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 administration of justice had Camp IX Versen to expand the system of the Emsland prison camps from seven to fifteen camps and to be able to use more prisoners for moor cultivation.
The camp Versen was completed in the summer of 1938 for a total of 1,500 prisoners. In May 1939 the first prisoners were admitted and in the summer the camp was already occupied by about 900 prisoners.
Until the beginning of the war, people who were persecuted by the Nazi regime for political, racial, social or religious reasons were imprisoned. In addition, there was a much larger group of prisoners convicted of criminal offenses.
After the beginning of the war in September 1939, the Wehrmacht High Command took over the camp as a prisoner of war VI B camp crew before annexing it to the main camp VI C Bathorn in May 1942. In December 1939, the camp Versen was occupied by 50 prisoners of war. The number increased to 300 by September 1941. In 1943/44, the camp Versen took up mainly Italian military internees. Until 1941, prisoners of war were also used for moorland cultivation. Later they worked in agriculture and commercial enterprises, especially in brickworks, clay mines and turf works.
From November 1944, the SS took over the camp as an external camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp (near Hamburg). The concentration camp inmates had to create defensive positions in the winter of 1944/45. Hundreds of prisoners died as a result of inadequate nutrition, clothing and housing during hard work. There were also arbitrary attacks by the guards. On March 25, 1945, the satellite camp Versen was dissolved. The SS transported the concentration camp prisoners before the advancing Allied troops over Cloppenburg in the direction Neuengamme.
After exhumations in the 1950s, the burial grounds of 297 deceased inmates from the satellite camp Neuengamme and 71 concentration camp inmates of the Emsland concentration camp Börgermoor, Esterwegen and Neusustrum, who had been sent here in 1955, are still standing at the war cemetery in Versen."
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Even today, there is a cemetery "Kriegsgräberstätte Versen" near the former camp.
297 deceased victims of the external command Meppen-Versen of Neuengamme Concentration Camp 1944/45 rest on the cemetery, probably built in 1944.
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