KZ-Gedenkstätte Flossenbürg (Concentration Camp Memorial Flossenbürg)

In 1938, the camp in Flossenbürg became the fourth large concentration camp in the German Reich. Around 100,000 people were imprisoned here until 1945. At first, the prisoners were exploited in the local granite quarries, and from 1943 onwards they had to assemble aircraft parts for the armaments factory Messerschmidt. In addition to extermination through inhumane forced labour, inmates were also executed, including Soviet prisoners of war and resistance fighters such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wilhelm Canaris and Hans Oster. Flossenbürg was also the starting point of the infamous death marches: in mid-April 1945, the SS drove over 10,000 prisoners south. Along these routes, the advancing American units discovered several thousand dead. When they liberated the camp on 23 April 1945, they found only 1,500 terminally ill prisoners. In 1946, a memorial to the victims was set up on a small area of the former camp grounds, and a cemetery was added in the 1950s. The memorial site in the "Valley of Death" is one of the first concentration camp memorials in Europe.The grounds of today's memorial site comprise about half of the former prisoner area and parts of the SS grounds. Some of the original buildings around the central roll call square have been preserved, including watchtowers, the crematorium, parts of the detention building, SS commandant's office and the former camp laundry with "prisoners' bath" and camp kitchen.A permanent exhibition provides information about the history of Flossenbürg Concentration Camp with its 90 satellite camps and documents individual fates of former prisoners in an exemplary manner. In the former camp kitchen, an exhibition is dedicated to the topic "What Remains - Aftermath of Flossenbürg Concentration Camp".

Last edited on 24.03.2025