Seydlitz Barracks (Special Camp No. 8)

Seydlitz Barracks was used for quartering cavalry units from 1901 until the beginning of the Second World War. From 1944 on the head of the Wehrmacht POW administration, General von Graevenitz, had his office in the barracks. After the war the barracks complex served as a 'resettler camp' for housing ethnic German expellees from former German territories.

In the spring of 1946, Special Camp No. 8 was moved from Fort Zinna to nearby Seydlitz Barracks to make room at Fort Zinna for the new Special Camp No. 10. Whereas Special Camp No. 10 held German and Soviet citizens convicted by Soviet military tribunals, Special Camp No. 8 served as an internment camp for Germans from the province of Saxony. In December 1946 and January 1947 Camp No. 8 in Seydlitz Barracks was emptied and closed. The prisoners were transferred in several groups to other special camps. Most went to the camps at Buchenwald and Mühlberg.

In later years the building complex was variously used by the Barracked People's Police (the predecessor of the National People's Army), as a police school and finally as quarters for the Soviet Army until the CIS troops withdrew from Germany in 1994. Today some of the former quarters have been converted to housing, whereas other buildings now contain the offices of the local labour office and other public authorities.