The long road to memorialization: a history of the development of the Esterwegen Memorial, 1945-2011

Sarah Schraeder

Memorial sites at former concentration camps serve as primary sites of memory of the Nazi regime's brutality and destruction of individual and civic freedoms in Germany. Much of the early postwar period included the development of memorialization projects of large concentration camp sites, such as Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, yet the overall trend in West Germany until the 1980s was to remember the past selectively, focusing particularly on their own victimhood. While the creation of public spaces of memory of these important sites served to remind visitors of the horrors of the Nazi regime, the smaller satellite camps were dissolved or redeveloped for other uses. These smaller camps were reestablished as sites of memory beginning in the early 2000s, and today these sites are locally highly publicized. This thesis will focus on a case study of the memorial at Esterwegen located in the Emsland, a rural region in northwest Germany on the Dutch border, to explore why nearly forty years passed before any memorial projects began and how these newer memorialization projects compare to the memorials that were established in the immediate postwar period. The Esterwegen Memorial commemorates a dense camp system where tens of thousands of inmates were incarcerated under brutal conditions that became integral to the regional economy and identity during the Nazi period. The primary focus in studies of memorialization projects of former concentration camps centers around the creation of memorial sites at large concentration camps. As the development of memorial sites at smaller former concentration camps did not develop until the late 1990s and 2000s, relatively little attention has been given to the development of these smaller sites. This thesis will provide an analysis of the development of a local and regional effort to memorialize a set of former concentration camps referred to as the Emslandlager, or camps in the Emsland. It will examine how local and regional memorial projects compare to national projects, a necessary comparison to understand how the Emsland's process of negotiating its Nazi past in order to show how it illumines and challenges national-level narratives about German memory of the Nazi era.

The long road to memorialization: a history of the development of the Esterwegen Memorial, 1945-2011

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