KZ Friedhof Schörzingen

Cemetery description

The Cemetery and the Schörzingen Concentration Camp Memorial.

In 1944, between Rottweil and Hechingen, there were established seven sub-camps of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp located in Alsace. The prisoners were forced to build a special installation to first obtain petroleum from oil shale and then to mine it. The project functioned under the code name ‘Wüste’. The Schörzingen camp was one of the sub-camps, and its prisoners came mainly from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. From the autumn of 1944, a large group of prisoners were Poles who were deported here from Warsaw during and after the Warsaw Uprising.
Between January 1944 and April 1945, as a result of slave labour and inhumane conditions, more than 500 prisoners lost their lives in the Schörzingen camp. Initially, the corpses of dead prisoners were driven away to the crematoria in Schwenningen and Tuttlingen. However, when the number of the dead rose substantially, the victims were buried in pits located at the back of the camp.
After the liberation, in May and in June, exhumations of those mass graves were conducted under the supervision of the French administration. The exhumed bodies were interred in single graves in the area of the present-day cemetery. Each German family from the nearby villages was made to provide a new linen shawl to wrap the victims’ bodies.
In 1947, a chapel was erected in the cemetery, which is now marked by wooden plaques bearing the names of 433 identified (at that time) victims. In 2017, more plaques with an additional 106 surnames, as well as the Book of the Dead were added.
The cemetery is the final resting place for 549 victims of the Schörzingen concentration camp. Approximately, half of these (252 persons known by their first and last names) were Polish citizens.
The cemetery is very well preserved and is marked by symbolic stone crosses. The information boards present the history of this concentration camp and its victims, while the chapel provides the victims’ names.

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