The Village and the Nazi Labor Camp
"Go ahead and write that we country bumpkins don't think much of this talk of graves," said Heinrich Keritz, a Jamlitz local in his mid-50s, leaning against the barbed wire fence holding a telescope. "All our taxes being are used and at the end, nothing will be found." Keritz looked angrily at the piles of earth, meter-high weeds and the backhoe.
Heinrich Keritz is the stereotype of a morose backwoodsman. To understand him, one has to know the story of his village. Jamlitz, a small town with some 600 residents on the border of the Spreewald forest south of Berlin. Tucked between rapeseed fields and a spruce forest, the village only rarely sees an urban tourist. Jamlitz residents don't like the flurry of publicity. The only feature setting this village apart from any other is its proximity to the "camp."
That is how Jamlitz locals refer to the Lieberose camp, a satellite of the Nazis' Sachenhausen concentration camp. At the end of 1943, some prisoners from Sachsenhausen were transported to Jamlitz and forced to build a training area for the SS division "Kurmark." There were more deaths in the Jamlitz barracks than in similar labor camps. Every day, dozens of prisoners were killed or died from exhaustion. Only 400 of a total 8,000 prisoners survived the war.
Sixty years have now passed since the horrific crimes in the camp. But the stories live on in Jamlitz -- about bones hidden in the forest, about haggard camp victims, about people on a death march begging for water, about SS men spending nights drinking and shooting.
Read entire article at Spiegel Online
Heinrich Keritz is the stereotype of a morose backwoodsman. To understand him, one has to know the story of his village. Jamlitz, a small town with some 600 residents on the border of the Spreewald forest south of Berlin. Tucked between rapeseed fields and a spruce forest, the village only rarely sees an urban tourist. Jamlitz residents don't like the flurry of publicity. The only feature setting this village apart from any other is its proximity to the "camp."
That is how Jamlitz locals refer to the Lieberose camp, a satellite of the Nazis' Sachenhausen concentration camp. At the end of 1943, some prisoners from Sachsenhausen were transported to Jamlitz and forced to build a training area for the SS division "Kurmark." There were more deaths in the Jamlitz barracks than in similar labor camps. Every day, dozens of prisoners were killed or died from exhaustion. Only 400 of a total 8,000 prisoners survived the war.
Sixty years have now passed since the horrific crimes in the camp. But the stories live on in Jamlitz -- about bones hidden in the forest, about haggard camp victims, about people on a death march begging for water, about SS men spending nights drinking and shooting.