IN-PERSON London Heritages. Section A

Abstract

In the decades after World War II, East and West Germany developed divergent narratives about German complicity and resistance toward fascism, antisemitism, and the Holocaust. Each country differently (de)emphasized German culpability and differently identified the main victims of the Nazi era. This presentation offers a comparative analysis of the official treatment of two former concentration camps: Sachsenhausen, located twenty miles north of Berlin in former East Germany, and Neuengamme in Hamburg, former West Germany. The two camps were historically linked and only 150 miles apart. Sachsenhausen was established in 1936, initially to incarcerate political prisoners. It became a labor camp with a gas chamber and an area for medical experimentation/torture. Ultimately, some 200,000 prisoners suffered in Sachsenhausen, and tens of thousands died there. In 1938, the Nazi SS established a satellite camp in an abandoned brick factory in the Neuengamme suburb of Hamburg. Neuengamme became an independent camp in 1940 and eventually, with its subcamps, became the largest concentration camp in north-west Germany. Over 100,000 people from across occupied Europe came through Neuengamme, and tens of thousands died there. After the war, these camps underwent different histories of remembrance. This paper focuses on the divergent historical interpretations that marked the postwar period in the two German countries. I analyze the organizational efforts behind maintaining the original camp structures, the development of educational programing and exhibits, and the interpretation of historical events at the sites. I place the distinctive developments in their country-specific contexts and explore political reasons for the differences. The conclusion looks at the way the narratives at these memorial sites have changed since German unification in 1990.