Camp VI

Oberlangen

Camp VI Oberlangen was built in autumn 1933 and initially served as a training camp for guards. From April 1934, the justice administration used the camp to imprison 1,000 prisoners. An SA unit in the service of the judiciary was responsible for guarding the camp, which was later complemented by judicial officers.

Up until the beginning of the war, the prisoners were people who had been persecuted by the Nazi regime on political, racial, social or religious grounds. In addition, there was a much larger group of prisoners who had been convicted of criminal offences.

Depending on the time of year, the prisoners had to perform 8 to 12 hours of forced labour in the moor every day (drainage, road and path construction, peat extraction). The rations were poor and inadequate in relation to the hard labour. In addition to this general ordeal, the prisoners were subjected to a great variety of physical and psychological abuse by the guards. 

In 1935, an average of 788 prisoners were imprisoned each month. Around 80 percent of these were on labour deployment. Around half of the prisoners from Oberlangen were withdrawn to the Palatinate in September 1938 for the construction of fortifications. It was not until the summer of 1939 that the camp was once again occupied by 800 to 1,000 prisoners.

After the start of the war in September 1939, the Wehrmacht High Command took over the camp as a prisoner of war camp and assigned it as a branch camp to the main prisoner of war camp VI B Neu Versen. In 1940/41, the camp was occupied by around 1,400 Polish ensigns, and in autumn 1941 by 2,000 Soviet soldiers. Oberlangen became an officers' camp in 1943. On the 1st of September 1944, 4,967 Italian military internees and 920 Soviet officers who were prisoners of war were registered here. After the failure of the Warsaw Uprising, female prisoners of war from the Polish Home Army were brought to Oberlangen from December 1944 to April 1945. In March 1945, a total of 1,556 female prisoners of war were held here.

On the 12th of April 1945, the camp was liberated by the 1st Polish Armoured Division.

The Oberlangen war cemetery is the final resting place of 62 Soviet soldiers in individual graves and 2,000 to 4,000 unknown Soviet prisoners of war in mass graves.

Oberlangen memorial pavilion

A memorial pavilion was opened on the former site of the Oberlangen camp in September 2014 by representatives of the Emsland district and the municipality of Oberlangen. Twelve boards provide information about the history of the site.

Polish survivor Wanda Broszkowska-Piklikiewicz said at the opening that the memorial pavilion was for the future, to ‘show our youth that this terrible time must not be repeated’.

The site is open all year round and is barrier-free. There is no entrance fee.