Flossenbürg Concentration Camp

Scope and content

The collection contains among others:
Documents of Concentration Camp Flossenbürg relating to prisoner barracks, clothing, weaponry, transports, general correspondence; witness testimonies of former prisoners, proof-of-claim forms on the prisoner work deployment, strength reports, status reports, transport lists, reports of attempted escapes, camp correspondence, Wehrmacht personnel files, prisoners numbers books, prisoner lists, lists of personal effects, punishment documents, prisoner-hospital records, release documents, death certificates, cemetery lists, affidavits, lists of liberated prisoners, lists of prisoners who died after liberation

History of Concentration Camp Flossenbürg 1938-1945:
In the Oberpfaelzer forest, only some 10 km away from today’s border to Czechia, from 3 May 1938 until 23 April 1945 was the site of Concentration Camp Flossenbürg. In selecting this site it was not only the strategically important proximity to the border but primarily the ample supply of granite which proved decisive. In 1937 the SS –Administration Office had already been examining several stone quarries with the intention of building a concentration camp where the prisoners could be used as slave labor for fuel extraction. After the selection of the granite quarry near Flossenbürg as the location for the Concentration Camp, the first 100 prisoners from Dachau Concentration Camp arrived on 3 Mai 1938 in Flossenbürg. The prisoners belonged primarily to the categories “criminal” and “asocial”. They had to carry out the work of developing and building the camp. The SS-owned “Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH” (German earth and stone works Ltd) assumed the administration of the stone quarry. Within a very short time the number of prisoners increased rapidly, by the end of the year there were approx.1,500. Roughly half of them were forced to work in the stone quarry. The rest of the prisoners had to continue with constructing the camp: they built prisoner barracks, SS housing and buildings for manufacturing construction material. By April 1940 the number of prisoners had climbed to approx. 2,200. Whereas the first prisoners had been primarily Germans, as of 1940 the prisoner structure changed fundamentally. Prisoners from the occupied countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, Belgium, Netherlands and from the Soviet Union formed the majority of the inmates. The largest group numerically was the East Europeans, who comprised almost two thirds of the total number of prisoners. With the increasing importance for the armaments industry of the work done by prisoners, thousands of Jews, primarily from Poland and Hungary, were deported to Flossenbürg. They had to assemble fighter planes for the Messerschmitt Company. As a result of the “evacuations” from camps in the east, in 1944 the number of prisoners in Flossenbürg climbed rapidly: in March 1945 the SS held around 15,000 people captive in the main camp, and 37,000 people in the approx. 100 satellite camps. Between 16th and 20th April the camp was disbanded, and the SS forced 16,000 to 20,000 people onto a death march heading south. On 23 April 1945 US-Army units liberated CC Flossenbürg. Of the at least 100,000 prisoners who were held captive in Concentration Camp Flossenbürg and its satellite camps during the seven years the camps existed, more than 30,000 of them lost their lives.

Source: Skriebeleit, Jörg: Flossenbürg, in: Lexikon des Holocaust, ed. by Wolfgang Benz, München 2002, p. 72-73 and http://www.memorialmuseums.org/denkmaeler/view/242/KZ-Gedenkstätte-Flossenbürg [Latest access 2012-08-13]