Espeland concentration camp was established in Arna, Norway, now a part of Bergen, by the Nazi authorities of occupied Norway in the summer of 1943. It was largely built by slave labor from the other concentration camp near Bergen, Ulven concentration camp. All prisoners from Ulven were transferred to this camp, which quickly became overcrowded.
Prisoners were mistreated and often brutalized, and the camp had a separate section for chain gangs and prisoners who were kept in solitary confinement. When liberated in 1945, there were 200 prisoners at Espeland.
After the war it was used for prisoners with relations to the now-succumbed Nazi rule. According to Kjell Fjørtoft, abuse occurred in the camp.
Famous quotes containing the words concentration camp and/or camp:
“Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist; since what happened to them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.”
—A. Alvarez (b. 1929)
“When the weather is bad as it was yesterday, everybody, almost everybody, feels cross and gloomy. Our thin linen tents—about like a fish seine, the deep mud, the irregular mails, the never to-be-seen paymasters, and “the rest of mankind,” are growled about in “old-soldier” style. But a fine day like today has turned out brightens and cheers us all. We people in camp are merely big children, wayward and changeable.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)