Jens-Christian Wagner Book order

Around 3,500 children under 15 were among the around 120,000 people from all over Europe who were imprisoned in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Many of these children died of hunger, disease or physical violence. Those who survived carried the burden of their physical and mental suffering for the rest of their lives. The exhibition booklet documents substantial parts of the exhibition. Based on some individual life stories, the specific conditions under which children lived in the Bergen-Belsen camp and the ways in which they tried to cope with them are presented. The relief measures taken for surviving children after the liberation and full biographies of child survivors also get their own sections.

In the late summer of 1943, although Germany's military defeat was already clearly looming on the horizon, the SS established Dora Subcamp outside the town of Nordhausen, Thuringia. Its inmates were compelled to perform labour in the effort to relocate rocket armament from Peenemünde to the underground Mittelwerk plant. In the autumn of 1944, Dora and its neighbouring subcamps were consolidated in Mittelbau Concentration Camp, whose forty individual camps formed a network which had spread throughout the Harz Mountains by the war’s end. The majority of the inmates were assigned to gruelling forced labour in the construction of tunnel facilities for underground aircraft factories. By April 1945 the SS had deported more than sixty thousand persons to Mittelbau Concentration Camp from all over Europe. At least twenty thousand of them died. This volume documents the permanent exhibition on the camp’s history presented at Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial. It places Mittelbau-Dora in the context of the »Total War« and provides information not only on the inmates, but also on the perpetrators, profiteers and spectators in the camps’ environs.