KZ-Gedenkstätte Flossenbürg

Cemetery description

The Flossenbürg concentration camp, located on the border of Upper and Lower Bavaria, began to be operational as of May 1938. The first prisoners, like in other concentration camps, were German communists, Social Democrats, Jews, criminals and other ‘anti-social elements’. From late autumn 1939, the first transports from Poland started to arrive, soon followed by regular transports from all of occupied Europe.
Situated in proximity to quarries and on a high mountainside, the camp consisted of 14 wooden prisoners’ barracks equipped with a sewage system. Initially, each barrack housed 500 persons, with the number rising up to 1000 in the later period. The barracks stood on a mountainside and 80 steps led up to them which the prisoners had to walk up and down, carrying all sorts of heavy objects like cauldrons filled with soup. Flossenbürg, similarly to all the other concentration camps, was surrounded by an electric barbed wire fence.
The prisoners worked in quarries that provided the Third Reich with the necessary building material vital for the state’s development. They laboured as slaves for companies such as Deutsche Erd und Steinwerke and Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke. The camp had about 80 working units (kommandos) that worked for the sake of all the branches of the German economy: railways, mining, building, as well as armaments, metal and aviation industries.
On 23 April 1945, the American troops of the 358th regiment of the 90th infantry division liberated the Flossenbürg camp. The liberators found only 1,526 seriously sick and dying prisoners in the camp. As of mid-March 1945, the Germans had evacuated the camp by sending ‘death marches’ in the southerly direction. Approximately 7,000 prisoners did not survive those marches. The last evacuation columns were liberated as late as on 8 May 1945.
The data provided by the Gedenkstätte Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial estimates that between 1938 and April 1945, approximately 100,000 prisoners passed through the camp and its kommandos (working units) - 84,000 men and 16,000 women, including prisoners from Poland - 31,400, from the USSR - 22,000, from Hungary - 11,000, from Germany - 9,097, from France - 5,070, from Czechoslovakia - 2,263, from Italy - 3,033, and from Yugoslavia - 1,952. The estimated number of deaths amounts to around 30,000. According to the numbers given by former prisoners, though, the overall number of prisoners of Flossenbürg was approximately 200,000 while 90,000 died, including 28,000 Soviets, 17,545 Poles, 3,200 French citizens, 3,200 Czech citizens and 3,100 Jews. To this number should be added those who were not mentioned in the camp’s documentation but who died during the first days, weeks or months after the end of the war as a result of exhaustion and the diseases the prisoners had fallen ill with while still in the camp. Just after the war, the number of victims from Poland was estimated at 17,546. Nowadays, this number has been reduced to 8,000 Polish victims documented by name (relevant information is available at the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial).
During its operation, the camp utilised 4 crematorium ovens that at times could not accommodate all the bodies. In such cases, the bodies were burnt in pyres within the camp. In the area of the present-day museum, one can find the so-called ‘Valley of Death’ - the site of the former crematorium that was used to burn the victims’ bodies between 1940-1945. Their ashes are buried in the nearby pyramid made of earth and underneath a granite slab. Below the crematorium and on the lawn there is the symbol of a red corner - the place where prisoners were shot dead.
The present-day area of the memorial site houses a cemetery of more than 5,000 prisoners. Some of the deceased died in the sub-camps of the Flossenbürg concentration camp, but the majority were victims of the death marches from April 1945 until the war’s end. Initially, the victims were buried in the place where they died. In the post-war period, their remains were moved to the area of the memorial site. However, most of the victims remain anonymous. In contrast, some of the names are known, but it is not known where the remains of those victims are interred. Therefore, only when both the identity of a given victim and the place of their interment are known is their grave marked with a headstone bearing their personal data.
In 1947, a group of Poles (former prisoners) erected a chapel that was consecrated in presence of an international public. It was the first memorial site connected with a concentration camp in Bavaria and one of the first of this type both in Germany and in Europe. However, for several dozen post-war years, this site was known by just a few. Most of the camp’s infrastructure had not survived. Therefore, the area was built over and it was only in the late 1990s that the process of the creation of an honourable memorial site was launched. On 1 January 2003, the Bavarian Memorial Foundation took custody of the Flossenbürg concentration camp site. The Foundation is governed by the Bavarian State Ministry for Education and Culture, Science and Art, and is financed from the budgets of the Bavarian state, the city of Munich and with resources coming from the federal donation project. In 2007, the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Museum was formed in the area of the former concentration camp. The Museum is governed by the Bavarian Memorial Foundation.

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