Braunschweig Schillstraße

Apart from the Braunschweig camp, Büssing had one more such establishment in Vechelde, which was under administrative governance of the Schillerstraße camp. There were two other camps, with one of them located at Salzdahlumer Straße, by an SS riding school, where from January until mid-February 1945 about 750 female prisoners were kept, mainly working on removal of damages caused by town bombing. The number of deaths at KZ Schillerstraße was estimated to be about 500; at least 30 in KZ Vechelde, where three deaths of Poles are recorded. The bodies of the deceased were transported to Salzgitter-Watenstedt and buried at the cemetery in Jammertal and Westerholz. In the last period of the camp's existence, from January to March 1945, the corpses were burned in the local crematorium at the main cemetery at Helmstedter Straße.

In 1996, a competition for a memorial site was announced. A German artist - Sigrid Sigurdsson, prepared the project that won the competition. It was implemented a year later and handed over to the inhabitants of Braunschweig on the 3rd of November 1997. A wall running partly along the border of the former camp bears aluminium plaques with information about the sub-camp's history, biographies of the prisoners and documents from that period, obtained from the open archive that is also located within the area of the memorial site. Some of the plaques are empty, which symbolises the long period of the town being silent about its Nazi past. Before the wall, there is a four-level platform where you can go and have a look at a part of the former camp and where today the main post office is located. The post office building has a neon inscription taken from the Talmud:

DIE ZUKUNFT HAT EINE LANGE VERGANGENHEIT

THE FUTURE HAS A LONG PAST

According to the artist's vision, looking from the platform is supposed to symbolically make it easier for the viewer to see the past of this place.