"At five in the morning we were ushered into the street which was empty and deserted. No one was there apart from us. At the station there was a long freight train. We were loaded onto it. We strained our ears to hear if the bridge was being blown up behind us, but apart from the rattle of the train’s wheels, we heard nothing."
On the 1st of April 1945, the satellite camps at Porta Westfalica were cleared. All production and development work in the underground sites was also shut down at the same time. This was as the Allied troops were imminently advancing towards the Weser River.
The prisoners hadn’t left the camp for work the day before. At dawn, all prisoners from all three satellite camps – apart from the women held in Vennebeck – were taken to the station and crammed onto a train that left Porta Westfalica and headed to the east a short while later. During the journey, the train was divided and the prisoners were taken on different routes to various other satellite camps, where they were again intended to be used for forced labour in armaments factories.
After a short while, these camps were also cleared. On the 14th of April 1945, the first women who had previously been imprisoned in Hausberge were liberated in the Salzwedel satellite camp by the U.S. Army. After about two weeks, the men who had survived the Lerbeck and Barkhausen camps arrived at the Wöbbelin satellite camp not far from Ludwigslust. On the 2nd of May 1945, the highly overcrowded camp was liberated by American troops. Initially, some of the women from the Hausberge satellite camp were transported to the Beendorf satellite camp near Helmstedt. Not long after, they were transferred to Hamburg and then distributed to various satellite camps. Some of them were subsequently placed in the hands of the Swedish Red Cross and transported to Sweden via Denmark.
The prisoners were subject to brutal violence by the SS guards on these transports. The exact number of the women and men who died on the transports is still unknown.