Work education and gypsy detention camp St. Pantaleon-Weyer
The work education and gypsy detention camp St. Pantaleon-Weyer is a former National Socialist prison camp in the municipality of St. Pantaleon , today again Haigermoos , in Upper Austria . The camp existed from July 1940 to the beginning of 1941 as a labor education camp and was then used as a "gypsy detention camp" until November of the same year. Today a memorial commemorates the prison.
history
The labor education camp
The labor education camp existed from July 5, 1940 to approx. January 7, 1941. From July 7, 1940 to around the end of August 1940, the Gasthaus Göschl in Moosach, municipality of Sankt Georgen near Salzburg , served as a warehouse. Then the local group leader , the innkeeper and farmer Michael Kaltenegger, as well as the Gaufürsorgeverband, which was the formal operator of the camp, gave the property of the innkeeper Geratsdorfer in Weyer for sublease. Kaltenegger himself had leased it from the landlord, who was in financial difficulties. The prisoners were used to regulate the Moosach .
In a letter from Gauleiter August Eigruber dated May 31, 1940 and the Nazi representative for labor education Kubinger dated September 10, 1941 to all mayors of the Upper Danube Gaus , the purpose of the camp is described as follows:
"Taken delivery can such a fellow be who refuse to work fundamentally connected, even blaumachen, at work constantly stir up trouble or reject those that do any assumption of a work, even though they are physically suitable. But they must all have reached the age of 18. Also asocial operating guides are included. Only cases of a criminal nature cannot be dealt with here. And severely disabled people because heavy physical work has to be done. "
In accordance with these guidelines, people classified as unpopular were subsequently brought into the camp; Karl Gumpelmaier from Mauthausen , for example , because, as managing director of a large woodworking company, he refused to buy a flag from the German Labor Front . The two young prisoners, Oskar Heinrich and Heinrich Müller, had refused to take part in company sports at the Steyrermühl paper mill and - as they had not yet reached the age of 18 - were brought to Weyer as anti-social, contrary to the regulations. In many cases it has been proven that not only “anti-social” people were admitted.
The inmates were only informed of the reasons for their detention upon arrival at the camp. There were no legal remedies and on arrival there was regular use of force by the camp leader August Steininger. The so-called education was incumbent on the camp personnel, which was formed from SA Standard 159 from Braunau am Inn , to which the camp commandant also belonged. As the camp continued, so did the violence of the SA . The first to die in the camp was Johann Gabauer from Julbach , who was critically injured and left lying next to his work colleagues. Numerous seriously injured people were admitted to the surrounding hospitals. From a medical history:
“There were welts all over the body. E. came to consciousness temporarily in the hospital and said that he had been thrown into the water repeatedly. He died on September 4, 1940. The doctor in charge arranged for the body to be opened, which revealed superficial, bloody epithelial defects that had spread over the entire back, especially on the protruding parts of the back as well as on the back of the head and upper arm. They are evidently the result of the mistreatment. "
After the death of Josef Mayer, who came from Neukirchen, the camp doctor Alois Staufer saw the opportunity to get out of his personal entanglement, which he had gotten into by issuing harmless death certificates for camp victims; he sent a statement of the facts to the Wildshut District Court . This marked the beginning of a year-and-a-half-year struggle to bring charges against the guards and camp management, but also against Nazi figures like Franz Kubinger and the district inspector Stefan Schachermayer. The charges that were approved by the Justice Ministry in Berlin were:
- Manslaughter
- severe abuse
- Instruction of under 18s
- Instruction of people who could not be described as unwilling to work
In view of the impending trial, the Weyer labor education camp was closed at the beginning of January 1941, some prisoners were released on vows of silence and others were transferred to a concentration camp.
The efforts of the Gauleitung to suppress the proceedings were successful. On April 16, 1942, proceedings against a total of five defendants were discontinued with Hitler's authorization.
The gypsy detention camp
After the hasty dissolution of the labor education camp, the custodial authorities in Weyer interned more than 350 Austrian Sinti and some Roma from January 19, 1941 . The St. Pantaleon camp, like the camp built around the same time in Lackenbach in Burgenland, was referred to as the "gypsy detention camp". The camp staff was changed, a gendarmerie master and ten police reserve officers formed the supervisory staff, and an officer from the criminal police from Linz became the camp manager. The SA storm leader Gottfried Hamberger remained the administrator.
In St. Pantaleon, prisoners were supposed to continue drainage and regulation work, but more than half of those detained were women and children. While the death had been reported to the registrar in the labor education camp by the camp doctor, it was now taken over by the camp leader or the administrator. Some of the causes of death listed are extremely strange: "weakness in life" and "heart collapse" in children, "cardiac degeneration" in an older woman. According to contemporary witnesses, the dead bodies of the Sinti were first deposited in the grave digger's chamber of the Haigermoos cemetery between cans and shovels and buried at night without a recognizable grave.
The camp was closed on November 4, 1941, the inmates were loaded into cattle wagons and, after a three-day stopover in Lackenbach in Burgenland, deported with 4,700 other people to the gypsy camp of the Litzmannstadt ghetto in Łódź, Poland . Nobody returned from there.
aftermath
After the war, there was a people's court case against those responsible in 1948 , but it lasted until 1952 because of the escape of two main defendants. The proceedings ended with convictions and sentences ranged from 15 months to 15 years. The proceedings against the camp manager August Steininger ended in 1952 with two years and six months imprisonment. The "gypsy detention camp" was not even mentioned in the people's court trials after 1945. Camp II was not even mentioned in the trial against Gottfried Hamberger, who was also the administrator of this camp. In April 1955, however, all those convicted were released on the occasion of the amnesty for the 10th anniversary of the Second Republic. From 1949 the Austrian political parties vied for the favor of the former National Socialists in elections at the federal level, and from 1950 they often found a place again in local politics.
As in many other cases on this subject, this section of the story has been suppressed or deliberately not addressed. In 1979, on the occasion of the “Innviertel near Austria” anniversary, the community of St. Pantaleon published a community chronicle in which, however, can still only be read about those who died in the world war. It was not until the late 1980s that people began to look into the history of the camp. The writer Ludwig Laher , who lives in St. Pantaleon, and the historian Andreas Maislinger , who was born in the neighboring municipality of Sankt Georgen bei Salzburg , initiated the construction of a memorial to the camp, which was designed by the artist Dieter Schmidt, who comes from the Bavarian town of Fridolfing , and which was opened in 2000 . The memorial is supervised by the St. Pantaleon community and the Weyer Memorial Site .
photos
memorial
Memorial on the Moosach
Information board in the memorial
memorial
Memorial group of figures by Dieter Schmidt (Fridolfing)
Stumbling blocks in Weyer
.JPG)
Web links
- Weyer Memorial Site , including photos of prisoners from 1941
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Weyer Memorial Site / Innviertel , brochure of the Weyer Memorial Site Association, 2010.
- ↑ a b c d e f Association: Weyer Memorial Site, accessed on December 24, 2010
- ↑ See the novel of the same name by the writer Ludwig Laher.
Coordinates: 48 ° 2 ′ 41.8 " N , 12 ° 52 ′ 55.2" E