Events

Camps – Spaces – Neighbours. 

Concentration Camps and Their Surroundings

The European Summer University 2026 will examine not only the complex interactions and relationships between concentration camps and their surroundings, but also the respective attitudes of the local populations towards the memorial sites in the Federal Republic of Germany, the GDR, Austria, reunified Germany and the territories occupied by the Wehrmacht during the Second World War.

The concentration camps were not only an ‘integral part of the National Socialist social order’ (Jens-Christian Wagner), they also existed in constant interaction with their regional surroundings and were thus impossible for anyone to overlook. From 1933 onwards, a large number of smaller and, in some cases, temporary concentration camps were set up to lock up actual or potential opponents of the new National Socialist order, to subject them to interrogation and torture without legal restrictions, or to enforce the racist Volksgemeinschaft.

‘The concentration camps were never cut off from the rest of the world, and certainly not from the communities in their neighbourhood’ (Nikolaus Wachsmann). The involvement of companies and businesses in the construction and logistics of the camps and propaganda-driven press tours in the 1930s brought their existence to the public's attention.

Jens Schley's Nachbar Buchenwald (1999) and the search for traces in Fürstenberg/Havel conducted by him and Annette Leo (Das ist so'n zweischneidiges Schwert hier unser KZ..., 2007) are examples of how the socio-spatial environment of concentration camps can be explored. This helped to counter the myth that people knew nothing and were not allowed to speak out. At the same time, such research projects revealed the unbroken continuity of Nazi propaganda, which claimed that criminals and ‘anti-social elements’ had been rightly imprisoned in the camps and had threatened and terrorised the local population after liberation in 1945.

When memorials were established at the sites of some former concentration camps, the initiative in most cases came from survivors and camp communities who wanted to commemorate the murdered prisoners. The surroundings of the camps initially played only a minor role and were not featured in the first exhibitions. Nevertheless, the presence of the camp sites and their conversion into memorials confronted the people in the surrounding areas with a past that most wanted to forget and repress as quickly as possible.

Venue

Ravensbrück Memorial Museum

Straße der Nationen
16798 Fürstenberg/Havel