After my failed attempt to sketch remnants of a Forced Labor Camp in Witten-Annen Germany, I decided to sketch the Zeche Nachtigal which is now a museum. I figured that the forced laborers who were not working in the Annen Steelworks Factory building weapons, would be at Nachtigal. Nachtigal means nightingale which is a bird known for or its powerful, complex, and beautiful song, which is often heard at night.

I sketched the historic twin engine winding machine. It is roughly the same size as the steam engine used previously in operation starting in 1871. It was used to hoist coal from the Hercules shaft. As the shaft was deepened a stronger winding machine was needed. In 1892 the coal mine shut down due to flooding. The machinery was sold off and soon the site became a brick works. By 1897 the brickwork’s produced up to eleven million bricks annually for the construction of industrial facilities and houses. The history of the brickwork’s jumped from 1897 to 1983. There is no mention of what happened at the brickwork’s during WWII, but it is safe to say the business would have been booming in war time.

Forced laborers were extensively used in German brick factories during WWII, particularly to produce building materials for Nazi construction projects. Concentration camp prisoners and millions of civilians from occupied territories were exploited by German industry to support the war effort, including the production of bricks. With over 200 forced labor camps in Witten it seems very likely that the forced labor would have been used in the Nachtigal brick factory. With the Ruhr area being constantly bombed by the allies there would have been a need of bricks to repair damaged buildings. Young eastern European men were obliged to join the German workforce, but both men and women were forcefully abducted from the streets.

Camp barracks in industrial centers varied in size, but most have been described by former forced laborers as poorly constructed, surrounded with barbed wire, and heavily guarded. The barracks were typically equipped with one small stove, a limited number of washrooms and toilets, mattresses filled with sawdust to make crude beds, and few blankets. Eastern Europeans working in factories, like the brickwork’s, received one cup of coffee or tea, 200-300 grams of bread, and one or two cups of watery cabbage soup per day. These rations, however, largely depended on what food was available, and as the war continued, food rations often decreased.

A sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp was established in Witten on September 16, 1944, utilizing an existing barrack complex built in 1942 near the Dortmund-Witten railway line. The initial transport from Buchenwald Concentration Camp brought 700 male prisoners, primarily political detainees aged 16 to 63 from the Soviet Union, France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Belgium, and Germany, with about one-third of a subsequent group of 50 arrivals in February 1945 being Polish Jews. These prisoners, housed in wooden barracks with double bunks and minimal facilities, performed grueling 12-hour shifts in Hall 7 of the Steelworks foundry, operating furnaces and machines to produce steel components for naval armor and aircraft, under constant threat of violence from SS guards and kapos.

A Kapo was a Nazi concentration camp prisoner—often a criminal or political prisoner—assigned by the SS to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks, acting as a collaborator in exchange for privileges. They were hated by fellow inmates for their brutality and held authority over them, often enjoying better food and conditions.

The camp, secured by barbed wire and watchtowers, operated until late March 1945, with prisoner numbers fluctuating to around 600 by evacuation due to deaths, escapes, and returns to the main camp; the SS received four Reichsmarks daily per prisoner from the factory.

Conditions in the sub-camp were dire, marked by undernourishment, exposure to cold, disease, and brutal oversight by SS, leading to frequent accidents and illnesses like pulmonary infections. By late March 1945, at least 16 prisoners had died from exhaustion and related causes, with nine Soviet inmates secretly executed by transfer to Buchenwald’s crematorium and over 60 sick individuals returned to the main camp, of whom at least 14 perished shortly after.

On the night of March 29, 1945, the SS evacuated the remaining approximately 600 prisoners on a death march northeast toward Lippstadt Germany, to the west of Dortmund-Witten, during which an unknown number were killed; the survivors were abandoned on April 1 and liberated by advancing U.S. forces, with some succumbing to their ordeals in the following days. Post-liberation investigations in the 1960s and 1970s examined SS crimes at the site but resulted in no convictions. Most Germans kept silent about the crime of forced labor or completely denied it.

Holocaust survivor Irene Weiss put it this way, “The most dangerous animal on earth is man. A man can turn into animal in no time. All he needs is permission. As soon as permission is given from government, it accelerates. Even a hint of permission that it is OK to attack this group or exclude this group, or shame that group. It’s happening, it never stopped.”