The reason they were brought here was the Friesenwall - a hurried belt of anti-tank ditches and field positions meant to stop an Allied landing on Germany's North Sea coast. The prisoners dug it by hand. With shovels and spades they cut a trench four to five metres wide and three metres deep through heavy marshland, and built the shelters and firing positions along it, sometimes standing all day in cold water and mud. The march out to the works was often several kilometres each way. Older naval men, classified unfit for field service, guarded them; the kapos who were supposed to drive the pace beat them, frequently at random. By December the war had moved so far past this coast that the Friesenwall no longer had any military meaning at all, and the whole undertaking was abandoned. The men had been worked to death building nothing.

They arrived in Reichsbahn cattle wagons. About 1,500 prisoners came from Neuengamme on 25 September 1944, and another thousand followed on 20 October. Most were Dutch, French, Danish and Polish - men taken in occupied countries and shipped north - along with Soviet and German prisoners. They were held in nine wooden barracks, eight of them sleeping quarters and one nominally an infirmary, alongside a cookhouse, an armoury, a tailor's and cobbler's shop, and four improvised latrines. Their camp elder was Heinrich Neufeldt, a German political prisoner. The site itself was second-hand: it had been built in 1938 and 1939 for a construction battalion working on the Husum-Schwesing airfield, a place where the Luftwaffe kept dummy aircraft to draw Allied bombers away from real targets. A barracks meant for 250 workmen was made to hold ten times that number of starving men.

The camp was run from September 1944 by SS-Untersturmführer Hans Hermann Griem, who from November was also in charge of the subcamp at Ladelund. He withheld food as a matter of routine, took pleasure in torture, shot prisoners himself, and was frequently drunk. When Husum-Schwesing and Ladelund were dissolved he moved on to command Dalum in the Emsland camp system. Then nothing happened to him for eighteen years. The Flensburg prosecutor reopened the file in 1963 and got nowhere. In 1965 investigators established that Griem was living in Hamburg-Bergedorf, and in 1966 the case passed to Hamburg, where prosecutors finally built it properly. The Hamburg court opened preliminary judicial proceedings on 16 January 1969. Griem died on 25 June 1971, shortly before his trial was due to begin. No one was ever convicted for what happened at Schwesing.

When the war ended, most of the dead were repatriated, and for a while the site housed refugees. The reckoning came slowly and locally. In 1983 a working group published the camp's history, and on 30 January that year around a thousand people gathered in Husum to hear former prisoners describe what had been done to them - in the town whose streets they had been marched through. Nordfriesland bought the eastern half of the site in 1985 and more of it in 1994, preserving the foundation remains and a surviving hydrant. Ulrich Lindow's memorial was unveiled on the grounds in November 1987; the site was listed in 1995. From 2001 and 2002, 297 steles were set across the field, one for each man known to have been killed here - stooped steel figures, scattered rather than ranked, because the violence that killed them was arbitrary. Later research has pushed the toll higher still, to at least 302. The steel was chosen because it rusts quickly, so the names carved into it grow harder to read every year. That is deliberate. Remembering, the memorial argues, is not something the past does for you. In 2017 a building called the House of the Present was added, along with new information boards and an audio guide, and since 2014 a Freundeskreis has worked to keep research and public memory going.