Emslandlager ("Emsland camps") were a series of 15 moorland labor, punitive and POWs-camps, active from 1933 to 1945 and located in the districts of Emsland and Bentheim, Lower Saxony, Germany.
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"Camp VII Esterwegen was next to Neusustrum and Börgermoor to the early concentration camps in the Emsland. From August 1933, the National Socialist leadership and the Prussian state imprisoned in the camp for 2,000 prisoners mainly political opponents and used them for forced labor in the Moorkultivierung.
The SS guards terrified the prisoners. Due to jurisdictional disputes between the Prussian state and the SS solved in November 1933 first police and then a guards of the SA from the SS. The inhumane treatment of the inmates did not change under the SA guards.
In the early summer of 1934, the camp became the sole concentration camp of the SS, which expanded the camp to 1936 the second largest concentration camp in the German Reich after the Dachau concentration camp. The strength of the guards consisted in 1936 of over 500 SS men. The camp was occupied in 1935 with about 800 inmates.
In October 1936, the camp was dissolved as a concentration camp and continued as a prisoner of law camp. The guard took over a serving in the judiciary SA unit, which was later supplemented by judicial officials. Through an expansion in 1937, the capacity of the camp rose to 1,600 prisoners.
Depending on the time of year, the prisoners had to do forced labor in the moor for 8 to 12 hours a day (drainage, road and road construction, peat extraction). After the beginning of the war in 1939, they were increasingly used in war-important enterprises and in agriculture. In 1944, the engineering company Klatte from Bremen set up a factory at the warehouse, where prisoners had to produce armaments, including aircraft parts.
The food was bad and in relation to the hard work not enough. Beyond this general ordeal, the prisoners were subjected to multiple physical and mental ill-treatment by the guards. There were an unknown number of deaths and murders.
Until the beginning of the war, people who were persecuted by the Nazi regime for political, racial, social or religious reasons were imprisoned. In addition, there was a much larger group of prisoners convicted of criminal offenses. After the beginning of the war, the judicial authorities increasingly transferred former soldiers who had been condemned by Wehrmacht courts to the camp.
Between May 1943 and May 1944, the judiciary relocated about 2,700 "night and nebula" prisoners, resistance fighters from France, Belgium and the Netherlands, to Esterwegen. For admission, the judiciary separated the "camp south" from the rest of the prison camp.
The dead of the Esterwegen camp, whose number is unknown due to lost documents in the post-war period, were buried in the camp cemetery Börgermoor, today the burial place Esterwegen."
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