In July 1944, a special section of the camp was set up for prominent French prisoners, comprising political opponents and resistors against the German occupation of France.

William discovered his singing voice while cheering his fellow prisoners at Neuengamme and went on to a prominent career as a singer of popular and gospel music.

[2] On 15 March 1945, the transfer of Scandinavian prisoners from other German camps to Neuengamme began, as part of the White Buses program.

[12] Neuengamme's subcamps were emptied later that month on death marches to the reception camps of Bergen-Belsen and Osnabrück, and, on 8 April, an air raid on a prisoner train transport led to the Celle massacre.

Between 20 and 26 April, over 9000 prisoners were taken from Neuengamme and loaded on four ships: the passenger liners Deutschland and Cap Arcona, and two large steamers, SS Thielbek and Athen.

Concluding that the ships contained Norway-bound fleeing Nazi officials rather than thousands of prisoners, the Royal Air Force (RAF) Hawker Typhoons bombed the Thielbek, Cap Arcona and Deutschland on May 3.

Under the special requirement from the Soviet Union made in 1944 to take back all citizens, repatriation began on 9 May, only four days after the DP Camp was established.

[21] To get along with the difficulties of supply in the DP Camps, caused by the enormous number of survivors, on 27 May 1945 the British military government called on the citizens of Hamburg to donate clothes for men and women.

[22] In May 1945, the DP Assembly Centre "Zoo" was established in the Hamburg park "Planten un Blomen", for repatriations into the Soviet Union.

In fact in 1950 six DP Camps still existed in Hamburg (Zoo, Funkturm, Radrennbahn, Alsterdorf, Fischbeck und Falkenberg) with 4.000 people.

On 8 October 1946, the eleven men found guilty in the Neuengamme Trials were executed by hanging by the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint.

[30] The Neuengamme concentration camp was run under the SS practice of "extermination through labour" (German: Vernichtung durch Arbeit).

Prisoners worked for 10–12 hours per day and were killed both due to the inhumane conditions in the camp as well as active violence from the guards.

42,900 prisoners died from difficult slave labour combined with insufficient nutrition, extremely unhygienic conditions contributing to widespread disease, and arbitrary brutal punishments from the guards.

This included the construction of a canal on the small offshoot of the Elbe river located at the campsite in order to transport raw materials from Hamburg.

[35] From 1942 until the end of the war, armaments production became the central focus of Neuengamme, with private business ventures profiting financially from the free labour of the prisoners.

Several armaments companies, including Messap, Jastram, Walter-Werke and the SS-owned Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke (DAW), established facilities inside the Neuengamme concentration camp following negotiations with the Nazi regime.

According to the testimony of Wilhelm Bahr, an ex-medical orderly, during the trial against Bruno Tesch, 200 Russian prisoners of war were gassed by prussic acid in 1942.

[41] According to the testimony of Wilhelm Bahr, an ex-medical orderly, during the trial against Bruno Tesch, 197 Soviet prisoners of war were gassed by prussic acid (Zyklon B) in the arrest bunker of the camp on 25 September 1942.

Many of these SS women are known by name, including Käthe Becker, Erna Dickmann, Johanna Freund, Angelika Grass, Kommandoführerin Loni Gutzeit (who was nicknamed "The Dragon of Wandsbek" by the prisoners while serving at Hamburg-Wandsbek), Gertrud Heise, Frieda Ignatowitz, Gertrud Möller, who also served at the Boizenburg subcamp, Lotte Johanna Radtke, Chief Wardress Annemie von der Huelst, and Inge Marga Marggot Weber.

Today it is known that female guards staffed the subcamps of Neuengamme at Boizenburg, Braunschweig SS-Reitschule, Hamburg-Sasel, Hamburg-Wandsbek, Helmstedt-Beendorf, Langenhorn, Neugraben, Obernheide, Salzwedel, and Unterluss (Vuterluss).

Only a few were tried for war crimes, and these include Anneliese Kohlmann, who served as one of six women-guards at Neugraben,[43] and Gertrud Heise, Oberaufseherin at Obernheide.

As an independent concentration camp, the following were commandants of Neuengamme: • SS Hauptsturmführer Martin Gottfried Weiß, June 1940 – September 1942.

[50] The Nazi Organisation Todt (OT) operated each subcamp and used forced labourers to build bunkers, gun emplacements, air-raid shelters, and concrete fortifications.

Documentation Center reopend camp after 20 year sebaticle, in 2024 by Chief Sargeant of Federal Ministry at Channel Islands (Background) Location was merged with Geospatial Data in 2024.

Following intense pressure from the Amicale Internationale de Neuengamme, the main organization representing all former camp prisoners, the memorial was then expanded in 1965.

In 1984, protests successfully halted the demolition of the former brickworks and several important historical buildings from the former camp were designated as heritage sites.

[52] While decades of pressure from survivors and activists managed to convince the Hamburg Senate to relocate the two prisons standing on the former concentration camp site in 1989, it was in 2003 and 2006 they were officially moved off-site.

The columns of basalt remember July 1944, when the Maquisards from Murat were deported and afterwards murdered in the Neuengamme concentration camp and its affiliates.

The second is a former subcamp of Neuengamme in Hamburg-Sasel, where Jewish women from the Lodz Ghetto in Poland were transferred and forced to work in construction.