"BERLIN - Berlin's Tempelhof airport is remembered today as the site of the Air Lift, the effort by Britain and the United States to fly in food and supplies to West Berlin during a year-long Soviet blockade starting in 1948. But a decade earlier, it was the site of unspeakable atrocities at one of the Nazis' earliest concentration camps -- and a husband-and-wife archeologist team has begun an excavation at the site to shed light on its troubled past. Susan Pollock and Reinhard Bernbeck began their dig at the Columbia Concentration Camp earlier this year. Though most of their previous work had brought them to the Middle East and Turkey, they decided to explore the Tempelhof site two years ago after taking up professorships at Berlin's Free University. "We learned about this 'history' that Tempelhof had at a conference," Pollock told me. "The consensus was that excavations should be done some time soon, since a lot of development of the site is planned over the coming decade." The Nazis created Columbia in 1933 from what had been a military jail. The site came to house political prisoners and forced laborers for the airline Lufthansa and plane builder Weserflug -- one of the companies that eventually became European aerospace giant EADS. Columbia served as a training center to teach and perfect new torture methods that would later be employed to run Germany's huge network of concentration camps around Europe." http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/excavating-one-of-the-nazis-first-concentration-camps/278877/
I never heard of this camp. Interesting reading. Good information about an early camp where terror methods were perfected.
With an average occupancy of 450 prisoners as of February 1934, the 156 single-person cells were badly cramped. Prisoners were intimidated, humiliated, abused, and tortured, and a number were murdered http://www.tempelhoferfreiheit.de/en/about-tempelhofer-freiheit/history/national-socialism/concentration-camp-columbia-haus/