Memorial Arbeitserziehungslager Airport Essen/Mülheim

Air traffic at Essen / Mülheim was stopped at the beginning of the Second World War. The small circular civil aviation airport from the year 1925 had to be expanded and equipped with modern runways in order to use the airport for military purposes. Workers were urgently needed for this purpose, but they were not easy to obtain due to the then lack of workers, which had only increased with the start of the war by the mobilization of the Wehrmacht.
In June 1941 the work education camp in Essen / Mülheim was put into use for about 500 prisoners, housed in empty wooden barracks on the west side of the airport, not far from the airport quarter.
The vast majority of the prisoners at the airport were young foreigners from the Netherlands, France and Belgium. But Germans, Poles, Yugoslavians and Ukrainians were also held captive in the camp. Most of the foreigners had been involuntarily recruited into the Arbeitseinsatz in Germany and had gone home for various reasons, back to family and relatives. According to the Nazis, they had broken their "employment contract" and could therefore be prosecuted by the Gestapo. In the camp they were separated from the German prisoners by a barbed wire fence: contact between Germans and foreigners had to be prevented.
From early 1942 until the camp was dissolved and destroyed in March 1945, a total of at least 130 people died as a result of the inhumane conditions in the prison camp. Almost half of the dead were Dutch.

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