Lagerstrasse (KZ)

Camp street in the Dachau concentration camp

Lagerstrasse in today's memorial

The term Lagerstraße had two different meanings in a concentration camp at the time of National Socialism .

All permanent concentration camps of the Nazi regime were kept similar in the structural arrangement of the apartment blocks. A large street, the so-called camp street, ran through the middle of the rows of residential barracks.

In the autumn of 1942 , the SS ordered the collection of prisoner hair for commercial use in the concentration camps . Hair should grow to the required length. To avoid a normal civil hairstyle, which would have been helpful when trying to escape, a five-centimeter strip of hair was shaved once a week. In prisoner jargon, the haircut was soon referred to, at least in the Dachau concentration camp, as camp street.

In the Dachau concentration camp, commandant Martin Weiß prohibited shaving this strip into your hair in 1942, but Soviet prisoners of war were exempt from this in order to remain identifiable as prisoners in the event of an escape.

literature

• Stanislav Zámečník : (Ed. Comité International de Dachau): That was Dachau. Fischer (Tb.), Frankfurt 2006. ISBN 978-3596172283

Individual evidence

1. ^ Zámečník: That was Dachau. Luxembourg, 2002. p. 252.