Forced Labour in Wetzlar , 09.10.2014

We‘ve done a lot of driving: Hamburg and Ravensbrück in the north, Dachau and Nuremberg in the south, Berlin in the east and Eifel and Amsterdam in the west. Only now do I remember that there‘s a place of horror just five minutes‘ walk away from home in Wetzlar.

Admittedly hidden and hardly recognisable as such.

Behind a set of nondescript, green doors is a bygone world.

It‘s cold, damp, dark and empty. A production facility for war essentials.

In 1944 production was shifted to locations which couldn‘t be so easily bombed by the Allies, and here in Wetzlar, behind these doors and a second set further down, foreign labourers were forced to manufacture optical instruments for the military.

How long would our molly-coddled generation have held out in such a place?