The camp was built in late 1943 – early 1944 as part of a secret program known as Stoffel to relocate Messerschmitt manufacturing plants underground, protected from Allied bombing raids.
Originally an annex to the concentration camp at Natzweiler-Struthof, it was inhabited by a group of 2,189 Jewish prisoners from the Radom Ghetto in Poland.
By the fall of 1944 operation Stoffel was abandoned and most of the prisoners reassigned to other camps, notably Bisingen, Hessental, Dautmergen, or Unterriexingen.
With the approach of the French army, on 5 April 1945, the SS sent many prisoners on a forced march to the Dachau concentration camp.
Corpses in large common graves were exhumed after the war and reinterred in a memorial gravesite near the camp, which was officially opened on 2 November 1958.