Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial – House of Remembrance

The Dokumentenhaus (Document House), built in 1981, was the first exhibition building at the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial. On the 50^th anniversary of the liberation in May 1995, it was converted into a Haus des Gedenkens (House of Remembrance). The Düsseldorf-based artist Thomas Schütte (born 1954) redesigned the existing building in collaboration with the architect Gerhard Scharf from Hamburg. The walls inside the building are raw concrete, some of which have been varnished red.

Lists of the dead
Long fabric banners hang from the walls. They bear the names of nearly 25,000 prisoners who died in the Neuengamme concentration camp and its satellite camps. The names are listed chronologically by date of death. The columns of names grow longer towards the end of the war until they seem almost incalculable. 953 of the people listed died in the first year after the liberation as a result of the lasting effects of their imprisonment. They, too, are counted as victims of Neuengamme. Numerous blank banners commemorate the thousends of victims whose names are not known. Facsimiles of the camp’s original death registers can be found in seven display cases in a side room. These registers were kept in the concentration camp’s infirmary. A multi-volume book of remembrance includes more information about the victims, and computer terminals are available for digital research.

Models for comparison
There are two models of the concentration camp grounds in the main hall of the House of Remembrance. One shows the grounds as they were in 1948, when the former concentration camp was handed over to the Hamburg prison authority. After the end of the war, the site was used as an internment camp by the British until 1948. The other model is a modern architectural model showing the grounds as they were in 1995, when the House of Remembrance was erected. The models reveal how the grounds of the former camp developed and changed in the five decades after the war.