On January 27, 2025, it will be 80 years since Auschwitz was liberated. The consequences are still deeply rooted in our society. This is also the case in Lusdwigsfelde, where the largest forced labor camp of Mercedes Benz in Germany was located. At the site of the former camp itself, there is nothing to remind us of the history or the people who had to perform forced labor and died here.

In 1936, the Daimler-Benz AG large engine plant was built in the Genshagener Heide near Ludwigsfelde. In close cooperation with the Reich Aviation Ministry (RLM), aircraft engines were manufactured here in order to build up the

newly created air force. During the course of the war between 1939 and 1945, Genshagen was one of the most important locations for the air armaments industry, with a total area of 375 hectares. From 1940 onwards, prisoners of war and numerous other deportees from all over Europe were forcibly deployed here (cf. 2022, Matthias Antkowiak, Archäologischer Zwischenbericht).

From 1942 onwards, the management of the Daimler-Benz site in Genshagen requested forced laborers from the concentration camps from the SS Economic and Administrative Office, which was located on Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, today's Cumberland Haus. In 1944, when the armaments industry was running at full speed, Daimler-Benz selected around 1,100 women from the Ravensbrück concentration camp between August and October 1944 and sent them to the factory. From November 1944, the women were housed in a cellar located directly next to the workplace, the so-called “Deutschlandhalle”. Here they had to carry out assembly work. The survivors did not see daylight again until the end of the war in May 1945. The site of the former armaments industry is still unmarked today: Only a few traces of the former building can still be found.

It is unclear where those who died or were killed, including over 100 Italian forced laborers who died of tuberculosis, were buried.Mercedes-Benz still produces in Ludwigsfelde and is one of the largest employers there. Neither Mercedes-Benz nor the town of Ludwigsfelde have so far shown any interest in clarifying and acknowledging their own local history.

We invite you to join us on a visit to the site of the former Deutschlandhalle and the cellar for the concentration camp prisoners from Ravensbrück and learn more about the history on site.

Historian and forensic expert Andreas Heinze will walk with us along the route that the forced laborers had to take for Daimler-Benz, from the train station via the former camps to the production site and the cellar, and will explain at each station what happened, using archive material, among other things.

If you wish, you can join us on the regional train from Berlin.

To make it easier to plan, please register for the memorial walk: gedenkspaziergang@posteo.de