“Karya 1943. Forced Labor and the Holocaust”: A chance find, a life’s work

An elaborate, bilingual traveling exhibition is currently on view in the “Documentation Center for NS Forced Labor” in Berlin-Schöneweide. Its title: “Karya 1943. Forced Labor and the Holocaust.” It is based on the collections and research of the Greek private historian Andreas Assael.

Assael is the descendant of surviving Jews from Thessaloniki. More than twenty years ago he made a sensational discovery. At an antique market in Munich, Assael finds a photo album with the inscription “Organization Todt”. This was the paramilitary Nazi organization for construction work. In the photos: railway tracks, toiling workers, supervisors in uniform. When Assael looked closely at a photo in 2002, he became alarmed: he thought he had discovered a Jewish star. And he is right.

On one page it says: “Karya, railway construction”. Assael had previously read about it in a book, “the worst camp on Greek soil,” it said. Karya was a death camp located on the Thessaloniki-Athens railway line, 250 kilometers north of the Greek capital. Assael acquires the photo album with around eighty historical photos and sheds light on a repressed, largely unknown chapter of the German occupation in Greece.

“I knew I had a mystery to solve and I wanted to solve it before the witnesses die.” Assael locates the location, tracks down the last contemporary witnesses, records the stories, collects, sorts, organizes and researches. A life’s work for the trained electrical and industrial engineer.

In 1943, an estimated 300 to 500 Jewish men had to split and remove a rock to create a siding for Wehrmacht trains. Anyone who survives the murderous operation is shot. There should be no witnesses…

And yet few escape death. They flee on adventurous paths, some join the resistance. Assael locates ten survivors of the camp and gets them to tell stories.

The elaborately designed traveling exhibition that was created in this way can be seen until next March in the almost completely preserved former forced labor camp in the south of Berlin, in the middle of a residential area. The area has been called the “Documentation Center for Nazi Forced Labor” since 2006. Of the 13 former barracks, six remain. They have since been restored, and traces of history on the facades have unfortunately been erased.

The exhibition, with its various installations, is oriented towards the mountain range in Karya. At the beginning the visitor finds a reproduction of the photo album. When you browse and tap the photos, background information appears on a screen; this is called “digital animation”.

The first exhibition block provides a historical overview of the years in occupied Greece and especially in Thessaloniki – 200,000 Greeks alone died of starvation, 60,000 Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, around 8,000 survived.

At a so-called media station you can delve deeper into research on the construction site in Karya. It is the exciting presentation by a working group from the University of Osnabrück. The area was measured and photographed on site in April 2023 using drones and GPS devices; the viewer can compare the condition of yesterday and today in superimpositions on the screen.

In the last exhibition block, the historical background from 1944 to the present is outlined. Taboos, contradictions, disinterest and repressions in historiography can be seen in timelines. Failures and open questions about German post-war responsibility, shamelessness after 1945, and also the torn and tragic civil war society of Greece in the post-war period.

But Andreas Assael is once again one step ahead of the permanently employed and institutionally secured German historians. A year ago, Assael tracked down Karya’s camp manager. Once again he found what he was looking for at a German antique market and secured forty relevant documents on the subject. Inside is the name of the camp director: Josef Langmeier, who died in 1969.

“A very beautiful grave,” says Assael. He found it in Gangkofen (in Lower Bavaria): granite stone in gold writing, old German – “and the full title at the top: Oberschachtmeister.” “Oberscharführer?” I ask. “No,” replies Assael, “chief shaft master, the job, not the Nazi rank. So head slave driver!” Yes, that’s what it should say on the gravestone.

Unfortunately, there is no information about the camp manager in the exhibition; there is apparently too little time for that. Assael also learned that the German construction manager and photographer, Hanns Rössler, had joined the NSDAP early on. The private collector also found two letters from Rössler in which he was able to assure the camp director in 1945 and 1946 that all of the damaging documents no longer existed in the construction company. The usual: German perpetrators covered each other.

Unfortunately, the continuity of the Bavarian company’s history remains underexposed in the exhibition. Assael rightly calls the construction company the “perpetrator company.” It still exists today, albeit under a different name.

Representing the murderous forced labor system of the German occupiers in Greece, this exhibition now sheds light on this largely unknown chapter. However, the story does not rest and sensitive points are not emphasized enough.

»Karya 1943. Forced labor and the Holocaust«, until March 30, 2025, Documentation Center for Nazi Forced Labor, Berlin.