It was considered the “limbo of Buchenwald”: The concentration camp in the village of Sachsenburg was long forgotten. The state and the municipality made efforts to do the memorial work late.
The old Sachsenburg spinning mill, which has been vacant for decades, rises gray and mute into the cloudy sky. The slowly flowing Zschopau makes an elegant arc here, as if it wanted to avoid the small river island on which the building stands. However, some of the river water is diverted through a branch channel into the interior of the factory, where it drives the turbines of a small power station. The roar of the system can be heard muffled throughout the building. “When you stand still in the old production halls of the factory, you can also feel the movement of the turbines,” says Frankenberg’s Mayor Thomas Firmenich. “The whole house vibrates. It never comes to rest. “
The fact that the gray building in the central Saxon Zschopautal is not coming to rest may also be due to the ghosts of the past. The Sachsenburg spinning mill was once a concentration camp – one of the first in Germany after the Nazis came to power and the largest and most important in Saxony. Between May 1933 and August 1937, thousands of people – mainly communists, social democrats and trade unionists, but also Jews, theologians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, criminals and so-called antisocials – were locked up in the huge, now vacant production halls. They had to do forced labor in the nearby quarry and in the town of Frankenberg, to which Sachsenburg belongs today. The concentration camp is often referred to as the “Limbo of Buchenwald”. How many people died there is still unknown, as is the exact number of those imprisoned; it is between 8,000 and 16,000.
The history of the camp has so far only been researched in part. Which also has to do with the fact that historians, the Free State of Saxony and the city of Frankenberg have long hidden the dark past of this place. Commemoration of the victims also hardly played a role after the end of the GDR. The former Sachsenburg concentration camp has become a forgotten place. Now finally, in the next three years, Frankenberg wants to transform the site into a place of remembrance and remembrance, as Mayor Firmenich explains: “We are giving the place back its dignity and its historical significance.” That sounds good, but the truth is also that this would probably not have succeeded without the persistence and commitment of civil society initiatives.
Which brings us to the Chemnitz teacher Anna Schüller, who has been driving the project of a memorial in Sachsenburg for years. In 2009, the then 18-year-old high school student founded the “Klick” initiative with like-minded people, which was supposed to keep memories of the concentration camp alive and to research its history. “In many conversations, especially with young people, we find out to this day that they know the camps in Ravensbrück, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. But hardly any of them know that there was also a concentration camp in their immediate vicinity, ”explains the young teacher. “The Sachsenburg concentration camp was also not an issue in school lessons in the region. It was as if the camp had never existed. “
In 2011, “Klick” organized a workshop on the site for sculptors and filmmakers. “That attracted many young people from the area who began to take an interest in the history of Sachsenburg via the art projects.” They produced an audio guide that led through the grounds of the old factory and accompanied a former one with the camera Prisoners when he returned to the place of his captivity for the first time and developed a “media box” for a school project day on the history of the Sachsenburg concentration camp, which history teachers can borrow from the Chemnitz city library. With the support of the Sachsenburg camp association, they also searched archives for information about the concentration camp and its inmates. “Parallel to these activities, we campaigned in the city council, but also in talks with members of the state parliament, to finally set up an appropriate memorial in the old factory,” says Anna Schüller. “But we didn’t get anywhere for a long time. We got the impression that the city had long underestimated the importance of the place and that the topic was therefore not at the top of their agenda. “
In fact, after German reunification, many citizens of Frankenberg and Sachsenburg had great reservations about a concentration camp memorial. A memorial had been erected on the site in the GDR as early as 1957. In 1974 a memorial room was designed in the factory, which was primarily dedicated to the communist victims of the camp. But the ritualized culture of remembrance of the SED state, which primarily served communist education and cementing the unity party’s claim to leadership, had also repelled many people. The now vacant factory on the banks of the Zschopau, in which many people from the region had worked until 1990, was now primarily a symbol of a failed fiduciary policy. The memorial room was closed with the factory, the Treuhandanstalt had signs and memorial plaques removed, and the memorial was neglected.
In 1995 the Hessian entrepreneur Marcel Hett acquired the factory site. “For me it was initially a completely normal industrial plant, empty and unused like so many former companies in the old GDR,” says Hett. “There were rumors in the city that prisoners were housed there during the Nazi era. But the talk was always of the fact that it was a protective custody camp for criminals and ‘anti-social’. ”It was Anna Schüller’s and her colleagues’ work on history that opened his eyes. “From her I learned that my factory was one of the first concentration camps in Nazi Germany at the time, that hundreds of SS men were trained there as security guards who were later deployed in the German concentration and extermination camps.”
It had become clear to him that Sachsenburg, like Dachau, was an experimental field for the SS and thus a link between the system of the earlier camps and the later concentration camp system, which was oriented towards extermination. One of the first camp commanders in Sachsenburg was Karl Otto Koch, who later headed the Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald concentration camps. Its commanders’ villa is still on the factory premises today. “Suddenly I owned such a historically significant and depressing place,” says the 47-year-old. “That scared me a lot. It became clear to me that the factory in Sachsenburg is the only privately owned concentration camp in Germany and that it gives me a special responsibility. “
Anna Schüller calls it a stroke of luck that Hett bought the factory site. “Who knows whether another investor would have felt so committed to the history of this place,” she says. The entrepreneur from Taunus supported them in their efforts to bring young people and interested guests closer to the history of the former camp. The access to the factory site was never blocked so that anyone interested can visit the former camp site without registering. On a “path of remembrance” today, a total of 19 display boards in German and English explain the historical background.
Hett also gave her the opportunity to lead groups around the factory premises and to visit the historical sites that have been preserved in the camp, says Anna Schüller. Then she takes a bunch of keys out of her pocket and unlocks the door to the former headquarters at the former entrance to the factory. On the ground floor of the two-story building, which is to house the documentation center of the future memorial after a renovation, four detention cells are still preserved. Narrow, dark rooms where inmates were locked up for minor offenses. Anna Schüller points to numbers and words that were scribbled with pencil on walls and doors: “These are the remains of the prisoners who wanted to use these notes to document how many days they sat in the cell and how often they were beaten.”
Marcel Hett also knows the detention cells. “When I saw her for the first time and Ms. Schüller explained the inscriptions of the people tortured there to me, I was very depressed.” He was all the more surprised that the Free State and the city of Frankenberg had remained inactive for so long; and to create a worthy memorial to the horrors of the Nazi era. “In other federal states, even rudimentary remnants of such camps are maintained with great care and effort, and nothing happened here for a long time.”
In 2012, however, the tide seemed to be turning: In an amendment to the Memorials Act, the Saxon state parliament for the first time promised institutional funding of a memorial site for the former Sachsenburg concentration camp. Now the city council, which in previous years had not gotten beyond mere declarations of intent, also became active. The city is now also negotiating with Marcel Hett about the transfer of buildings on the factory site that are of importance for a future memorial. The entrepreneur finally donated the commandant’s office with the holding cells to Frankenberg. Further parcels and the former commandant’s villa were bought by the city. In the donation agreement, the city expressly undertakes to create “a worthy place to commemorate the victims of the Sachsenburg concentration camp … (and) a memorial against indifference and oblivion”.
But in 2018 the city failed to apply for funding to the federal government in order to receive financial support for the construction of a memorial. The Saxon Ministry of Science confirmed that the quality of the application was insufficient. There is also a lack of an operator concept, and other essential questions have also not been clarified. In addition, the city wanted to demolish the former commandant’s villa on the concentration camp site, although the ministry believes that this building makes up a significant part of the planned ensemble.
The situation seemed to be in a mess, especially since the civic initiatives were now in dispute with the city. The main subject of the conflict was the commanders’ villa, which from the point of view of the associations was indispensable for the future memorial. The city, however, argued with the immense costs of repairing the ailing building, which is why demolition was inevitable.
In the meantime, the opposing parties have reconciled, and together they are now striving for a second attempt at funding from the federal government. “In close partnership with the civic associations, we have created the prerequisites for a new application to be successful,” says Mayor Firmenich with certainty. Since January last year, the city has employed the Ukrainian scientist Mykola Borovyk, an experienced and internationally renowned historian, who is researching the history of the camp. His findings are discussed with a socio-political advisory board, which includes personalities from the city, and a scientific advisory board made up of recognized experts, and incorporated into the funding application. “Our goal is to have the application ready by next summer and to submit it to the federal government via the Saxon Ministry of Science,” says the CDU politician.
In addition, the city has acquired two other buildings on and on the factory site, which were previously privately owned. On the one hand, there is a restaurant in front of the entrance gate, which houses the existing permanent exhibition for the documentation center in its hall on the upper floor until the memorial is completed. And a house on the site that the previous owner has given up. “With the purchase of the two houses we wanted to prevent people from settling there whose political activities could run counter to the spirit of the memorial,” says Firmenich.
However, the further handling of the commandant’s villa is still controversial. The city launched an ideas competition to redesign the building and integrate it into the memorial concept. The two first-placed designs provide for the severely damaged house to be torn down down to the base of the building. There is no other solution, says Mayor Firmenich. “A renovation of the house would use up the majority of the funding and our share of the funds for the memorial.” Therefore, the jury decided on works that provide interesting approaches for an alternative building equipped with modern audiovisual resources on the site of the old villa .
Anna Schüller and her colleagues are dissatisfied with this solution. “The unique ensemble of the Sachsenburg concentration camp will be irretrievably destroyed by the demolition of the villa,” says Anna Schüller. “The commandant’s villa was clearly a place of perpetrators, and this requires a corresponding approach to the structural relics. A demolition, on the other hand, jeopardizes state and federal funding and thus the construction of the memorial. ”Factory owner Hett shares these concerns. “Actually everything is going in the right direction now,” he says. “But we still need a critical look and cooperation, because the risk is still great that the project will get stuck halfway.”
