Nordmark labor education camp

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Memorial stone (2019)

The Nordmark labor education camp was a labor education camp on the outskirts of Kiel . It existed from June 1944 to May 4, 1945.

history

Warehouse construction

In 1944 Fritz Schmidt , head of the Schleswig-Holstein Gestapo, member of the government and SS -Sturmbannführer, applied for the establishment of this camp. On May 1, 1944, the architect Steinfaß was commissioned by the Gestapo to supervise the building . The work was carried out in May and June 1944 on Rendsburger Landstrasse by Nord-Süd-Bau GmbH and the company G. Schlueter, Preetz , who only provided the skilled workers . The unskilled workers were Gestapo prisoners from the "Drachensee" police barracks in the Hassee district .

Inventory

The commandant became detective commissioner and SS-Sturmbannführer Johannes Post . At the end of the war, the camp consisted of over 20 barracks , accommodation for both the prisoners and the guards. There was also a “guest house” and two watchtowers. The detention bunker was half underground with 48 lightless individual cells. The unheated prison barracks were intended for 200 people, while open buckets or a few latrines served as toilets.

There was a sick barrack that was looked after by a physician from Hassee, a Russian doctor, a nurse and a Danish paramedic. Medical care in the often overcrowded barracks was inadequate and the prisoners were at risk of being killed by medic Orla Eigil Jensen.

Everyday warehouse life

Prisoners had to hand in their valuables and clothing and exchange them for camp clothing. Camp clothing was later dispensed with and red crosses were placed on the prisoners' clothing instead, making them recognizable.

A total of 5,000 people were detained in the camp, 600 of whom did not survive. Most of them were Soviet or Polish slave laborers . According to eyewitness reports, the prisoners were treated similarly to concentration camps . They were driven to work until they were completely exhausted, they were beaten and even shot at random. There were only a few attempts to escape; some prisoners did not succeed in escaping until the end of April 1945.

The working day started at 5:00 a.m. and lasted 10 hours. In the camp itself, the work consisted of building new barracks and repairing the paths. Outside the camp, the prisoners had to clear rubble in Kiel, uncover duds and help build bunkers in Schulensee and on Schützenwall . Furthermore, the workers were used as cheap labor by local companies. The companies included the Holsten brewery , Land- und See-Leichtbau GmbH, the concrete construction company Ohle & Lovisa and the Nordland fish factory in Hassee.

End of camp

In mid-April 1945 there were around 900 prisoners in the camp, which was occupied with 1,800 prisoners by evacuation marches . The prisoners came u. a. from the Fuhlsbüttel satellite camp , a satellite camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp , and from the Riga ghetto . In the two weeks before the end of the war, around 300 people were shot and buried in mass graves . The guards destroyed incriminating files and, before the Allies reached the camp, mostly left for Denmark. On the 3rd / 4th May 1945 the 8th British Corps reached the camp, in which only a few half-starved prisoners lived.

Immediately after the end of the war, the camp was set up as accommodation for displaced persons for a few months and in autumn 1945 refugees moved into the area now known as the “Russee Refugee Camp”. The detention bunker had been converted into a goat barn and potato store.

Judicial processing

In autumn 1947 the British occupying forces carried out four military trials under the name of "Kiel-Hassee-Cases". The camp commandant Post was hanged for shooting Royal Air Force pilots, and his deputy Otto Baumann was also executed. The "camp paramedic" Jensen was also sentenced to death for murdering seriously ill people. Since he was Danish, the Danish royal family intervened with the British government and the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, from which he was later released early. Other convicts received up to 20 years imprisonment, but were released after about 10 years at the latest.

The main responsible Fritz Schmidt could not be caught until December 1963. He denied any knowledge, was able to convince the Kiel public prosecutor's office and therefore the proceedings against him were dropped. However, the district court in Kiel sentenced him to two years in prison for aiding and abetting the murder of four air force officers , which were compensated for by pre-trial detention.

Post and Schmidt were not convicted for acts that they had committed in connection with the Nordmark labor education camp. In both cases it concerns the murder of four prisoners of war in Rotenhahn near Kiel on March 29, 1944, i.e. before the camp was established.

Commemoration

The city of Kiel did not initiate an official commemoration of the victims. When a mass grave was discovered during road works in the early 1960s, the public was once again reminded of the crimes. A football pitch, a tennis court and a supermarket were built on the site of the camp a few years later.

On June 17, 1971, the then day of German reunification , an inconspicuous boulder was erected as a souvenir and a second memorial stone was added in May 1985. The text was drafted by the church “Russee concentration camp project group”. The final sentence "This camp urges us to resist any approach of brutality and terror and to stand up for a humane future" was rejected by the responsible politicians as unsustainable and therefore deleted without replacement.

In November 2000, the remains of a memorial stone for the victims of fascism , erected by Polish forced laborers after the end of the war, was found on the former camp site. The "Working Group for Research into National Socialism in Schleswig-Holstein" designed a "memorial site for the Nordmark Labor Education Camp" on the initiative of the Kiel Culture Committee. On May 4, 2003, another memorial stone and three plaques were set up on the site, providing detailed information about the history of the camp.

A March of the Living took place from April 14-19, 2015 . It led from Hamburg to Kiel, hundreds of participants followed the route of the death march at that time. Among them were relatives of Hilde Sherman, who had suffered the death march 70 years earlier.

On May 5, 2016, at a memorial service on the former camp site, around 200 names of participants in the death march that had only just been discovered were read out for the first time. Previously, several relatives who had traveled from the USA and Sweden had been received by the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament president Klaus Schlie in the state parliament.

Trivia

In the 2006 German novel “A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian” (original edition “A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian” from 2005) by the British-Ukrainian writer Marina Lewycka , the Nordmark labor education camp, called “Lager Drachensee”, plays a central role in the Family story of the first-person narrator.

literature

  • Hilde Sherman Zander: Between Day and Dark, Girls' Years in the Ghetto , Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-548-20386-8
  • Wolfgang Benz (Red.): "Dachauer Hefte 5 - The forgotten camps", Munich 1994, ISBN 3-423-04634-1 .
  • Fritz Bringmann: "Nordmark Labor Education Camp". Reports, experiences, documents, publisher: VVN - Bund der Antifaschisten, Landesverband Schleswig-Holstein, Kiel, undated
  • Uwe Carstens : “The 'Rendsburger Landstrasse residential colony'. From labor education camp to refugee camp ”in Democratic History Volume IX. Publications of the Advisory Board for the History of the Labor Movement and Democracy in Schleswig-Holstein. Malente 1995, pp. 259-273.
  • Renate Dopheide: “Memorials in memory of the victims of National Socialism in Kiel and the surrounding area”, in “Communications from the Society for Kiel City History 77”, 1993.
  • “Nordmark Labor Education Camp” memorial ”. Materials, photos and documents on a prison of the Schleswig-Holstein Gestapo in Kiel 1944–1945. Published by the Asche Process and the Working Group for Research into National Socialism in Schleswig-Holstein e. V. Editor: Frank Omland. Kiel 2003, 80 pages.
  • Detlef Korte , “'Education' in the mass grave. The history of the 'Arbeitsserziehungslager Nordmark' Kiel Russee 1944–1945 ”, Publication of the Advisory Council for the History of the Labor Movement and Democracy in Schleswig-Holstein 10, Kiel 1991.
  • Jan Klußmann, "Forced Labor in the Navy City of Kiel 1939–1945" in "Communications from the Society for Kiel City History", Volume 81, Bielefeld 2004.
  • Frank Omland: The "Nordmark Labor Education Camp". A prison of the Schleswig-Holstein Gestapo in Kiel 1944–1945. In: Materials for history lessons 3rd ed. By the Schleswig-Holsteinisches Heimatbund. Editor: Detlev Kraack. Kiel 2007. 12 pages.
  • ders .: On dealing with history. The example of the memorial site “Arbeitsserziehungslager Nordmark” in Kiel , pp. 340–357 in: Information on Schleswig-Holstein Contemporary History Issue 50 / Winter 2008 (PDF; 736 kB)
  • Gerd Stolz: “People and Events - Memorial Plaques in Kiel”, Husum 2001.
  • “Kieler Nachrichten” of February 1, 2002, January 28, 2003, May 5, 2003.

Web links

Commons : Arbeitsserziehungslager Nordmark  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "The 'Arbeitsserziehungslager Nordmark' 1944-1945" ( Memento from September 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Biographical note on Johannes Post at akens.com, accessed on October 23, 2016.
  3. ↑ Biographical note on Johannes Post at akens.com, accessed on October 23, 2016.
  4. ↑ Brief history of the tractor in Ukrainian

Coordinates: 54 ° 17 ′ 51 ″  N , 10 ° 5 ′ 8 ″  E