Camp Ashcan

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Camp Ashcan ( Ashcan ) (in American English : Aschekasten, Ascheeimer) was the code name of a secret Allied prison camp under American leadership (officially: Central Continental Prisoner of War Enclosure No. 32 ) at the end of the Second World War . It was set up in the Palace Hotel in Bad Mondorf , Luxembourg . Here, between May and September 1945, almost all of the major German Nazis and high-ranking military officers who had been captured by then were detained and interrogated before they were brought to Nuremberg before the International Military Tribunal for the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals .

High-ranking National Socialist officials and military in the US prison camp Camp Ashcan in Bad Mondorf (Luxembourg). Link to the caption in the Luxembourg Wikipedia
Palace Hotel

Among the 86 prisoners, the majority of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trial of Major War Criminals were:

as well as u. a.

At the same time there was a similar camp in Kransberg Castle near Frankfurt am Main , which was codenamed Dustbin (in British English : garbage can) and was under British management and housed the more technical collaborators of the Nazi regime, including Albert Speer were.

In Camp Ashcan the prisoners were housed on the 3rd and 4th floors, the 2nd floor was empty, the Americans settled down on the first floor. The prisoners were allowed to move around freely, were even allowed to enter the park (which was of course secured with barbed wire and guard posts) and to talk freely with one another. The purpose of this was to make the prisoners more talkative during interrogations .

Five American intelligence officers were regularly sent questionnaires from the United Nations War Crimes Commission with which they were supposed to question the detainees. One of the interrogators was John Ernest Dolibois, a native of Luxembourg City , who would later become the United States Ambassador to Luxembourg. He was assigned as a "welfare officer" who should take care of the welfare of the high prisoners. This enabled him to gather valuable information and testimony.

The Americans could not keep what was going on behind the barbed wire completely secret: Mondorf witnesses said that they snuck around there as children during the long holidays to “watch the Görings” .

On August 10, 1945 the prisoners were brought to Nuremberg and Camp Ashcan was (in September 1945?) Dissolved. The building served as a hotel for a few decades before it was demolished in 1988 to make way for the modern thermal bath.

The military police unit, which then also served in Nuremberg (6850th Internal Security Detachment), was under the command of Colonel Burton C. Andrus.

literature

  • John Kenneth Galbraith : Life , Oct. 22, 1945, pp. 15-24
  • Walter Hasenclever : You will not recognize Germany. Memories . Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 1975, ISBN 3-462-01074-3 .
  • Wassili Stepanowitsch Christoforow et al. (Ed.): Interrogated. The questioning of German generals and officers by the Soviet secret services 1945–1952 (=  publications of the German Historical Institute Moscow . Volume 6 ). De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-041604-6 , chap. 1: Interrogation at Camp Ashcan in Bad Mondorf (Luxembourg) , p. 47–144 ( limited preview in Google Book search).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Article about the experiences of John E. Dolibois at Camp Ashcan: 'The Class of 1945' pages 7 to 16
  2. Ernst Piper : Alfred Rosenberg Hitler's chief ideologist, 2005, page 621

Coordinates: 49 ° 30 ′ 18 ″  N , 6 ° 16 ′ 48 ″  E