B8 rock crystal

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B8 Rock Crystal was the code name for one from the beginning of 1944 in St. Georgen an der Gusen , east of Linz in Austria under strengster secrecy by the SS furnished -Führungsstab B8 underground aircraft factory for the mass production of jet fighter aircraft of the type Messerschmitt Me 262 . Due to a contractual agreement between the Reich Aviation Ministry , Jägerstab , Messerschmitt GmbH Regensburg and the SS-Wirtschaftsbetrieb Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH (DEST), prisoners of the Gusen II concentration camp created one of the largest and most modern underground production complexes in the Greater German Empire in just 13 months of construction .

Emergence

The entrances for the prisoners to B8 Bergkristall

From the early summer of 1943, the Allies in the air war put their main focus on the aircraft industry (→  Combined Bomber Offensive ). In the course of this, one of the main producers of German fighter planes, Messerschmitt GmbH in Regensburg, was attacked on August 17th, causing a complete production stop there. In the course of these air raids on German aircraft factories, these were decentralized, i. H. divided into small, distributed manufacturing locations. A part of the fighter aircraft production was also relocated to the Gusen concentration camp . As a further countermeasure, parts of the aircraft production were relocated underground. Existing underground systems were used on the one hand and new tunnels were built on the other. The Reich Ministry of Aviation , the Reich Ministry of Armaments and War Production , the Reich Ministry of Economics and the SS played a key role in this .

In St. Georgen an der Gusen , the Esche II or Bergkristall tunnel system was planned for the new jet-powered Me 262 fighter from Messerschmitt AG . B8 Bergkristall was chosen as the cover name. The St. Georgen location brought several advantages: the geological conditions for a rapid tunnel construction were good, Messerschmitt already knew the area from relocating parts of their production to the Gusen concentration camp, and the location was well connected in terms of transport by the connecting Linz – Budweis railway line and due to the nearby Gusen concentration camp, there was a large number of workers who could be ruthlessly exploited for the construction and operation. Construction work for the tunnel system began at the beginning of 1944. The transfer of around 250 prisoners from the Mauthausen main camp to “Gusen-Bergkristall-Bau” marks this beginning. The tunnel was located in the immediate vicinity of the center of St. Georgen. As before in Ebensee and Redl-Zipf , Karl Fiebinger and his office took over the planning of the tunnel. For Bergkristall, his office also took on the construction management itself.

In order to have enough prisoners available for the tunnel construction, the SS built the Gusen II camp area next to the original Gusen I camp . During the construction of the Bergkristall gallery alone, over 6,000 prisoners were temporarily employed. Together with the prisoners of other large construction projects in the subcamps of the Mauthausen concentration camp, such as As the plants "Quartz" in the concentration camp Melk , "cement" in Ebensee concentration camp and "Townhouses", which was built in the vicinity of the Gusen concentration camp, almost half had in the fall of 1944, all prisoners in the camp system Mauthausen in the underground relocation of forced labor Afford. Over 8,600 prisoners died while the tunnels were being built or while armaments were being produced. In just a few months, by the end of November 1944, over 21,000 m 2 of production area was completed, on which the production of aircraft parts had already begun parallel to the further expansion of the tunnel. By the time it was liberated, the system was almost completely expanded and reached almost 49,300 m 2 or 8.15 kilometers of tunnel length.

business

In the tunnel system B8 Bergkristall (December 2014)

Even during construction, in autumn 1944, the production of the Me 262 jet fighter from Messerschmitt GmbH, which was propagated as a “ wonder weapon ”, began . In the already completed tunnel parts, thousands of prisoners had to produce parts of the wings and the fuselage of the Me 262 on kilometers of production lines. The completed parts could be loaded onto trains underground in a bombproof manner. For this purpose, a siding was built in the entrance area of ​​the facility. The aircraft parts were then transported by train to final assembly and flying in. The prisoners either had to walk several kilometers from the Gusen II concentration camp and were mistreated, or were taken by train to their place of work in the Bergkristall facility in open wagons. There, the prisoners had to do twelve or eight hour shifts without enough food to do heavy work in the construction of the facility or in the production of the aircraft parts. A large number of the prisoners deployed died after a few weeks as a result of the hard work and malnutrition. When the project is completed, 1,250 operational aircraft should probably be produced in the 50,000 m² tunnel every month. In fact, however, probably only parts for a total of just under 1,000 fighter planes were produced.

End of war

There are reports that all prisoners of the Gusen I and Gusen II concentration camps were taken to the Bergkristall and Kellerbau tunnels before the liberation. a. the Steyr-Daimler-Puch AG and the Graz University of Technology exploited prisoners, should be blown up to death. The ICRC delegate Louis Häfliger is said to have prevented this and thus saved thousands of people. However, from today's scientific point of view, this cannot be proven. All relevant sources refer to the statements of Louis Häfliger himself, an unequivocal description of the events in the last days before the liberation is therefore currently not possible.

On May 3, 1945, work in the Bergkristall gallery was stopped and important documents were destroyed in the furnace of the gallery. US troops reached St. Georgen on May 7, 1945. The concentration camps Gusen I and Gusen II as well as the concentration camp Mauthausen were liberated two days earlier by a small American tank scout troop. Important components and equipment still present in the tunnels were removed by US soldiers, the remaining equipment by Soviet soldiers after the area fell under the Soviet occupation zone in the summer of 1945 .

post war period

In November 1947, a criminal command under the command of the Red Army tried to blow up the facility with aerial bombs in order to make it unusable for further use. However, the tunnel system was not completely destroyed and in the years that followed, the site collapsed as a result of the poorly executed blasting and the associated instability of the system. In the decades after the liberation, a local company grew mushrooms in the tunnel system and extracted sand.

Todays use

Entrance tunnel system B8-Bergkristall (2015)

At the beginning of the 2000s, there were disputes over who was the owner of the gallery. The Bundesimmobiliengesellschaft (BIG) finally became the owner of the facility in 2001. Since reports saw acute collapse risks, safety measures were taken from 2002. In a process lasting several years, parts of the facility were preserved and secured, and large parts filled with concrete to ensure that the buildings erected above the tunnel were secured. These buildings were erected in the decades after the liberation in the area above the tunnel system. Today around 1,900 linear meters of tunnels are still preserved. In May 2010 the Bergkristall gallery was opened for the first time for former prisoners of the Gusen concentration camp . Since then, the tunnel has been open a few days each year, on which tours through the facility are offered. These tours take place in the days before the liberation ceremony at the Mauthausen Memorial and in autumn around the national holiday.

On the left side of the entrance a memorial stone was placed by the Polish government in a memorial ceremony in May 2015 . In December 2015, black memorial plaques were installed on the right side of the new entrance, showing a brief outline of the history of the Gusen concentration camp, the tunnel and the main camp at Mauthausen in German, Polish, English and Italian. These information boards were financed by the Republic of Poland .

Discussions

At the end of 2013, the BIG commissioned a test drilling, which should provide information about secret underground nuclear tests during the Nazi era. Initial investigations did not confirm the assumption. The drilling was stopped at the beginning of 2014. The existence of a second, lower floor, of which there were indications according to a geoelectrical investigation and files from 1968, was checked and refuted. In December 2014, a supposedly previously unknown part of the facility was discovered and further excavations were officially stopped. The Federal Monuments Office announced further scientific investigations. In May 2015, after reviewing the documents presented , the historian Stefan Karner advised that the tunnel system should be scientifically processed. The ORF report “Am Schauplatz” devoted 45 minutes of broadcasting time to all of the recent events. An expert commission consisting of historians, archaeologists and other experts, chaired by the district authority of Perg , finally came to the conclusion in an expert report that the rock crystal gallery is no larger than previously assumed. In addition, there would be no evidence of other previously unknown activities such as a nuclear or missile research center.

According to a ZDF documentation from September 2019, newly accessible documents should suggest that the Gusen concentration camp was much larger than previously assumed. According to this, the length of the underground tunnel system should be up to 26 km. Furthermore, an underground concentration camp is said to have existed, in which all prisoners may have been killed at the end of the war by deliberately blowing up the tunnel entrances. Other experts doubt this representation. For example, in the daily reports before and after the time of the alleged killing of 18,500 prisoners, around 23,000 prisoners in the entire Gusen concentration camp system remained unchanged. It is also criticized that the allegedly new sources were not made available to other experts.

See also

literature

  • Reinhard Hanausch: Survival through art - forced labor in the Gusen concentration camp for the Messerschmitt factory in Regensburg , Dr. Peter Morsbach Verlag, Regensburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-937527-52-9 .
  • Rudolf A. Haunschmied , Jan-Ruth Mills, Siegi Witzany-Durda: St. Georgen-Gusen-Mauthausen - Concentration Camp Mauthausen Reconsidered . BoD, Norderstedt 2008, ISBN 978-3-8334-7440-8 .
  • Rudolf A. Haunschmied: B8 Bergkristall - Historical Visit of the International Mauthausen Committee, May 7, 2010 , Gusen Memorial Committee, 2010.
  • Rudolf A. Haunschmied: Nazi history 1938–1945 , In: 400 years of the market in St. Georgen an der Gusen, St. Georgen ad Gusen, 2011.
  • Karl Littner: Life Hanging on a Spider Web - From Auschwitz-Zasole to Gusen II , BoD, Norderstedt 2011, ISBN 978-3-8423-9840-5 , available as Google Book Life Hanging on a Spider Web .
  • Robert Bouchal, Johannes Sachslehner : Underground Austria - forgotten tunnels, secret projects. Verl.-Gruppe Styria, Vienna 2013, ISBN 978-3-222-13390-9 .
  • District authority Perg (ed.): Expert reports on the tunnel system in St. Georgen / Gusen "BERGKRISTALL" . January 31, 2015 ( pdf [accessed September 9, 2016]).
  • Bertrand Perz: "We have a project near Linz using concentration camp men". On the genesis of the Bergkristall project , In: Mauthausen Memorial Yearbook 2009 ( pdf [accessed on April 15, 2017])
  • Ralf Lechner: rock crystal. Chronicle of a Difficult Legacy , In: Mauthausen Memorial Yearbook 2009 ( pdf [accessed April 15, 2017])

Web links

Commons : B8 Bergkristall  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Bertrand Perz: "We have a project near Linz using concentration camp men". On the genesis of the Bergkristall project , In: Mauthausen Memorial Yearbook 2009 ( pdf [accessed on April 16, 2017])
  2. ↑ a b District Authority Perg (ed.): Expert reports on the tunnel system in St. Georgen / Gusen "BERGKRISTALL" . January 31, 2015 ( pdf [accessed September 9, 2019]).
  3. ↑ a b Rudolf A. Haunschmied: NS-Geschichte 1938–1945 , In: 400 years Markt St. Georgen an der Gusen, St. Georgen ad Gusen, 2011
  4. ↑ John Starmühler: Louis Haefliger and the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp. A consideration of mediated history in Austria after the Second World War , Vienna, January 2008 ( pdf [accessed on April 17, 2017], diploma thesis)
  5. ↑ a b Ralf Lechner: Bergkristall. Chronicle of a Difficult Legacy , In: Mauthausen Memorial Yearbook 2009 ( pdf [accessed April 15, 2017])
  6. ↑ a b 'Bergkristall' gallery system, market town of St. Georgen, November 2016 ( pdf ( memento of the original from April 19, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. [accessed on April 17, 2017], booklet of the consciousness region Mauthausen - Gusen - St. Georgen) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bewusstseinsregion.at
  7. ↑ Visit to the "Bergkristall" gallery from May 12 to 14, 2016 ( Memento of the original from April 19, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial, accessed on April 17, 2017 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mauthausen-memorial.org
  8. ↑ http://www.gusen.org/de/2015/12/new-interpretive-plaques-for-bergkristall-tunnels/ [accessed on April 17, 2017]
  9. ↑ Test drilling into a radioactive Nazi past , Cathrin Kahlweit in: SZ from December 20, 2013.
  10. ↑ Shadows of the past come to light derstandard.at, accessed on February 10, 2014
  11. ↑ NS-Stollen: Light on the dark side of the rock crystal derstandard.at, accessed on October 18, 2014
  12. ↑ No evidence of other tunnels in St. Georgen / G. big.at , January 26, 2015, accessed on March 3, 2017 - reaction to the television documentary Die Suche nach Hitler's “Atomombe” by Andreas Sulzer (2015).
  13. ↑ St. Georgen an der Gusen: Derstandard.at discovered unknown Nazi system
  14. ^ Upper Austria: Riddles about secret Nazi tunnels diepresse.com, accessed on January 14, 2015
  15. ↑ Historians advise derstandard.at to conduct new research , accessed on June 16, 2015
  16. ↑ Stefan Brauburger: Underground SS facility - Secret underground concentration camp? In: zdf.de . September 8, 2019, accessed September 12, 2019.
  17. ↑ Gusen concentration camp probably larger than known. In: orf.at . September 9, 2019, accessed September 9, 2019.
  18. ↑ David Rennert: Speculations about secret tunnels in Gusen concentration camp irritate researchers. In: derstandard.at . September 9, 2019, accessed September 12, 2019.

Coordinates: 48 ° 16 ′ 9.8 "  N , 14 ° 26 ′ 38.5"  E