Echterdingen camp was located in the corner of Stuttgart Army Airfield. Today, there is a mass grave and memorial at the site, located just inside the entrance, which was officially dedicated on 15th April 2007. It consists of gravestones commemorating 34 Jewish victims discovered on teh site in September 2005 during a mass construction project ot upgrade the access to the airfield. The ceremony to reinter the bodies was conducted on December 15th 2005 and was attended by Rabbis from many countries around the world, particularly Israel. The dedication was performed according to Jewish tradition on International Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoa).

 

The camp, which consisted solely of hangar 13 (still in use today), accommodated 600 Jewish prisoners of which 211 died during the winter of 1944-45. The airfield itself was a Luftwaffe base completed in September 1939. It was bombed by the USAAF on 14th August 1944, during which the runway was severely damaged. Organisation Todt (OT) at Esslingen contacted the Economic Administration Main Office of the SS (WVHA), which administered all the camps, and requested 500 workers to repair the airfield. The work also entailed the construction of a link to the nearby highway so that aircraft could taxi on to it and use that also for take-off and landing.

 

600 prisoners, all of them Jews, arrived by train in Echterdingen on 22nd November 1944 from the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig, Poland. There were 201 Hungarians, 147 Poles, 80 Greeks, 43 French and Dutch, 13 Germans and 32 from other nations. Their physical condition was already poor even before their arrival at Echterdingen. Most of them had suffered harsh treatment and brutality for years.

 

Hangar 13 was constructed in February 1944 and previously served as accommodation for non-Jewish forced labourers. It was surrounded by a barbed wire fence and four watchtowers. The camp guards consisted of Luftwaffe personnel station at the airfield, commanded by SS Untersturmfuhrer Rene Romann from Alsace. Romann had previously been the comannder of the camp at Peltre and later commanded another camp at Geislingen.

 

The stone for the runway and highway link was taken from nearby quarries, one of which was in Emerland, south of Bernhausen, and the other in Leinfelden.

 

There were numerous attempts by local people to help the prisoners by giving them something to eat, either en route to the quarries or while the prisoners were working inside them. However, the heavy physical work in a particularly cold winter took its inevitable toll, exacerbated by the prisoners existing poor state of health and physical fitness. This quickly led to disease, from which 211 prisoners died. 19 of them were cremated in the crematorium at Esslingen. Another 66 were buried in a mass grave in Bernhauser Forest, but after the war the bodies were exhumed and buried at Ebershaldenfriedhof in Esslingen. 119 of the victims could be identified, but the names of the others remain unknown.

 

In January 1945, an outbreak of typhus forced the closure of the camp and the prisoners were sent to other camps. 100 prisoners were sent to the 'sick camp' at Vaihingen/Enz, a sub-camp of Natzweiler Stutthof concentration camp in France. 74 of these prisoners died there. Of the remaining prisoners, 21 went to Dachau. 59 went to Bergen-Belsen and 320 to Ohrdruf in Thuringen, a sub-camp of Buchenwald.