Detail

The Leipzig Nazi Forced Labour Memorial is situated to the northeast of Leipzig in the grounds of what is now the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research. During the Second World War, this site housed the head office of the company Hugo Schneider AG (HASAG), the largest armaments company in Saxony. In Leipzig alone, HASAG used some 10,000 prisoners of war, civilian forced labourers and concentration camp prisoners in the production of ammunition, shells and anti-tank weapons. To this end, the company constructed large barrack camps next to the company site in 1939 to house the forced labourers. In addition, in the summer of 1944, a satellite camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp was built to the north of the factory site, in which more than five thousand women, girls and children were incarcerated.

In 2001, volunteers erected the Leipzig Nazi Forced Labour Memorial on the former HASAG company site. They were mainly supported by the City of Leipzig and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, which has been on the site since the early 1990s. The memorial commemorates the former forced labourers in Leipzig and the region at the historical site and is a point of contact for survivors and their families. It carries out research into aspects of the subject which have not yet been illuminated and collects historical evidence. Its permanent exhibition displays information about the background and history of the use of forced labour by HASAG and in Leipzig and the region. A digital map in the memorial documents locations of all the known former camps and workplaces associated with Nazi forced labour in the Leipzig area. This map, which currently has more than 700 locations marked, can also be accessed for private research on the memorial’s website at www.zwangsarbeit-in-leipzig.de/karte and forms an integral part of its educational work.   

The memorial offers guided tours of the permanent exhibition and the former HASAG site throughout the year. Between spring and autumn, there are also public tours and cycle tours of various parts of Leipzig and the surrounding area, where participants can visit the sites of former camps and workplaces associated with Nazi forced labour and learn about the living and working conditions of forced labourers.

In addition to guided tours and tours of selected neighbourhoods, the memorial also offers seminar modules for school and youth groups to learn more about specific topics. With the help of historical documents, photographs and testimonies, these seminars offer students and young people the opportunity to look more closely at the biographies of former forced labourers and their living and working conditions, at selected camp sites and institutions that used and supported forced labour, and at the topics of resistance, criminal persecution and pregnancy of forced labourers.

The memorial also offers educational projects lasting several days in cooperation with schools and extracurricular institutions. It assists students in researching former forced labour camps in their neighbourhoods, accompanies them in their search for traces and supports them in memorial projects. In addition to the digital map of the former sites of Nazi forced labour in Leipzig, the memorial provides various materials on its website to help visitors prepare for a visit to a memorial site and to conduct their own research: https://www.zwangsarbeit-in-leipzig.de/de/zwangsarbeit-in-leipzig/ns-zwangsarbeit/karte/anregungen-fuer-die-bildungsarbeit