Gedenkort KZ-Außenlager Klinkerwerk

Cemetery description

In 1938, by the lock in Lehnitz near Oranienburg, the SS began to build, using concentration camp prisoners, a brickyard that was the largest in the world. The manufactured bricks were meant to be used in the turning of Berlin into Germania. Until 1941, the Klinkerwerk kommando was a penal company. After the construction of the prisoners’ barracks, it became a sub-camp where armaments production took place. In fact, it was a death sub-camp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp network, where the prisoners, both individually and in groups, were exterminated through murderous labour.
A large number of prisoners were also killed in the air raids that took place in April 1945. Nowadays, in the area of the former camp, one can find the unmarked graves of several dozen prisoners, located in the former bomb craters. Human remains can also be found at the bottom of the port canal and the wet dock.
Now, the area by the lock in Lehnitzsee houses an open-air exhibition entitled ‘Bricks for Germania - Hand Grenades for the Final Victory (Steine für Germania – Granaten für den Endsieg) that presents the history of this place and its prisoners. It includes, as well, a large mock-up of the area of the former Klinkerwerk sub-camp. Most of the buildings and infrastructure from the war period have not survived.
Following a 500-metre distance along the canal, one reaches the former brickyard port (Klinkerwerk). At the entrance to the wet dock there is the Memorial of the Klinkerwerk Sub-Camp (Gedenkstätte KZ-Außenlager Klinkerwerk) that was created in 2015. The steel plaques placed on the port quay bear passages from the memoirs of former prisoners that describe the living conditions and the life of the camp’s prisoners. The inscriptions are in German, English, Polish, French and Russian. They also bear various messages for posterity. One states: ‘To forget about this place would equal crime.’ The bricks found in the area of the former brickyard were used to build a symbolic prisoners’ triangle badge surrounded by a plinth that bears the following inscription: ‘1939-1945. Look here! Do not turn your eyes away!’
All the necessary information about the victims of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, its sub-camps and kommandos that is available in the Book of the Dead of the Sachsenhausen 1936-1945 concentration camp can be found on www.stiftung-bg.de/totenbuch/main.php a także na www.straty.pl

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