Abstract

The forced labour camp Allach, outside of Munich, Germany, was the third-largest of a network of 140 Nazi era subcamps of the main camp Dachau, and was created specifically to provide the labour force for the nearby airplane engine production plant of the corporation BMW. By 1944/45 conditions in the camp became catastrophic as a result of overcrowding, malnourish-ment, abuse and diseases, so that when the US army liberated the camp on April 30th 1945, dead bodies “were piled up like kindling,” and mass graves were created in the area of the so-called “Jewish camp.” After the end of the Second World War, the area of the former forced labour camp Allach was repurposed, until in the 1950s the Neue Wohnsiedlung Ludwigsfeld was created on site to provide a permanent settlement for refugees, expellees and displaced persons. Although corpses were removed from the mass graves in the 1950s, in 2017, 12 human skeletal remains were discovered unexpectedly on site during archaeological excavations which were undertaken in preparation for a major housing development. After it was determined that the remains were not of Jewish heritage, and that no evidence for mass graves had been found, the skeletons were exhumed and reburied in a local cemetery; the site now awaits rezoning permis-sion by the city of Munich. Local memory activists have lobbied extensively for a memorial project, which has been deemed not feasible by the city; instead, the mnemonic and material traces of the site have now been incorporated into exhibitions in the memorial site Dachau and in the BMW corporate museum. By building on the concept of “dead body politics”, I propose that the removal and reburial of the human remains of the Allach site highlights the ambiva-lence, which is inherent in these disturbing, forgotten and the oftentimes hidden remnants of the Holocaust that haunt the German urban, suburban and rural landscape in a form of enduringly “difficult heritage/knowledge.” This stands in sharp contrast to Germany’s much- lauded Ver-gangenheitsbewaeltigung which can perhaps be considered as “comfortable horrible.”