Hamburg-Wandsbek

In June 1944, a transport from Ravensbrück concentration camp brought nearly 500 women to Hamburg-Wandsbek for forced labour. The camp was under the authority of the Ravensbrück concentration camp until 31 August 1944. In the course of an administrative rearrangement, it became part of the Neuengamme camp system on 1 September 1944.
Another smaller group of women arrived at the end of September. In the spring of 1944, three huts had been set up to house the prisoners at Ahrensburger Straße 162, in the grounds of the Hamburg branch of Drägerwerk AG from Lübeck. Most of the women here came from Poland or the Soviet Union, though there were also women from Slovenia, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Czechoslovakia among them. They were forced to make gas masks for the so-called Brandt device programme of Drägerwerk in Hamburg, and in the last weeks of the war they also carried out clearance work in Hamburg following bomb attacks. In March 1945, Drägerwerk carried out experiments to determine how long someone could survive in a gas-proof air-raid shelter without a ventilation system. Prisoners from the Wandsbek satellite camp were taken to air-raid shelters throughout Hamburg for these experiments.

In April 1945, another transport of women from the Helmstedt-Beendorf satellite camp reached Hamburg-Wandsbek. Some of these women were taken to the Hamburg-Eidelstedt satellite camp shortly before the end of the war, where they were liberated by the British army on 5 May 1945. Most of the women from the Wandsbek camp were rescued by the Swedish Red Cross, who took them by train from Hamburg to Padborg in Denmark on 1 May 1945, and from there to Sweden.

The Hamburg-Wandsbek satellite camp for women was commanded by SS-Unterscharführer Johannes Heinrich Steenbock, temporarily by SS-Untersturmführer Max Kierstein, and later by Friedrich Wilhelm Hinz, who was posted to concentration camp duties by the Wehrmacht.