Hamburg-Veddel (Women)

At the end of 1998, the Hamburg Cultural Authority listed the warehouse as a historic building in light of the fact that it “represents the historical form of storage outside of the Speicherstadt [Hamburg’s warehouse district] with brick architecture which is characteristic of the period”. The interior of the building also remained largely unchanged, and traces of the prisoners could be found in the writing and carvings on the walls, making the building an “important witness to the Third Reich” in the port area.

Two plaques were placed on the outer wall of the building (one in German, one in English) by the Hamburg Cultural Authority as part of its "Sites of Persecution and Resistance 1933-1945" programme to explain the history of the Dessauer Ufer satellite camp. In 2020 two more plaques were installed on the building: one of a private initiative for the commemoration of Gestapo-prisoners from Groningen and the other one of the "Lagerhaus G Heritage Foundation" which commemorates the victims who died of the bombing of the Lagerhaus on 25 October 1944. Since 2021, a sculpture on the theme of forced labour by Carsten Bardehle, based on a design by Ella Nora Sloman, has stood in front of the building. 

In 1995, a mural by Cecilia Herrero und Hildegund Schuster entitled “For the Women of Dessauer Ufer” (“Für die Frauen vom Dessauer Ufer”) was unveiled on the banks of the Elbe in Altona at the initiative of the Women in the Museum of Work (Frauen im Museum der Arbeit) group with the support of the Lawaetz Foundation. The original location for the mural had been rejected by Hamburger Hafen- und Lagerhaus AG. In the centre of the mural is Lucille Eichengreen, a Jewish woman born in Hamburg in 1925 who was taken to the Lodz ghetto with her mother and younger sister in October 1941 at the age of 16 and was later deported to Auschwitz. In the summer of 1944, she returned to Hamburg as a concentration camp prisoner to carry out forced labour in her hometown. Together with 500 other prisoners, mostly Jewish women from Poland, she was taken from Dessauer Ufer to the Sasel satellite camp of Neuengamme concentration camp and from there to Bergen-Belsen towards the end of the war. After being liberated, Lucille Eichengreen – whose mother, sister and father had been murdered (her father died at Dachau) – emigrated to the USA.

The mural is part of Hamburg’s “Women’s Open-air Gallery” (FrauenFreiluftGalerie), a programme established in 1994 through which female artists from Hamburg and worldwide seek to portray women’s lives and work from different perspectives and through various artistic methods.