Emsland Lager VI Oberlangen - 22 July 2024
Lager VI Oberlangen
History (info: Wikipedia)
Camp Oberlangen was established in the autumn of 1933 in the Emsland. The plan was to use the camp as a concentration camp, but it was soon used to train SA men. The camp had to be able to accommodate 1,000 people. However, from April 1934 onwards, the camp was used to lock up political opponents of the Nazi regime. As an Emslandlager, the camp is known as Lager VI Oberlangen. The camp does not appear on the official German list of concentration camps. In December 1936, Camp Oberlangen was fully occupied and the Germans decided to expand the camp with five hundred places in 1937.
Until the beginning of the Second World War, the prisoners had to do work, such as cultivating peat. In September 1939, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) took over command of the camp. The OKW decided to use Camp Oberlangen as a prisoner of war camp. Initially, it housed mainly Poles, but after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Russian prisoners of war were also added. In 1943, the function of the camp was changed again. It was used as an internment camp for Italian soldiers. A year later, it had another function: female prisoners of war from Poland were imprisoned in the camp.
After the war
On 12 April 1945, the camp was liberated from Emmen by twenty-five soldiers of the Polish 1st Armoured Division. At that time, there were still 1728 women in the camp. They had become prisoners of war in 1944 during the Warsaw Uprising. These women belonged to the Armia Krajowa (loosely translated as the ‘Home Army’, i.e. the Polish resistance). A number of these women enlisted in the Polish occupation army. Until 1947, there was a so-called 'Polish enclave', called Maczkow, named after General Maczek, commander of the 1st Polish Armoured Division.
Virtually nothing remains of the camp itself. On the site where the camp used to be, there is a Polish memorial table, which was placed there in 1995 in memory of the victims. The camp cemetery has remained intact. Here lie 62 Russians in individual graves and between 2,000 and 4,000 Russian victims in several mass graves.
Monday 22nd July 2024
Info panel and next to it the Polish monument.
