Memorial for the Victims of the Rollwald Penal Camp

In the Rodgau district of Nieder-Roden - on the border with Ober-Roden - there was a Nazi prison camp between 1938 and 1945. The "Rollwald camp" was the largest of three main camps of the Rodgau prison camp, which were centrally administered from Dieburg. It served as a judicial penal institution in which prisoners who had been legally convicted by a court were held. Convicted prisoners were imprisoned in Rollwald, as were political opponents of the Nazi regime, "travellers", beggars, homosexuals and people who refused military service for religious reasons. The prisoners initially came from Germany and Austria, and later increasingly from the occupied territories of Europe - people who had fought against the German occupying forces in their home countries or had violated their laws.
The prisoners in the camp were used as forced laborers for clearing and development work, draining swamp areas and also for agricultural work. At the beginning of the war, they were taken away from these jobs and given contracts for the Wehrmacht in armaments production or to repair war damage. Many prisoners died due to the hard physical exertion. At the beginning of 1944, a separate camp cemetery was set up in Rollwald due to the sharp increase in the number of deaths.
On March 26, 1945, the US Army liberated the Rollwald camp.
After 1945, the current Rollwald settlement was built on the camp site and in the area surrounding the surviving buildings; some of the camp buildings were sold to private owners or partially demolished. The graves in the camp cemetery were leveled in 1965. Since 1983, a memorial stone has commemorated the victims of the Rollwald prison camp.
Since March 26, 2014, display boards in German, English and French at the memorial have provided information about the history of the camp.
Sources: Heidi Fogel, The Rollwald Camp. Penal system and forced labor 1938 to 1945, Rodgau 2004 • Memorial for the Nazi prison camp Rollwald lag-gedenken-in-hessen.de/?page_id=989 • Memorial "Lager Rollwald" bpb.de/themen/holocaust/erinnerungsorte/503223/gedenkstaette-lager-rollwald

For several years (1938-1945) people were treated inhumanely in a prison camp here. More than 200 people were buried in the camp cemetery.