Arbeit macht frei, a German phrase meaning "work makes (you) free", known for being placed over Nazi concentration camps entrances
The expression comes from the title of a novel by German philologist Lorenz Diefenbach, Arbeit macht frei: Erzählung von Lorenz Diefenbach (1873), in which gamblers and fraudsters find the path to virtue through labour.
She worked as a Clerk for Deutsche Bundespost, studied at the Akademie der Arbeit in Frankfurt and worked for the German Confederation of Trade Unions from 1967.
In 1941 he received a PhD for his work "Arbeit Neues Bauen im befreiten Oberschlesien. Der Ring in Sohrau. Entschandelung und Gestaltung" (New construction work in liberated Upper Silesia. The ring in Żory. Refurbishment and design).
In July 2005 he said that the only thing that came to his mind in relation to the CDU/CSU's slogan during the election campaign Sozial ist, was Arbeit schafft! ("Social is that which creates work") was the line at the door to Nazi Germany's death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau: "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work makes free").
Hentschel, Klaus The Mental Aftermath: The Mentality of German Physicists 1945 – 1949 (Oxford, 2007) ISBN 978-0-19-920566-0 (In doing research for this book, Hentschel took extensive material from two sources: (1) Physikalische Blätter and (2) the diary of Ernst Brüche held with Brüche’s papers in the Landesmuseum für Technik und Arbeit in Mannheim, Germany.