The Nazi Party Rally Grounds in September 1939: Germany's invasion of Poland unleashed the Second World War. Instead of cheering crowds, prisoners arrived in Nuremberg. The Wehrmacht turned the former camp of SA rally participants into a POW camp for 30,000 prisoners of war. The accessibility and infrastructure of the rally grounds provided the ideal prerequisites.

Soldiers and officers of various nationalities were interned here until the end of the war. Their survival chances depended on their military rank, the course of the war, and racial classification by the Nazis.

The SA camp, which up to 1938 accommodated thousands of rally participants, was to become the Russian camp with improvised tents to which the Soviet prisoners of war marched four years later as shown in this picture.

The grounds were not only attractive to the Wehrmacht. Private companies, the Gestapo and the SS also set up camps there, creating entire camp complexes. The site also served as the hub from which work details of prisoners of war and civilian forced labourers were organised across northern Bavaria. Men and women from the occupied territories, soldiers and civilians alike, were used as forced labour, also in Nuremberg. They were a familiar sight for Nuremberg's citizens.

Thousands of prisoners of war and forced labourers died during the war due to the catastrophic conditions or they were deliberately murdered. March Field train station was to become the departure point for the deportation of more than 2,000 Franconian Jews to the extermination camps. Very few survived.