Kottern-Weidach subcamp
The Kottern-Weidach satellite camp was a subsidiary camp of the Dachau concentration camp from October 1, 1943 to April 27, 1945 , which was initially set up by the SS in the Kottern district of the city of Kempten (Allgäu) and later in the Weidach district of the Durach community .
Origin background
In the summer of 1943 the textile factory “Spinnerei-Weberei Kottern” had to hand over part of its buildings to Messerschmitt AG for the production of war-essential parts of the fighter . Because a lot of workers were required for production and production had a high priority, about 100 prisoners came to Kempten on October 1, 1943, mostly Italians, Dutch and Yugoslavs. They were temporarily accommodated in the “Zum Stiefel” inn on Ludwigstrasse in Kottern, but soon had to move to the factory itself, where a production hall was used as a dormitory. Some rooms were reserved for the guards. In the non-confiscated parts of the "Kottern Spinnerei-Weaving" factory, textile production continued as normal.
Establishment of the camp
At about the same time as the arrival of the first prisoners, construction began on the actual camp, which the prisoners had to build themselves and which they moved into around the spring of 1944, but which was never fully completed by the end of the war. Four wooden barracks were built on 16,000 m² as accommodation for the prisoners and several brick buildings for the guards. This warehouse was located about one kilometer from the Messerschmitt AG production facility in an open field on the road connecting Weidach and Durach. The camp was surrounded by a high-voltage fence. At night, headlights from the watchtowers illuminated the surrounding area as bright as day.
In the Kottern-Weidach camp there were an average of 750, but also up to 1,500 prisoners. This strongly varying occupancy was based on the fluctuating labor requirements of Messerschmitt AG. Only “punitive commands” that were used to work in gravel pits were exempt from working on the aircraft parts. A well-known prisoner in the Kottern-Weidach camp was the Frenchman Louis Terrenoire (1908–1992); he later became a minister under Charles de Gaulle .
The Weidach satellite camp was guarded by around 30 to 40 SS men and a few dogs , which were mainly used to guard the prisoners on the daily march to the workplace and back. At the beginning of the camp commandant was SS-Hauptscharführer Fritz Wilhelm, who was soon replaced by SS-Hauptscharführer Georg Deffner due to his excessive consumption of alcohol and his very inhuman way of dealing with the prisoners who were important for war production. Georg Deffner was previously the camp commandant of the Kempten satellite camp . In February 1945 he was transferred to the Kaufering concentration camp command and replaced by SS-Hauptscharführer Edmund Zdrojewski, who had previously been employed in Mauthausen and from 1943 was deputy camp manager of the forced labor camp for Jews in Krakow-Plaszow . The rest of the camp crew consisted of members of the SS and, towards the end of the war, also of Luftwaffe soldiers who were no longer fit for the front.
In the camp's two years of existence, a total of 17 people died, most of them of typhus , although it is not certain here whether the cause of death stated by the guards corresponds to the facts. The relatively low death rates with the high number of prisoners can be traced back to the fact that sick people (prisoners who were no longer able to work) were transported to the main camp in Dachau. For example, a transport of 87 prisoners to the main camp is documented for September 7, 1944. The hygienic conditions in the camp must have been very poor as the site was under construction all the time it was in existence. The planned latrines and sanitary facilities were not erected until shortly before the end of the war, presumably to gloss over the situation towards the Allies. The kitchen of the Kottern-Weidach camp was located a few hundred meters outside the camp in a private farm near the Durach stream. The prisoner Louis Terrenoire reports of bugged and lice-filled dormitories as well as very cold winters in the high Allgäu in the wooden barracks. Only the guards had masonry accommodation.
In the winter of 1944/1945, however, it was no longer possible to transport the sick due to the general shortage of coal. A separate cemetery for concentration camp prisoners was then set up in the hamlet of Fahls in the Durach community , as burial in the community's church cemetery was prohibited. The instructions from Dachau, which the head of the Weidach camp brought to the mayor at the time, read: “No grave mound, no flower decorations and no cross are allowed to mark the burial sites, nor are clergymen or civilians allowed to participate in the funeral. The necessary work is all carried out by camp inmates. ”This cemetery was also not allowed to be publicly marked as a cemetery. B. by crosses or the like, but had to appear inconspicuous to the outside.
On July 19, 1944, the Messerschmitt factory was the target of an air raid by American fighter-bombers . The prisoners were locked up in the barracks and were thus at the mercy of possible false attacks. The attack, however, was targeted: parts of the production facilities were destroyed, the camp with the prisoners remained undamaged.
End of war
On April 26, 1945, American and French tank units came to the Allgäu . The camp commandant Zdrojewski ordered the about 600 ambulatory inmates to leave immediately, around 50 sick people and administrative employees stayed behind. A day later the almost empty camp was liberated; The commanders who had fled with the 600 prisoners were overtaken by American tanks just under 20 kilometers away, near Nesselwang . The prisoners were then initially housed with private individuals, in restaurants or parsonages until they were released.
SS-Hauptscharführer Georg Deffner was sentenced on February 11, 1947 by a US military court in Dachau to three years in prison for his work in concentration camps.
post war period
In 1960 the corpses from the cemetery were reburied in the Flossenbürg concentration camp cemetery, but only 13 prisoners were found. Today the federal motorway 7 runs across the site between the Betzigau junction and the Allgäu motorway triangle .
Around 1970 the German judiciary tried to clear up Nazi crimes in the Kottern-Weidach satellite camp; however, the portrayals of the former prisoners and the reports from the guards differed greatly, even among themselves. Since there were hardly any other sources for these acts and the eyewitness reports differed greatly after thirty years, corresponding proceedings were discontinued.
The area remained unused for a long time, and some of the barracks were used as private living space in post-war distress. Only in the last few years has the site been redeveloped with row houses and single-family houses, which should make up the new center of the Weidach district.
Since 1995 a memorial in the Weidach parish has been commemorating the concentration camp .
literature
Eyewitness accounts
- Louis Terrenoire: Sursitaires de la mort lente . Editions Seghers, Paris 1976. OCLC 3514393
- Erich Kunter, Max Wittmann: World tour to Dachau . Kulturaufbau-Verlag, Stuttgart, 1946. OCLC 14440638
Representations
- Markus Naumann: Traces in the forest. Messerschmitt / Werkzeugbau Kottern and the subcamp in Fischen. A contribution to the armaments industry and forced labor in the upper Allgäu during the Second World War (= Allgäu research on archeology and history, 3). Likias Verlag, Friedberg 2017, ISBN 978-3-9817006-6-4 .
- Markus Naumann: Kempten in the Second World War. External commandos of the Dachau concentration camp in Kempten and Kottern / Weidach . Kempten 1988.
- Gernot Römer: For the forgotten. Subcamp in Swabia - Swabia in concentration camps . Presse-Druck und Verlags-GmbH, Augsburg 1984, ISBN 978-3896390479 .
- Edith Raim: Kottern . In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 2: Early camp, Dachau, Emsland camp. CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52962-3 , pp. 376-378.
Coordinates: 47 ° 41 ′ 49.1 ″ N , 10 ° 19 ′ 36 ″ E