Fuhlsbüttel

From 1912[1] Luftschiffhafen (Airship Port) Fuhlsbüttel was the first hangar and headquarters of the Marine-Luftschiff-Abteilung (Naval Airship Division) of the German Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy). From there and several new bases recon missions over the North Sea and bombing mission against England were flown during World War I.

On 4 September 1933, seven months after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany, parts of Fuhlsbüttel prison were converted into a concentration camp.[2] It was initially placed under the command of the SA. Most of the inmates were Communists, Social Democrats and other political opponents of Nazism, Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, Romani, homosexual men and others whom the regime wanted to lock up. In 1936, the Gestapo began running the camp, then called Polizeigefängnis Fuhlsbüttel (police prison). Over 700 people were interned in the camp following Kristallnacht in 1938. Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp was referred to in common parlance as KolaFu (abbreviated from Konzentrationslager Fuhlsbüttel) and became a synonym for oppression and death through hard labor. Fuhlsbüttel was often an initial point of incarceration for prisoners who were sent on to other camps such as Buchenwald, Esterwegen, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück or Sachsenhausen. The camp was liberated on 3 May 1945, by which time over 250 people had been murdered there.

There is a memorial for the camp nearby. A famous political prisoner held at the camp was First World War veteran – turned pacifist – Kapitänleutnant Hellmuth von Mücke.

Fuhlsbuettel has a typical oceanic climate (Köppen: Cfb).[3]