Deportation Camp Cologne-Müngersdorf Memorial

From October 1941 to March 1945, the site served as an assembly camp where the Cologne Gestapo and city administration confined Jewish people from Cologne and the surrounding area before deporting them to ghettos and extermination camps in occupied Eastern Europe. The camp consisted of two areas: the former Fort V of the outer ring of fortifications and a barracks camp about 250 metres away, which the Jewish community was forced to pay for itself. People lived there in appalling sanitary conditions, in unheated barracks and without running water.

The first deportation trains left Cologne in May 1942. By early 1943, most of the inmates were taken first to the Theresienstadt ghetto and from there to the Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps; others were deported to Maly Trostinez near Minsk and to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were murdered. Only a few survived. In 1943 and 1944, the barracks camp was used to house foreign forced labourers. From September 1944, the Gestapo interned around 1,000 people living in so-called "mixed marriages" along with their relatives, and from October 1944 Fort V served as a "labour re-education camp". The camp was dissolved in early March 1945, only days before American troops arrived.

According to estimates, around 3,500 people in total were deported from Müngersdorf; this figure also appears on the memorial plaque at Fort V. Depending on the source, estimates range between 2,500 and roughly 5,000. How many people died in the vicinity of the camp, were murdered, or took their own lives in despair cannot be reliably determined.