Exhibition dedicated to "forgotten" concentration camp opens

For years Flossenbürg has been regarded as one of the "forgotten concentration camps" of World War II. Now, a new exhibition has opened which tells the story of those who were incarcerated and who lost their lives there.

A postcard in one of the first display rooms of the new museum reads: "Greetings from Flossenbürg." The friendly greeting is positioned under a picture of the historic castle ruins for which the small town on the German-Czech border is still well known for. In fact, while the postcard is from the 1920s, it could be from the present day.

What Flossenbürg is less famous -- or notorious -- for is that it was the location for one of the Nazis' 12 largest concentration camps; the camp where German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer died along with tens of thousands of other victims. After the war, the camp and its history slowly slipped into oblivion.

But the new exhibition, which opened to the public on Sunday, more than 60 years after the camp was liberated, aims to commemorate those who lost their lives at Flossenbürg and its surrounding camps and return its role in the "Final Solution" to the modern history books.

"Two thirds of the prisoners were Eastern Europeans," said Christian Omonsky, the press coordinator of the Flossenbürg exhibit, adding that the process of recounting the stories and compiling the evidence could only begin after the Iron Curtain fell and the former prisoners were able to visit the camp in 1995, on the 50th anniversary of its liberation.