There are only few contemporary witnesses left who can provide information about the conditions in the former camps of Nazi tyranny. The archived material is often unproductive – particularly that of smaller facilities, such as the field camps and labor camps. Yet their traces are scattered all over Central Europe. What do these material remains have to tell? Archaeology has hardly been used yet as a tool that can help to explore this question. Reinhard Bernbeck takes archaeological findings found under the Tempelhof Airfield in Berlin as an example to show in detail what this "archaeology of contemporary history" can do, where it has its limitations and how it fits into a controversial "culture of remembering".
