A German property developer has bought a former Nazi concentration camp that used tunnel slave labour, alarming historians and victims’ relatives.
The owner of GPM Projekt 58 UG, a development company in Saxony that is said to specialise in “problem properties”, has agreed to pay €500,000 (£421,000) for the site after the previous owner went into insolvency.
The decision has angered historians in Saxony as well as relatives of the camp’s survivors, who say they cannot believe such a historically sensitive landmark has been sold off to a private firm.
The Langenstein-Zwieberge camp was built near the town of Halberstadt in Saxony and consisted of an 8 mile-long tunnel network, where prisoners were forced to help build Nazi weapons such as V2 rockets for the war effort.
Survivors of the camp said the conditions were so barbaric that the bodies would “pile up” in the tunnels, where many suffered from extreme malnutrition.
“I am angry, sad, outraged, all at the same time,” Helena Barcikowski, a descendant of camp survivor Marian Barcikowski, told Der Spiegel magazine.
Mr Barcikowski had been deported to Germany in 1944 from Warsaw, where he was a staunch opponent of Nazism, she said. He was put to work in the tunnels for seven months and somehow survived.
But when he returned to his family after the war he was a shadow of his former self, suffering from tuberculosis and dysentery – and weighing just 48 kilograms.
“His condition was so bad that he was too weak even for a death march,” Ms Barcikowski added.
The purchase has also concerned historians such as Rainer Neugebauer, a professor of social sciences at Harz University of Applied Sciences.
“[It is stunning] how something like this can still happen after 80 years,” he told Der Spiegel. “One gets the feeling that none of those with political responsibility are taking this historically sensitive facility seriously… this is not real estate, it is a mass grave.”
It remains unclear what GPM Projekt, which is run by investor Peter Jugl, intends to do with the site of the former Nazi camp. However, the firm’s lawyer has reportedly stated in court that there are no plans for commercial use of the tunnels themselves.
The company’s website includes a portfolio of various residential and office projects, as well as an airport hotel and student accommodation blocks. The same website vaguely refers to the concentration camp site as “underground halls in Halberstadt” without giving further context.
According to Der Spiegel, local authorities had initially tried to block the purchase of the land because it contained a monument to the crimes committed there which cannot be moved.
But Mr Jugl then sued state authorities and won his case, on the grounds that their right of veto did not apply to the sale of insolvent estates – as was the case with Langenstein-Zwieberge.
The Telegraph has approached GPM Projekt for comment.
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