Essen-Mülheim labor education camp
The Essen-Mülheim labor education camp , or AEL Essen-Mülheim for short , located on the city limits between Essen and Mülheim an der Ruhr , was a penal camp for German and foreign people who refused to work (mainly Dutch, Belgians and French) from June 1941 to March 1945. It was run by the Cologne Gestapo office, but other Rhenish-Westphalian Gestapo offices also delivered convicts to the labor education camp .
History of origin
At the beginning of the Second World War , air traffic at Essen / Mülheim Airport was suspended in 1939 . The small airfield from 1925 was to be expanded and provided with modern runways so that it could then be used for military purposes. When looking for workers for this major project, representatives of the airport company turned to the inspector of the Rhenish-Westphalian Gestapo.
At that time, the Gestapo was looking for partners to set up police custody camps for the detention of workers who did not comply with the prescribed “work discipline” by being absent from work without excuse, by being absent due to pseudo-illness or by leaving their jobs without the necessary permission from the responsible person Employment office terminated. The Dortmund Gestapo had already set up the first labor and education camp (AEL) near Lüdenscheid in August 1940 . In April 1941, the Münster Gestapo followed suit with a comparable camp in Recklinghausen . In order to deter and punish the Dutch, Belgians and French fleeing en masse from their “work assignment” in Germany, the decision was made to set up another camp for these same foreign “refusal to work”. Essen / Mülheim Airport was a suitable location for the camp, as the police picked up most of the refugees at the Dutch border and were able to transport them from there to the airport without much effort.
The warehouse
In June 1941, the Essen / Mülheim labor education camp was opened for around 500 prisoners in empty wooden barracks on the western edge of the airfield not far from the airport settlement. Two officers from the Cologne Gestapo were responsible for managing the camp, while the police headquarters in Essen provided 26 police officers to guard the prisoners. The duration of imprisonment was generally six weeks, but in practice there were numerous prisoners who stayed in the camp for much longer.
The majority of the prisoners were Dutch, Belgian and French nationals. But there were also Germans, Poles, Yugoslavs and Ukrainians among the camp inmates. Most of the foreign prisoners had been forcibly recruited to “work” in Germany and tried to flee to their homeland. For the National Socialists they were "breach of contract" who had to be punished. In order to prevent contact between them and the German prisoners, they were housed in the camp separated from one another by barbed wire.
From the beginning of 1942 until the camp was dissolved and destroyed in March 1945, at least 130 people died as a result of the prison conditions. Almost half of the dead were Dutch. The AEL was also not spared in an air raid on the airport on Christmas Eve 1944. The high bunker of the airport settlement, which the prisoners were not allowed to use, was hit directly. The camp was partially destroyed and four prisoners were killed in the bombs. According to estimates by historians, between 1941 and 1945 a total of around 6,000 to 8,000 prisoners passed through the Essen / Mülheimer AEL.
literature
- Gabriele Lotfi: The Mülheim-Ruhr airport labor education camp. In: Mülheim yearbook. 52, 1997, ZDB -ID 400095-x , pp. 151-161.
- Gabriele Lotfi: Gestapo concentration camp. Labor education camp in the Third Reich. Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart et al. 2000, ISBN 3-421-05342-1 (also: Bochum, Ruhr-Universität, dissertation, 1998).
Web links
Coordinates: 51 ° 24 ′ 5.8 " N , 6 ° 55 ′ 38.3" E