Humboldtstrasse subcamp

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Commemorative plaque of the city of Essen on the corner of Humboldtstrasse and the Regenbogenweg in Essen-Fulerum
Text of the memorial plaque at Humboldtstrasse / corner of Regenbogenweg

The Humboldtstrasse subcamp was a branch of the Buchenwald concentration camp in the Fulerum district of Essen during World War II .

The official name was SS-Arbeitskommando Fried. Croup, food . 520 young Jewish women were also housed here as forced laborers for Friedrich Krupp AG .

history

Emergence

Due to the noticeably worsening economic and military situation in the German Reich in the last year of the war, there was an increasing shortage of workers in the armaments industry. This was located in Essen, west of the city ​​center, in the Krupp cast steel factory , which was also known as the armory of the German Empire .

“In the second half of the war, labor was an urgent task for the concentration camps. In May 1944 Hitler gave the order to use Hungarian Jewish prisoners for the work in the armaments industry, so that in the summer of 1944 100,000 Hungarian Jews were brought into the camps. Sauckel , the general representative for labor, issued the guideline for their treatment : "All these people must be fed, housed and treated in such a way that they perform as efficiently as possible with the most economical use possible."

- B. Hillmann, V. Kluge, E. Kramer : Lw.2 / XI - Muna Lübberstedt, forced labor for the war. Bremen 1996, p. 118

In the early summer of 1944, after no longer prisoners of war and foreign civilian workers were available, and its own workforce had been drafted for the war , the Friedrich Krupp AG requested the allocation of 2,000 male concentration camp prisoners as workers. The deputy head of personnel of the Krupp company, Heinrich Lehmann , spoke personally to the responsible office group D, the inspection of the concentration camps of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA) in Oranienburg . This was followed by a written request to the Buchenwald concentration camp, which was complied with in June 1944. Instead of the required 2,000 men, the Krupp company was promised female prisoners who had previously been deported , mostly from Hungary , to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp , but had not yet been murdered in the gas chambers there. The assignment to forced labor initially saved these women from death as a gas in the concentration camp. The 2,000 Jewish women, many of whom came from northern Transylvania and spoke Romanian , were in a tent camp in Gelsenkirchen ( Gelsenberg camp ) that was subordinate to the Buchenwald concentration camp in order to clear rubble in the hydrogenation plant of Gelsenberg Petrol AG . Krupp sent the representative Walter Trockel to the Gelsenberg camp. A delegation from personnel administration and operations management selected 500 women aged on average 20 years. Although Krupp only had 300 jobs for women, in principle only groups of 500 people could be assigned. In addition, 20 so-called prison functionaries were selected . All 520 women were taken to the subcamp on August 24, 1944 in the Humboldtstrasse in Essen-Fulerum.

The warehouse

Friedrich von Bülow was in charge of the Krupp Group's labor camps, in which concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war had to do forced labor . He was jointly responsible for the mistreatment and systematic malnutrition in the camps. Albert Rieck, a thirty-year-old SS Oberscharführer , was a camp leader on Humboldtstrasse. His deputies were the SS-Unterscharführer Otto Maier and Willi Kerkhoff.

In 1943 the camp site in Fulerum was laid out. Initially there were French civil workers in the camp , later Soviet forced laborers and Italian military internees . In August 1944, the Jewish women selected in Gelsenkirchen for the Krupp armaments industry joined them. They were placed in the western storage area, which was delimited with barbed wire and had four sleeping barracks and a kitchen barrack with a dining room. The interned Italians had previously stayed here. The barracks were built in the open. There were no paved access routes. A sleeping barracks offered 130 beds on straw sacks in 65 double bed frames. The Soviet prisoners were housed across from the barbed wire. Since the SS had too few guards due to the large number of subcamps that had been created, they had Krupp employees trained in the Ravensbrück concentration camp during a crash course of around ten days to supplement their troops and introduced them to the SS service (see SS entourage ).

The 520 young Jewish women now had to do hard work in the Krupp Rolling Mill II and in the electrode workshop of the Krupp cast steel factory on Helenenstrasse, where they were separated from other workers. The morning roll call always took place at 4 a.m. in front of the barracks. The forced laborers were usually able to travel the six kilometers between the workplace and the camp by tram there and back. Most women started work at 6 a.m. in Rolling Mill II to load furnaces or to carry out welding and auxiliary work.

On the night of October 23rd to 24th, 1944, the southern part of the labor camp on Humboldtstrasse was almost completely destroyed by air raids by the Allies , which resulted in a further deterioration in the situation of the prisoners. The women made makeshift repairs to the kitchen barrack, which was the least damaged. There was hardly any space left and not enough blankets or straw. Instead of taking the tram, which had also been destroyed, they now had to walk the six kilometers to work, wrapping their feet in rags or in wooden slippers, since there were no shoes. On the factory premises, which had already been partially destroyed, clean-up work had to be carried out with lugging construction materials. After 6 p.m. the women were driven back into the camp. Food was further reduced, mostly cabbage soup and bread. Since the kitchen barrack was also destroyed in another air raid by the Allies on December 12, 1944, there was now only sleeping facilities in the basement of a destroyed barrack with a little straw on mostly damp cement floor. The Krupp company management was aware of these conditions, but did nothing.

Camp manager Rieck hit the women in the mouth with a rubber club. Every day some girls ran around with bloody faces. It is also known that one woman died of severe frostbite and another of tuberculosis . A pregnant woman discovered was taken to Auschwitz concentration camp . In a preliminary investigation at the Central Office of the State Judicial Administrations to Solve National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg in 1971, it was found that four women succumbed to abuse, two died in an air raid and a newborn was also killed.

Six women flee

Newly erected memorial plaque from the former Markscheide 50 house

Six women (namely: Gizella Israel, Rosa Katz, Agnes and Renée Königsberg as well as Elizabeth and Erna Roth) were able to flee in the turmoil of an air raid on the way from the camp to work before being transported to Bergen-Belsen at the end of February or beginning of March 1945 . When the SS guards fled to the air raid shelter and the girls stayed behind, they saw their chance to escape.

They spent a few days in the cellar of the destroyed morgue of the Jewish cemetery on Reckhammerweg . Then they came to the nearby house of Gerhard Marquardt , the Krupp employee whom Rosa Katz had met while caring for his sick wife. He offered her help at the time and now provided the girls in the mourning hall with bread and water. The six girls were seen there, however, and were able to stay in Marquardt's emergency accommodation, a gazebo on the city meadow, where Erna Marquardt cooked for them. Then Gerhard Marquardt hid the girls in a ruined house on Reckhammerweg and later in an abandoned gazebo. Marquardt was able to procure a larger supply of bread with the help of an acquaintance, Heinz S., who was a member of the Waffen SS.

After a little later the gazebo no longer offered a safe hiding place, the fugitive girls turned to the stove builder and Krupp master Karl Schneider, who the girls remembered for good treatment. Karl Schneider put the girls in various places in Essen-Altendorf : Rosa Katz came to see an SA man who is still unknown today near the bridge on Berliner Strasse over the railway, while Karl Schneider brought four girls, the Roth and Königsberg siblings, to him the grocer Fritz Niermann in his apartment at Markscheide 50. Niermann was assisted in the rescue of the girls by Heinrich Edelmeier and Adolf Gatzweiler from the security service. Niermann, whose wife and daughters had been evacuated due to the air raids, was able to take care of the four girls with the help of Gertrud Hahnen. He had seen the girls earlier on their way from the camp to work and had turned to the Krupp masters he knew for help, including Karl Schneider, so that they could get things such as bread or soap outside the company. Gisella Israel stayed with Karl Schneider and was looked after by his neighbor Erna Lippold, as his wife and child had been evacuated.

Together with other Russian forced laborers, all six girls were kept in hiding for four weeks until the Americans marched into Essen on April 11, 1945, and thus survived their escape. Gisella Israel returned to Hungary, Rosa Katz went to Venezuela, Elisabeth and Erna Roth and Agnes and Renée Königsberg emigrated to the United States.

On March 19, 1985, the State of Israel posthumously awarded Fritz Niermann and Gerhard Marquardt the honorary title of Righteous Among the Nations for their courageous and selfless help, which had put their lives in danger .

Dissolution and Liberation

On March 17, 1945, the camp had to be closed because it could no longer be operated due to the further advance of the Allied troops. As early as February 1945, camp manager Rieck claimed that he had orders not to let any camp inmate fall alive into the hands of the Allies. Krupp then ordered his forced laborers to leave Essen immediately. On that March 17th they had to march on a special train to Bochum , where they were led by SS guards and an administrative employee from the Krupp company. From there, the starving inmate women and Jewish male inmates from Hungary were transported by train to the Buchenwald concentration camp. The journey in 3rd class cars and freight cars took three days. The women were diverted on another transport to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp , where they arrived on March 22nd. There they were exposed to typhus and threats from firing squads, among other things . Many women from the Essen labor camp did not survive Bergen-Belsen. A larger, not exactly known number, however, saw the liberation of the concentration camp by the British on April 15, 1945. They were first brought to Sweden by the Red Cross , from where some emigrated to Israel and others to the USA . Only a few have returned to Hungary.

After the liberation until today

Today's housing estate on the site of the former Humboldtstrasse camp
2013 place in Essen-Altendorf named after one of the rescuers, Fritz Niermann

In the Nuremberg Krupp Trial in 1947/48, the Humboldtstrasse camp was seen as an expression of inhuman labor policy and industrial involvement in the National Socialist crimes , also because Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach , knowing the destination Buchenwald concentration camp, had the Jews leave Essen.

The former area of ​​the labor camp was built over in the post-war period with multi-family houses with company apartments for Krupp employees who are still managed there today.

On December 2, 1959, Krupp granted ten million Deutschmarks in compensation only for Jewish forced laborers, without recognizing any legal obligation. The fact that around 400 of the women who were deported by Krupp from Essen to the Buchenwald concentration camp shortly before the end of the war now asserted claims was made by Berthold Beitz , the chief representative of the post-war group, as evidence of an unjust punishment of Krupp in the Nuremberg Krupp Trial shown. The sum of 5000 DM per applicant was also nicely calculated.

In 1971 there was an investigation by the Central Office of the State Judicial Administrations to solve National Socialist crimes in Ludwigsburg regarding the subcamp on Humboldtstrasse. There was no criminal case.

In 1989, the city of Essen had a memorial plaque erected on the corner of Humboldtstrasse and Regenbogenweg in Essen-Fulerum, pointing to the outpost of the Buchenwald concentration camp, the fate of the forced laborers housed here and the intolerable conditions prevailing at the time. This board is part of the 5th themed route of the Route of Industrial Culture - Krupp and the City of Essen .

The house at Markscheide 50, in which four of the six women who had fled had been kept hidden by their rescuer Fritz Niermann, was demolished in 2011 as part of an urban development project to create the Niederfeldsee with adjacent new residential buildings. The memorial plaque on the house was secured and re-erected in 2014 on a meadow in the area of ​​the former house to commemorate. In 2013, a small square within the new housing estate was named after Fritz Niermann.

literature

  • Jan Erik Schulte : Concentration camps in the Rhineland and Westphalia 1933–1945 . Schoeningh Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-506-71743-X , p. 188-192 .
  • Ulrich Herbert : Dachauer Hefte 2: Slave labor in the concentration camp - From Auschwitz to Essen: The history of the subcamp Humboldtstrasse . Dtv Verlag, 1993, ISBN 3-423-04607-4 , p. 13-34 .
  • Ernst Schmidt : Lights in the Dark: Opponents and Persecutees of National Socialism in Essen . Klartext Verlag, Essen 2003, ISBN 3-89861-280-5 , p. 328-360 .
  • Bruno Fischer: Ruhr area 1933–1945: the historical travel guide . Christoph Links Verlag, 2009, ISBN 978-3-86153-552-2 , p. 42 .
  • TV documentary by ZDF 2004 by Sebastian Dehnhardt and Manfred Oldenburg : Hitler's managers: Gustav and Alfried Krupp - Die Waffenschmiede. (Survivors of the Humboldtstrasse camp have their say here.)

Web links

Commons : Humboldtstrasse subcamp  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Benjamin Ferencz: Wages of horror. Denied compensation for Jewish forced laborers. Frankfurt am Main / New York 1986, p. 51.
  2. ↑ a b Judith Altmann survived concentration camps and forced labor. In: derwesten.de , January 26, 2014, accessed on December 2, 2014.
  3. ↑ BArch Ludwigsburg, ZStL IV 429 AR-Z 51/71 B
  4. ↑ a b c d e Walter Kern: Silent Heroes from Essen. Resisting the Persecution 1933–1945 . Old Synagogue Essen, Essen 2014, ISBN 978-3-924384-41-8 , p. 66-73 .
  5. ^ Israel Gutman, Daniel Fraenkel, Jacob Borut: Lexicon of the Righteous Among the Nations: Germans and Austrians . Wallstein, 2005, ISBN 3-89244-900-7 , p. 191, 192 .
  6. ↑ Karin Orth: The system of the National Socialist concentration camps. A political organizational analysis . Hamburger Edition, 1999, ISBN 3-930908-52-2 , p. 262-269, 309-313 .
  7. ^ Norbert F. Pötzl: Beitz: A German story . Heyne, 2011, ISBN 978-3-641-06811-0 .

Coordinates: 51 ° 26 '4 "  N , 6 ° 57' 35"  E