Qualla: Kemna Concentration Camp

Kemna Concentration Camp: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0. There was a bar 600 meters up the road, in Wuppertal-Beyenburg, where on summer nights in 1933 you could hear the screams. People who lived on the other side of the Wupper could hear them too. By the end of that summer everyone in the Bergisches Land knew a phrase that had not existed before that July: Pass auf, sonst kommst du nach Kemna. Watch yourself, or you'll end up in Kemna. The empty four-story textile factory at Beyenburger Strasse 146, on the bank of the river, had become a place that the Nazi Party wanted feared - one of the first of the German concentration camps, opened only six months after Hitler took power, run by the SA, and so brutal that even the new regime closed it after half a year.

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Image: Frank Vincentz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kemna Concentration Camp: Why a Factory on the Wupper

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Luccio1973 Rolf-Bernd Hechler, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Reichstag fire of February 1933 gave the new regime the legal pretext it had been waiting for. Within days, an emergency decree suspended civil liberties, and within weeks the Gestapo, the SA, and the police had arrested some ten thousand political opponents - mostly communis...

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Image: Luccio1973 Rolf-Bernd Hechler | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kemna Concentration Camp: The Prisoners and the Guards Knew Each Other

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0. Kemna was different from the camps that came later. The prisoners and the guards were almost all locals. They were from Wuppertal, from Solingen, from Remscheid, from Duisburg and Dusseldorf, from the towns of the Ruhr just north. Many of them had known one another for years - so...

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Image: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kemna Concentration Camp: The Town Could Hear

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Caecilius Mauß, CC BY-SA 3.0. What makes Kemna unusual in the history of the camps is that the surrounding population was not insulated from it. The factory sat on a public road, in plain sight of the path along the river. On weekends, family members and friends of those held inside took walks in the woods op...

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Image: Caecilius Mauß | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kemna Concentration Camp: Six Months, and Then Closed

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0. Kemna closed on January 19, 1934. The official reason was that the SA was being centralized and would no longer run such camps; in practice, Kemna's regime had outrun what even the new Reich could publicly tolerate. The prisoners who had not yet been released were transferred to ...

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Image: Frank Vincentz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kemna Concentration Camp: What Stands There Now

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0. The factory still stands. So does the building at number 142, where the SA officers slept. For decades, the property's owners refused to allow any memorial on the grounds themselves. So in 1983 a monument was put up across the street: a bronze relief made by pupils of a Wuppertal...

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Image: Frank Vincentz | CC BY-SA 3.0