The exhibition “From Lithuania to Landsberg” was shown in 2018 at the Säulenhalle in Landsberg and in 2019 at Boston College in Boston (USA).

It is currently on tour as a traveling exhibition at other universities in the USA.

You can explore the exhibition digitally with 360° documentation.

An exhibition by Karla Schönebeck (concept, and text) and Wolfgang Hauck (design and realization).

INTRODUCTION

From Lithuania to Landsberg

The 23,000 people who arrived at the Kaufering railway station near Landsberg in the summer of 1944 in transport wagons to work for the National Socialist armaments industry under the most miserable conditions or to be redistributed to other camps were 99.9 percent Jews.

They came from all corners of Europe and could not have been more different:

Lawyers, farmworkers, artists, scientists, intellectuals, doctors and craftsmen, believers and atheists, communists and conservatives, Zionists and patriots, men, women, orphans and widowers, some as desperate as others as hopeful.

Hungarians and Poles made up the strongest groups in Kaufering/Landsberg, followed by Lithuanians.

What was the reason for their special role, which was also recognizable to outsiders? Did it crystallize only after the liberation at the end of April 1945 in the Landsberg DP camp and the St. Ottilien DP hospital, or did the reasons lie deeper and further back?

What did they have in common with fellow sufferers from France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Romania or Greece and how did they differ?

The exhibition “From Lithuania to Landsberg” is a search for clues, in the course of which the paths of victims and perpetrators cross several times and, not least, close their circles at the Lech.

Karla Schönebeck