Neuengamme

Members of the Boys were slave labourers in the Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg, Germany.

Neuengamme concentration camp was operated by Nazi Germany and had 85 subcamps.

The Boys were teenage and child-Holocaust survivors, who were brought to the UK after the war for rest and rehabilitation.

^{KZ Neuengamme.}

History

Neuengamme was a concentration camp established on the outskirts of Hamburg. It was the largest concentration camp in northwestern Germany. It is believed that of the 100,000 prisoners in the main camp and its subcamps about 42,900 died.

Established in 1938, Neuengamme was originally a subcamp of Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Prisoners were used as slave labour in the brick factory.

The camp became a concentration camp in 1940, and prisoners brought from across occupied Europe began to work in armaments factories. The largest group of prisoners in the main camp were Soviet prisoners of war.

Neuengamme had 80 subcamps including one in the Channel Islands on the island of Alderney. Almost all women imprisoned at Neuengamme were interned in subcamps. The members of the Boys held in the Neuengamme camp complex are believed to have been held in its subcamps and were taken there are slave labourers in the last year of the war.

The camp was run under the SS practice of Vernichtung durch Arbeit, ‘extermination through labour.

Dissolution & Liberation

On 15 March 1945, the transfer of Scandinavian prisoners from other German camps to Neuengamme began, as part of the White Buses programme. Later that month Neuengamme’s subcamps were empties by death march. Over 9,000 prisoners were taken to the Bay of Lübeck and placed on ships among them the Cap Ancona which were bombed in a British air raid, among the Sam Pivnik, one of the Boys. Over 7,000 prisoners died in the raid.

On 2 May 1945, the SS and the last of the prisoners left the Neuengamme concentration camp. The first British soldiers who arrived the next day found the camp empty.

Aftermath

The British Army used the main camp as an internment camp for SS and Nazi officials and as a displaced persons’ camp. The British conducted 33 trials of staff from the Neuengamme concentration camp between 1946-1948. Some of those found guilty were executed.

In 1948 the camp was converted into a prison run by the Hamburg authorities from 1950-2004.