments production sites – wherever was most convenient.
Berlin was no exception. In fact, if anything, the city became a hub of subcamps in its own right, especially as the Western and Eastern Fronts closed in and Nazi Germany became desperate to maintain a high level of military industrial output. The capital became the most important armaments hub in the Third Reich. By late 1944, Sachsenhausen (30 km north of Berlin) had 15 subcamps within Berlin’s city limits and over a dozen just beyond it, including one at today’s BER airport.
There are so many subcamps in the city you’ve likely never heard of or even noticed – ones you might even walk past every day. Despite its prominent location, most people aren’t aware that there was a former civilian forced labour camp on Sonnenallee, a five-minute walk from a large weapons factory operated by National Krupp Cash Registers. In late August 1944, 500 women – all Jewish – arrived in Neukölln and were marched to their new quarters.
For the next seven and a half months, they would be forced to work at the Krupp factory, as survivors referred to it, under the watchful eye of the SS (by this stage, the dangerous, state-backed terrorist Schutzstaffel had morphed into an experienced persecutor and mass murderer of Jewish populations). Today, the site of this camp, KZ-Außenlager Neukölln, is the home of Kleingartenanlage NCR: an allotment garden.
The Women of KZ-Außenlager Neukölln
The subcamp operated from August 1944 until April 1945. The prisoners, over 95% of whom were from Poland, arrived in Neukölln via the Łódź ghetto and Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were mostly from the Łódź area, though some came from as far away as Vienna, Romania and France. Their ages varied from 14 to over 60, though the vast majority were between 17 and 25 years old. Unusually, many of the women came in pairs: friends, sisters, mothers with their daughters, former work colleagues.
To say that their experiences had been harrowing before their arrival in Neukölln is a massive understatement.
To say that their experiences had been harrowing before their arrival in Neukölln is a massive understatement. The inhabitants of the Łódź ghetto had to work to receive any food, meaning those too young, old or ill to work were either left to die or carted off to the Kulmhof death camp. Not only did they live in constant fear, they also witnessed their families get torn apart. Many of the women who came to Neukölln lost their children in this manner. Only 5% of the Łódź ghetto’s inhabitants survived the war.
After the Łódź ghetto had been liquidated in August 1944, the remaining survivors – around 67,000 people – were put in cattle cars and sent by train to the infamous ramp inside Auschwitz-Birkenau. At this point, they were taken off the train to endure ‘selection’, a process during which an SS doctor determined whether individuals were fit enough to be forced labourers; the remaining individuals were sent straight to the gas chambers. The women of Neukölln survived this process, but around 45,000 – approximately two thirds – of those who arrived from Łódź were murdered within a few weeks.
Survivors of the Neukölln subcamp state that their time in Berlin was, in comparison to what came before, relatively benign. There’s no doubt that it felt that way, at least in their collective memories. They had individual bunk beds to themselves, a luxury in the overcrowded final stages of the concentration camp system. They were allowed to grow their hair long and they enjoyed a somewhat good relationship with the SS commandant of the camp and his chief female warden. They even received items to decorate their rooms. In addition to eating the standard meal of 125g of bread and watery soup, they were allowed to lunch in the factory’s canteen. Civilian workers provided extra food and stockings. One foreman even allowed the younger women to take a nap under his desk. The barracks had hot running water.
That being said, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that this period of ‘period of respite’ was truly horrific. Many testimonies, particularly those recorded shortly after the war, reveal that prisoners endured near-daily air raids and were forced to take shelter in exposed, one-metre-deep trenches dug next to the barracks. The work in the factory, which involved handling heated pieces of metal to create anti-aircraft grenades and MP40 machine guns, led to several prisoners losing fingers. Fourteen of the women were sent away to Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück camps due to ill health, and in one case a pregnancy, never to return.
The camp was officially closed on April 18, 1945, and all internal documents were destroyed by the commandant. The prisoners were marched to S-Bahn Neukölln, where they boarded a train to Sachsenhausen, only to be moved the following day to Ravensbrück. They arrived at a camp that, by all accounts, looked and felt like the apocalypse. Thousands of inmates from other subcamps had been brought to the already overcrowded camp as the Red Army closed in from the east.
Unbeknownst to them, one of the strangest chapters of the war was about to become their salvation. Heinrich Himmler, chief architect of the Holocaust and head of the SS, attempted to use his contacts to appeal to the World Jewish Council and the Swedish Red Cross. His plan was to offer them any remaining Jewish prisoners in order to curry favour among Western allies. He hoped they would invite Himmler, along with the remnants of the German forces, to join together and ‘save Europe’ from the Red Army.
Himmler held a tense meeting with a German Jew by the name of Norbert Masur, who successfully negotiated for the release of at least 1,000 Jewish prisoners from Ravensbrück. The deal was integrated into the White Bus rescue operation run by the Swedish and Danish Red Crosses. The vast majority of the women from Neukölln were evacuated to Sweden from Ravensbrück on April 25 and 26. It’s estimated that around 20% settled in Sweden, 30% moved to Israel and the US respectively and the rest moved to other parts of the world.
Post-War Remembrance
Straight after the war, several survivors offered their testimonies of the camp to the various authorities, in case they would need it in future legal battles. In the 1950s, many of the Neukölln women joined up with other previous inmates of Krupp factories to begin a class-action lawsuit against the company. Their collective pressure pushed Alfred Krupp – widely reported as the richest man in the world at that time – to create a compensation fund for victims. He would do so while admitting no legal liability, providing tokenistic sums that enriched only a few thousand applicants to the tune of around $1,000 USD each.
From the late 1970s onwards, over 60 survivors sat down to record interviews or put pen to paper about their experiences during the Holocaust. Grete Stern and Hella Fixel’s video testimonies were integrated into the website Eternal Echoes and a documentary called Aspangbahnhof 1941 Geschichte einer Frauenfreundschaft (Aspangbahnhof 1941 Story of a Female Friendship). Tola Walach donated a pair of broken reading glasses to Yad Vashem – the Holocaust memorial, museum and archive in Israel – which were on her person when she was separated from her mother at Auschwitz-Birkenau and she held onto throughout her time in Neukölln.
The son of Maika Goldman, Professor Stanley Goldman, a lawyer and genocide studies scholar, published a book in 2018 about his mother’s experiences, called Left to the Mercy of a Rude Stream. In 2007, Judith Buber Agassi, the daughter of two former concentration camp prisoners, wrote a chapter in her book Jewish Women Prisoners of Ravensbrück based primarily on the personal testimonies. She was even able to gather a list with over 200 names from the camp, derived solely through the survivors’ network. Yet, incredibly, there’s little awareness in Neukölln about the existence of these recollections. There are no copies of Goldman or Agassi’s book in the public library or at Museum Neukölln.
The failure of Neukölln’s public institutions and civil society actors to fund and support a cohesive community of memory around the former KZ-Außenlager Neukölln shines through again and again. Attempts to provide Holocaust remembrance boil down to two tiny signs, one with a broken QR code, and an inaccessible Gedenkstein (memorial stone). Then there’s the light installation created by artist Norbert Rademacher, introduced in 1994. Two lines of text, which are supposed to have been projected into the leaves of trees, now point down at the pavement, which you can only read when it’s turned on at night. It attracts very little attention.
Worse still, when the request for a giant, obnoxious billboard directly in front of the memorial landed on their desks, the Bezirksamt lacked the institutional memory to reject it. Not only is the advertising tacky in the extreme, it sums up the institution’s priorities and its failure to take Germany’s historical responsibility seriously when it comes to remembering the Holocaust at home
