Lünen is just a half hour drive north of Dortmund Germany. My father, 1st Leutenant Arthur Thorspecken in the 75th Infantry Division would have passed just west of this village as the 75th pushed south towards Dortmund.
Lünen was crucial for Germany’s war effort in WWII, supplying coal and steel. The city had steel production, copper refineries, and a large electric power station. Manufactures include machinery, electronic products, cement structures, glass, and shoes.
In Lünen I sketched the Miner’s Housing Museum. The museum is located in the colony of the former Minister Achenbach Coal Mine. The interior rooms are quaintly decorated to recreate what the place might have looked like in the 1920s and 30s, with a tin stove and tea cups on a manicured tablecloth. The forced laborers would not have had such luxuries.
Lünen, Germany, was a location where forced labor was extensively used during World War II, which was a common practice throughout the Third Reich’s economy. Forced laborers would have had to work deep in the coal mines. Millions of people from across occupied Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, were deported to Germany to work in various industries and agriculture to support the war effort.
The majority of forced laborers were Poles, Slavs, and Soviet prisoners of war, who faced brutal and discriminatory treatment, including inadequate rations, poor sanitation, and constant surveillance. These individuals were forced to work in key war-related industries, such as coal mines (Lünen is in the heart of the Ruhr coal-mining region), steel plants, chemical plants, and armament factories.
Laborers were housed in cramped, unhygienic barracks and often worked to the point of exhaustion or death. The majority of camps in Lünen were civilian forced labor camps, which were widespread across Germany and numbered over 30,000 in total. These typically consisted of basic barracks or converted buildings. The conditions in these camps were generally catastrophic, involving long hours of hard physical labor, minimal food rations, inadequate sanitation, and constant abuse from guards. The Nazi regime implemented a policy of “extermination through labor,” where workers were intentionally worked to death.
Once liberated by the Allies, the Forced Laborers became known as Displaced Persons. It became the allies responsibility to feed and try and return displaced persons back east to their homes. Back in Russia, these displaced persons would be seen as traitors and they would be treated as the enemy.
Numerous German companies profited from this system, including major corporations like Krupp, Thyssen, and Siemens, as well as smaller local firms.
The city faced significant damage from Allied bombings.
On April 7, 1945, a train carrying around 400 German concentration camp prisoners from the Wilhelmshaven satellite camp who were “unable to march” was attacked by Allied bombers at the Lüneburg railway station. At least 256 concentration camp prisoners died in the attack. The survivors were rounded up in a field. The next day, the SS took around 140 of them to Bergen-Belsen. The remaining 60 to 80 prisoners, some of whom were injured, were murdered on 11 April 1945 in in the Tiergarten Forest near Lüneburg by the Wehrmacht soldiers who were guarding them and the single remaining SS officer, Gustav Alfred Jepsen.