Jubilee year 2023
Learn more about the 375th anniversary of the Peace of Westphalia.
The Peace Prize
Every two years, Osnabrück awards the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize.
Erich-Maria-Remarque-peace-prize
Towards the end of the Second World War, more than 2,000 men and young people were imprisoned by the National Socialists in the old pumping station of the Augustaschacht Ohrbeck, an ore mine near Osnabrück. They were prisoners of war who were housed in inhumane conditions and used as forced labourers in the neighbouring ironworks. Others had to recover unexploded bombs or clear rubble in the city of Osnabrück. More than 100 of them had died by the end of the war.
On the initiative of citizens, artists and the University of Osnabrück, the building known as the Augustaschacht became a memorial to the victims of Nazi terror who suffered and died here. An association organises the educational and research work carried out in the Augustaschacht and the Gestapo Cellar Memorial in Osnabrück.
The joint management of these two sites, which symbolise the repressive system of National Socialism, was an obvious choice because both are based on the activities of the Secret State Police, the "Gestapo". The Gestapo assigned foreign forced labourers to what it called the "Ohrbeck labour education camp" in order to punish them and prevent them from attempting to escape. This is why the camp was also called the "Gestapo concentration camp" by outsiders.
However, the Gestapo was also responsible for the persecution and suppression of any opinion or behaviour, ethnicity or religion that did not conform to the regime in Osnabrück between 1933 and 1945. Jews, political dissidents, people who did not conform to social norms or members of the German Sinti minority were persecuted, arrested and often deported to concentration camps, often in collaboration with other Nazi authorities.
From 1939, the Osnabrück Gestapo had its headquarters in a part of Osnabrück Castle. A memorial was set up here in 2001, the so-called "Gestapo Cellar".
At the time, the upper floors of the west wing housed the organisation's offices, while five detention cells were set up in the basement, where the secret police interrogated their prisoners, sometimes under "aggravated" conditions - a trivialising term for torture.
Several of these cellar rooms can be visited today. Touch screens offer visitors the opportunity to learn about the methods used by the "Gestapo". There are also parts of the index card archive, which the employees used to document their inhumane actions. Almost 50,000 index cards have been preserved and are now the only archive of this kind to have been fully digitised.