NEUENGAMME-RING

a complex of Nazi German concentration camps situated in marshy country near Neuengamme, a suburb of the port city of Hamburg, Germany. The first camp was established in 1940 to provide slave labour for local armaments industries, and beginning in 1942 annexes to the camp were set up at armaments factories in Bremen, Hamburg, and Hannover and near the Volkswagen Works and the Hermann Gring Works in the state of Braunschweig. There were some 70 annexes in all. According to German estimates, some 82,000 prisoners died in these camps, many from disease, malnutrition, and exhaustion, others from the effects of medical experiments, and several thousand on May 3, 1945, during a British air raid on Elbe River ships to which inmates had been transferred.