Camps

The small fabric badge with a cross-stitch border is embroidered with a number: the prisoner number of the Polish Jew Nelly Kalecka, which was assigned to her in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Nelly received this pin in 1945, on her 16th birthday, in the Retzow-Rechlin subcamp. A friend and fellow prisoner transformed the prisoner number – today one of the strongest symbols of dehumanisation in the Nazi camps – into a personal gift for her.

German-occupied Europe was criss-crossed by a complex camp system. In addition to concentration and extermination camps, this also included forced labour and police detention camps. Camps were used to repress and exploit undesirable groups – often to the point of death. In extermination camps such as those of “Aktion Reinhardt”, Jews in particular were murdered on an industrial scale shortly after their arrival. Forced labour and criminal human experiments also took place in the Auschwitz camp complex, the centre of the mass murder of Jews as well as Sinti and Roma.