Hinzert concentration camp, officially known as SS-Sonderlager Hinzert (Eng. Special SS Camp Hinzert), was a Nazi concentration camp located in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. Established in 1939, the camp initially served as a detention facility for German and Austrian political prisoners, particularly those labeled as communists, social democrats, or members of other opposition groups.
Hinzert’s location near the German-Luxembourg border made it a strategic site for the incarceration of political dissidents and resistance members from Western Europe. Over time, its purpose expanded, and it housed prisoners from various nationalities, including French, Belgian, Luxembourgish, and Soviet individuals. The camp also detained individuals classified as “anti-social” by the Nazi regime, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and Roma people.
The camp’s infrastructure consisted of barracks, a roll-call square, administrative buildings, and a punitive facility known as the “bunker,” where prisoners faced solitary confinement and severe punishment. Conditions at Hinzert were harsh, with overcrowding, inadequate sanitation, insufficient food, and brutal treatment from SS guards. The inmates were subjected to forced labor, often involving physically demanding and hazardous tasks, such as construction projects and agricultural work.
Hinzert was not primarily an extermination camp, but it played a role in the broader system of Nazi repression and genocide. Many prisoners were transferred to other concentration and extermination camps, such as Buchenwald and Dachau, where the mortality rate was even higher. At one point a Nacht und Nebel section was installed in the concentration camp, at these N&N sections you just disappeared from life. Although alive under harsh circumstances nobody knew where you were or if you were alive or not. You just vanished from the face of the earth.
Hinzert Concentration Camp shown in a drawing made by former prisoner Albert Kaiser, a union supporter and caricaturist from Luxembourg. The central image shows prisoners being forced to run in circles naked as part of the daily ‘calisthenics’, a purposeful humiliation on the part of SS guards that was witnessed by local residents passing by the camp fence. (image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Museum Memorial, WS 70092)
The Hinzert concentration camp was liberated by American forces in March 1945.
Visit
Hinzert Concentration Camp is open during daytime hours, for opening times of the visitors centre check out the website.
The photos from the SS officers in Hinzert Concentration Camp are from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wikipedia
