Bullenhuser Damm

Bullenhuser Damm memorial - darkometer rating : 7 - A relatively small but extremely moving memorial site in Hamburg , Germany . It commemorates a particularly heinous crime committed by the Nazis towards the end of WWII : the murder of 20 children from the concentration camp of Neuengamme who they had performed medical experiments on. Even though these murders were committed in order to cover up any traces of those deeds, it has subsequently become one of the most thoroughly researched and best documented cases of any such Nazi crimes. > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: The children had been inmates at Auschwitz , deported there from various parts of the Nazi -occupied territories in WWII (in particular: Poland , France , the Netherlands , Italy and Yugoslavia ). At Auschwitz they and their mothers were housed in the women's camp part, the kids in the “children's block”, where they were already subjected to medical experiments. Then in November 1944, these 20 kids, ten girls and ten boys aged between 5 and 12 years, were specially selected by SS doctor Josef Mengele himself to be sent to the concentration camp of Neuengamme near Hamburg , for a special series of tuberculosis experiments. Once there, Neuengamme's SS doctor Kurt Heißmeyer used the children for his vicious “tests”: injecting them with tuberculosis bacteria in order to test his theories on the disease and possible cures (somehow be believed that deliberately creating a second infection could outdo a first one … but of course that was wrong). All these experiments were well documented and photographed and filed in an orderly fashion (just as in other camps – cf. e.g. Dachau !).