Sad History

The tablet on Walsroder Str.

There was construction work in the street near where I live since I moved to my current flat in July, and as I walked through it the other day, they finished with it. As I walked through the site, small tablets on the stone below my feet caught my attention. Memorial tablets: some people got caught and then died in a concentration camp.

It aroused my curiosity, and I browsed about it. There was a concentration camp at the city part where I live: Konzentrationslager Mißler, located at the Walsroder Str. 1—about seven minutes' walk from where I live.

The concentration camp stood at the beginning of March 1933 by the initiative of the police president Theodor Laue. The reason: an overload in the city jail, which was full of the “enemy” of Nazi. There was a big arrest between February and March of 1933, summing up to 1305 people until 1934 [+]. The arrested were people from the trade union, the communist, and the social-democrat [+].

In the concentration camp Mißler, the guards tortured and committed violent acts toward the prisoners. The people who were living in the area became witnesses for this cruelty [+]. The concentration camp closed in 1934 and they moved the prisoners to other concentration camps in Ochtumsand, Langlütjen II, and the jail Oslebshausen [+]. This was due to the protest of the resident, who could not withstand the torture and brutality that happened [+].

The memorial tablet on the pedestrian walk wrote that those whose names written on it went through deportation to a concentration camp in Minsk. Those people were probably Jewish; they die there. On November 18th, 1941, the first wave of deportation of the Jewish people took place. The Gestapo was responsible for this with the help of the local police. The state took the assets that the people left, claiming it as something that would benefit the state [+].

I went to the address where the concentration camp Mißler once stood. Behind the stores, café, and restaurants that fill the surrounding, a small monument stands. A relief on the wall shows a grotesque form with words written on it. The following is my translation of it:

Nothing is harder and demands more character than to find oneself in an open contradiction to one's time and saying out loud: No!


Bremen, 23 December 2016 #memoir

Remark: I lost my notes on the sources for the information here when I moved from Bremen. Where a citation supposed to be available, I gave a bracket with a plus sign there. Therefore, any facts should be viewed skeptically.