Emslandlager II Aschendorfermoor - Aschendorf-Moor-Siedlung, Germany - WWII Prisoner of War Camps on Waymarking.com

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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"From April 1937, the camp was expanded to accommodate 1,500 prisoners. For the guards, the prisoners had to create an "amusement park", from which remains are preserved.
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. From July 1937 to May 1940, the central administration of all camps located in the Emsland gathered the political prisoners in Aschendorfermoor. Of these, about 2,200 prisoners were affected during the entire period. Subsequently, almost half of the prisoners were former soldier convicts of Wehrmacht courts.
Depending on the time of year, the prisoners had to do forced labor in the moor for 8-12 hours a day (drainage, road and road construction, peat extraction). After the beginning of the war in 1939, they were increasingly used in war-important enterprises and in agriculture. 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. There are 237 deaths recorded in the civil registry; the actual number is likely to be higher. The dead were buried in the camp cemetery Börgermoor, today burial place Esterwegen.
At the beginning of April 1945, about 2,500 to 3,000 prisoners were transferred from the prison camps in the Emsland to Aschendorfermoor in order to transport them away. Shortly thereafter, a captain in paratrooper uniform appeared with a few scattered soldiers, took command and made a mass murder of the prisoners. When he was arrested in Aurich, the captain identified himself as the 21-year-old corporal Willi Herold. He was sentenced to death by a British court in August 1946 and executed in Wolfenbüttel on 14 November.
In 1946, the 172 victims of the massacre were exhumed and buried nearby in a newly created cemetery."

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