Emslandlager ("Emsland camps") were a series of 15 moorland labor, punitive and POWs-camps, active from 1933 to 1945 and located in the districts of Emsland and Bentheim, Lower Saxony, Germany.
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The camp VI Oberlangen was built in the fall of 1933 and initially served as a training camp for the guards. From April 1934, the judiciary used the camp to house 1,000 prisoners. The guard took over a serving in the judiciary SA unit, which was later supplemented by judicial officials.
Until the beginning of the war, people who were persecuted by the Nazi regime for political, racial, social or religious reasons were imprisoned. Add a much larger group of prisoners convicted of criminal offenses.
Depending on the time of year, the prisoners had to do forced labor in the moor for 8 to 12 hours a day (drainage, road and road construction, peat extraction). The food was bad and in relation to the hard work not enough. Beyond this general ordeal, the prisoners were subjected to multiple physical and mental ill-treatment by the guards.
In 1935, an average of 788 prisoners were imprisoned. Of these, about 80 percent were in work. About half of the prisoners from Oberlangen was withdrawn in September 1938 for the construction of fortifications in the Palatinate. Only in the summer of 1939 was the camp again occupied by 800 to 1,000 prisoners.
After the beginning of the war in September 1939, the Wehrmacht High Command took over the camp as a prisoner-of-war camp and assigned it as a branch camp to the POW camp VI B Neu Versen. 1940/41 was the camp with about 1,400 Polish Ensigns, occupied in the fall of 1941 with 2,000 Soviet soldiers. In 1943 Oberlangen became an officer camp. On September 1, 1944, 4,967 Italian military internees and 920 Soviet prisoner officers were registered here. After the failure of the Warsaw Uprising from December 1944 to April 1945 war prisoners of the Polish Home Army were brought to Oberlangen. In March 1945, there were a total of 1,556 war prisoners.
On April 12, 1945, the camp was liberated by the 1st Polish Armored Division.
On the war cemetery Oberlangen (See Waymark (
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Commemorative pavilion Oberlangen
In September 2014, a commemorative pavilion was opened on the former site of the Oberlangen camp by representatives of the district of Emsland and the municipality of Oberlangen. Twelve panels provide information about the history of the place.
The Polish survivor Wanda Broszkowska-Piklikiewicz said on the occasion of the opening, the commemorative pavilion serves the future, "to show our youth that this bad time must not repeat itself".
The place is open all year and barrier-free. Admission is free.
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