Memorial plaque at the Tesch & Stabenow company headquarters

The plaque dedicated in 1997 commemorates the victims of the concentration camps who were murdered with Zyklon B, a poisonous hydrogen cyanide gas produced by Tesch & Stabenow (Testa). This company was based in Messberghof and had sold pesticides since 1924. After 1941, the firm supplied all of the Zyklon B used in the Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Stutthof and Neuengamme concentration camps. It took years of public pressure before the plaque was finally installed. The memorial plaque features the closing line of the ‘Song of the Murdered Jewish People’ by the Jewish poet Yitzhak Katzenelson, who was killed in Auschwitz in 1944.