Читать книгу 100 Favourite Places - Группа авторов - Страница 15

11

NS Forced Labour
Documentation Center

SCHÖNEWEIDE

These low-rise, cinderblock buildings could be mistaken for storage units – or perhaps poultry barns. They line up one behind the other on a stark lot, some with boarded-up windows, their walls flecked with mould. Indeed, they merge noiselessly with the semi-industrial landscape of Schöneweide; but these are the remains of General Building Inspector (GBI) Camp 75/76 – so anonymous as to be left undiscovered until 1993.

The ‘Building Inspector’ was Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, who had such camps built to house forced labourers tasked with the construction of Welthaupstadt Germania, the Nazis’ planned capital of the world. From 1943 on, those incarcerated at this and other GBI camps also built air raid shelters, toiled in arms factories and cleared rubble from the streets after bombings. During WWII, Berlin had approximately 3,000 camps like this one.

Camp 75/76, in use from 1943 to 1945, imprisoned some 2,000 men from Italy, Belgium, France and Poland. In 1945, a group of female prisoners was resettled here as well, and made to work at the Pertrix battery factory. After the war, some barracks were converted to civilian uses, such as scientific laboratories and a sauna.

Most of the buildings are now shut; through grimy windows you can make out derelict kitchens and electrical equipment. But Building No. 5 contains an extensive exhibit commemorating tthe twelve million people forced into labour camps under the Nazis. A map details all the prison camps in Berlin, and display cases bear discarded reminders of this camp’s occupants – a stack of documents bound with string, a heap of rusted bottle openers.

Somewhat surprisingly, a number of the camp’s buildings remain in commercial use. Just next to the memorial are several that function, variously, as a doctor’s office, a bowling club, even a kindergarten. A little further away, though, stands Building No. 13. Preserved to demonstrate the everyday life of the inmates, the barrack’s walls bear inscriptions made by the Italian prisoners who lived here, their long-forgotten names a testament to the brutality of the Nazi regime. TE

Britzer Str. 5, 12439: S Schöneweide; www.topographie.de

Map: Overview G3