Ulm (dpa / lsw) – “Laboratories of violence” or “rehearsal stage of the Third Reich”: This is what experts call the early concentration camps of the National Socialists, which an exhibition is now focusing on. Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth (Greens) opened the joint show “Prelude to Terror. Early Concentration Camps under National Socialism” in Ulm’s Oberer Kuhberg Documentation Center on Tuesday.
These first camps paved the way for mass extermination, but the curators of the exhibition say that they are still underrepresented in the public eye. Behind it are 17 memorials and places of learning throughout Germany. Large institutions such as the one in Dachau or the Berlin “Topography of Terror” are involved, but also smaller ones such as the memorial in Ahrensbök in Schleswig-Holstein.
Using the biographies of prisoners and guards, the project shows the system of the early concentration camps. “They also wanted to test what the population would put up with,” explained Dr. Ingaburgh Klatt from the Ahrensbök Memorial. “And the population didn’t resist at all.”
At the opening, Minister of State for Culture and patron Claudia Roth drew the link to the present: Today there are enemies of democracy again and also members of parliament who want to draw a line “where there should be no line,” said the native of Ulm. The exhibition is an “exemplary project for the decentralized culture of remembrance and the diversity of our memorials.”
