Erinnerungsort Alter Schlachthof

In the location's words:

The campus of the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences is now located on the site of the former slaughterhouse in Düsseldorf. The former Grossviehmarkthalle now houses the university library and the Alter Schlachthof place of remembrance.

We commemorate the crimes committed at this historic site during World War II: the slaughterhouse served as a collection point prior to the deportations of the Jewish population from the entire Düsseldorf administrative district. Almost 6,000 Jewish men, women and children had to gather in this hall. They were registered, searched and robbed and had to spend a night here in the Grossviehmarkthalle, full of uncertainty before what was to come. The next morning they were deported from the nearby freight station to ghettos in occupied Eastern Europe: to Łódź, Minsk, Riga, Izbica and Terezín (today: Terezín). The ghettos were often only stopovers on the way to further concentration and extermination camps. Only a few survived the Shoah.

The memorial reconstructs and documents these crimes. It also deals with the aftermath of Nazi rule in German society. For some thought patterns and images of the enemy that were the basis of these crimes are still virulent today, such as racism, anti-Semitism and other structures of exclusion.