Agfa camera works sub-camp

The Agfa-Kamerawerke satellite camp in Munich - Giesing was a satellite camp of the Dachau concentration camp from September 12, 1944 to April 30, 1945.

Around 700 female concentration camp prisoners worked here in the Agfa camera works (today Weißenseestraße 7–15); two hundred predominantly Dutch women and about three hundred women from Eastern and Southeastern Europe, mostly Polish women. They did forced labor in the Agfa camera works (then part of IG Farben ). There, time fuses for anti-aircraft grenades were assembled and parts for V1 and V2 weapons were manufactured.

The women were housed in a residential building on Weißenseestrasse in Munich-Giesing, which had been damaged in a bomb attack before it was completed. There were about six women in each room. A barbed wire fence and four watchtowers surrounded the area. The walk to the plant took about twenty minutes.

Demolition of the Agfa-Geveart production facilities in 2011

The commandant of the security team was Kurt Konrad Stirnweiß. In the reports of Dutch women forehead white is seen positively and his assistant Alexander Djerin is seen negatively. With the exception of the not particularly popular Ms. Richter, little is known about the eleven female guards.

Prisoners

193 Dutch women and ten women from other countries were arrested, mainly because of their resistance activities. The same was true for the Slovenians. The Polish women were deported to concentration camps in retaliation for the Warsaw Uprising . The Dutch women came from the Herzogenbusch concentration camp and the Haaren prison. When the Allies advanced, the prisoners were transported to Germany and transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp on September 8, 1944 .

The approximately 250 women, including the Dutch women, who arrived in Munich-Giesing from Ravensbrück on October 15, 1944, exchanged around 250 predominantly Polish women who were sent back from Giesing to Ravensbrück on the same day. According to this, all women in the Agfa-Kamerawerke subcamp must have lived under the threat of being sent back to Ravensbrück.

On April 9, 1945, shortly before the end of production in the plant, nine forced prostitutes were transferred from the main camp in Dachau to the Agfa-Kamerawerke satellite camp. There were about five prostitutes among the Dutch women. About fifty of these women had also come to Germany from the Herzogenbusch concentration camp. They were accused of having infected Wehrmacht soldiers with sexually transmitted diseases.

Life in the camp

Weißenseestraße 7–15 in 2017

Initially, the information about the Agfa camera works came from the book Prisoners of Fear by Ella Lingens . As a political prisoner and doctor, Ms. Lingens was in Auschwitz and briefly in the Agfa subcamp. Her portrayal of the Agfa-Kamerawerke subcamp sparked violent protests from the Dutch survivors of the camp because, among other things, she portrayed the Dutch women as naive and misinterpreted facts. As a result, some Dutch women published their own reports. The most detailed report comes from Kiky Gerritsen-Heinsius. Substantial reports from women of the other nations are not known.

Torture, murder and brutal harassment were not part of everyday life at the Agfa-Kamerawerke subcamp. The women suffered from the many air raids, the cold, poor nutrition, inadequate hygiene and poor clothing. Illnesses were the result. In addition, since the evacuation of the Herzogenbusch camp in early September 1944, the Dutch women had been completely cut off from their homeland. They received neither mail nor parcels. Two Dutch women died during their stay in Munich. According to an unconfirmed testimony by Leni Leuvenberg, twenty Polish women who were housed on the Agfa site were killed in the air raid on February 25, 1945. L. Eiber names a forty-year-old Polish woman who died on October 7, 1944.

The women worked on the assembly line with German civilians. There was always a German standing next to a prisoner. The civilians were not allowed to approach the prisoners. Nonetheless, there were kindnesses from civilians that the prisoners valued. The proximity to them also protected the prisoners from being attacked by the guards.

strike

On January 12, 1945 the Dutch women went on strike, supported by the Slovenian women. The women spontaneously and haphazardly refused to work together. Nevertheless, a ringleader was selected for this action and the Dutch woman Mary Vaders was severely punished with imprisonment in the Dachau concentration camp. The situation was relatively mild because the women did not oppose the camp management, but the factory management. They protested against the work pressure exerted by the plant and the food provided by Agfa. Before that, the prisoners' food came from the main camp in Dachau. Although it was often delivered late due to the war, it was almost sufficient in contrast to the food from the Agfa factories.

The Dutch women stuck together. They did handicrafts , wrote poetry and held services. There was little free time, but the factory was closed for a few days at the turn of the year. Sabotage of production and machines is often reported.

liberation

The plant was closed on April 23, 1945. The transport routes to the plant were destroyed and production came to a standstill without material being supplied. On April 26, 1945, the women received marching orders. The majority left the camp in Giesing early the following morning; only the sick and a few other women remained in the camp. It is said that women were free to stay in the camp. The fact that the vast majority have left the camp suggests that the women trusted Kommandant Stirnweis and were afraid that Munich would be destroyed. The so-called death march ended in Wolfratshausen . The women reached the Walserhof in Wolfratshausen late in the afternoon on April 28th. The route between Giesing and Wolfratshausen is unclear. It is said that they marched via Grünwald to Deining, then to the west, but then the women would have arrived in Wolfratshausen on April 27th.

On the evening of April 30th, the Americans reached Wolfratshausen. On May 1, Kommandant Stirnweis gave the women into the care of the Allies. The Walser family in Wolfratshausen was responsible for accommodating and caring for the approximately five hundred women on the farm. The women who remained in Munich and in the Dachau infirmary were liberated by the Americans around April 30, 1945.

On May 4, the women were transferred to the Föhrenwald camp. The majority of the Dutch (and the ten related women) were picked up by the Swiss Red Cross on May 15 in Föhrenwald . They returned from Switzerland to the Netherlands on a special train via France and Belgium.

literature

Lingens, E. (1947). Prisoners of fear : a life under the sign of resistance, Deuticke Verlag, ISBN 3-216-30712-3
Reinders, G. (2010). Het Zakdoekje , Nijgh & Van Ditmar, ISBN 978-90-388-9357-0
Schalm, S. (2009). Survival through work? External commandos and satellite camps of the Dachau concentration camp. Volume 10 in the History of Concentration Camps series , ISBN 978-3-940938-45-9
Steig, A (2018). KAMERA - An artistic-scientific project on the Agfa camera work subcamp with a memory report by Kiky Gerritsen-Heinsius, Icon Verlag, ISBN 978-3-928804-92-9