A satellite camp of Buchenwald was established is Annen–Witten. My late night research found a memorial which had some of the foundations of barracks visible and several plaques to memorialize what had happened on the site. By using Google Street View I actually was able to see the memorial right from where I might be able to park the rental car. It was rare for me to actually see my destination so I was excited.
When I got to the location I walked to the spot I had seen the memorial on Google street view. Everything was different. A new business was being erected and I think the foundation of that building covered the foundations of the old barracks. I decided to walk around the block and approach the memorial from another side road. I had no luck, the chaotic construction site blocked any chance of seeing the plaques if they still existed. I was resigned to the fact that they probably no longer were there. I sat on a mound of excavated dirt and started to draw in the direction where the memorial used to be.
Sketching at this site was hellish since huge trucks kept backing into the construction site. I would have to stop sketching and step up over the dirt mound to safety. I helped one driver by using hand signals to show the distance he had before he scrapped the side of his truck into another vehicle. He finally decided it was too tight a turn and he honked his horn until the other drive came out and moved his vehicle.
Millions of people, from concentration camp inmates to civilian workers from abroad and prisoners of war, were forced to work for Nazi Germany during the Second World War. In 1944, a satellite of the Buchenwald concentration camp was even created to accommodate the concentration camp inmates in the Annen Cast Steelworks. Most of the workforce in the town was made up of forced laborers, who were used mainly for the production of weapons. Between 230 and 250 forced labor camps of different sizes were established in the town by 1945. With this memorial bulldozed over, there remains no known traces off the former camps.
On September 17, 1944, the first train for the Annen Cast Steelworks containing 700 prisoners arrived from Buchenwald concentration camp. There is evidence that there were 71 Poles among those camp prisoners whose names are known. The camp was similar to many other satellites of concentration camps with regard to its structure, furnishings and living conditions. It consisted among other things of several barracks to house the prisoners and a muster ground and was surrounded by a double layer of barbed wire to prevent the prisoners from escaping. The furnishings were extremely sparse and were largely limited to two-story bunk beds. In addition, the washroom barracks had not been completed when the first inmates arrived, so that they had to wash in the open air. In Witten-Annen, as elsewhere, forced laborers were subject to violence and harassment from the functionary prisoners and the SS guards and suffered from hunger and disease due to malnutrition, the cold temperatures and inadequate hygiene.
The Annen Cast Steelworks was regarded as the most important industrial operation in Witten-Annen and was one of a total of six factories. It also played a big role in the production of arms during the Second World War. As well as cast steel parts for airplane construction, armor plates for warships and semi-finished products for weapons were produced there. Above all, a large number of low-skilled workers were needed for the armament production operation.
Of the verified fatalities among the forced laborers in Witten, 51 of the victims came from Poland. By the end of the war, approximately 5% of the total number of forced laborers in Witten had died. According to one forced laborer, “it was not the armament production work itself, but the hunger, cold and demeaning repression by overseers, SS men and some of the functionary prisoners that caused the most hardship”. Over 600 people died from their Nazi forced labor.
Locals in 1945 would have known about the forced laborers. “The locals were able to see the camp inmates, many of whom were colleagues, walk the around 600-metre route from the camp (…) to the main entrance of Annen Cast Steelworks. The factory lay in the center of the town district, close to the train station and the market square as well as the Evangelical and Catholic churches, the post office and the local school which were close by. The street where forced laborers were marched to work was lined with restaurants, shops and residential buildings”.
After the end of the Second World War were characterized by a refusal to talk about the Nazi history of the town. During that time, the history of the forced laborers in the town and the satellite concentration camp in Witten-Annen was ignored, and collective amnesia set in. In the 1980s that attitude started to change and the former memorial I was seeking resulted. With Forced Labor barracks foundations paved over, that history was quietly erased once again.