Schmelt office

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The Schmelt office - also known as the Schmelt organization - organized the forced labor deployment of Jews in Upper Silesia and the Sudetenland between October 15, 1940 and mid-1943 . The "Special Representative of the Reichsführer SS for Foreign Workers in Upper Silesia", SS Brigadefuhrer Albrecht Schmelt , set up a network of up to 177 camps and temporarily had over 50,000 workers.

structure

The Schmelt office was set up by order of Heinrich Himmler on October 15, 1940 “to record and control foreign labor in Eastern Upper Silesia ”, with the area of ​​responsibility soon extending to Lower Silesia and parts of the Sudetengau . Albrecht Schmelt's deputy had been SS-Sturmbannführer Heinrich Lindner since the summer of 1941 . Sosnowitz (actually Polish: Sosnowiec ) was the seat of the office, which initially consisted of eight and soon forty employees . There was also the office of the " Central Council of Elders of the Jews " headed by Moshe Merin . This became the executive organ for the work and had to recruit the specified number of Jewish men and women. For this purpose Schmelt provided the Judenrat with ethnic German auxiliary and protection police and also had a Jewish security service set up.

history

Warehouse and use

When the SS economic area around Auschwitz was "cleared", the camp SS deported the resident Poles; the Schmelt office was charged with the deportation of the Jewish population.

In the autumn of 1941 the Schmelt office housed around 17,000 Jewish forced laborers in camps; half of them lived in camps along the planned Reichsautobahn Berlin-Breslau-Krakow. Other camps were set up directly at industrial companies such as Blechhammer or Freudenthal , which were later continued as Auschwitz subcamps. IG Farben in particular benefited from forced labor. Since June 1942, in addition to the prisoners from Auschwitz, 600 “Schmelt Jews” were also involved in building the Buna works . They lived in their own barracks and wore yellow-striped drill suits .

The camps were mostly small and fenced with barbed wire . The 100 to 400 Jews housed there were guarded by the SS and the police. Within the camp there was - comparable to the concentration camps - internal prisoners' self-administration with the so-called Jewish elders, camp files and column elders. The forced laborers were transferred to other camps as needed. The Schmelt office kept a considerable part of the wages paid by the companies, while another was deducted for room and board, leaving only pennies.

In addition to these camps at construction sites and industrial companies, the office used numerous Jews for forced labor in Wehrmacht production sites . These war-important - often privately organized - companies for the manufacture of Wehrmacht boots, knapsacks, uniform parts etc. employed around 20,000 "Schmelt Jews" in 1941. Most of these companies settled around towns such as Sosnowitz, Bendzin , Warthenau and Krenau ; the forced laborers used lived on site with their families. Although these forced laborers received wages, they had to transfer 30 percent to the "Aufbaukasse des Dienststelle Schmelt". The money was used for settlement projects by ethnic Germans and the "family welfare of the SS".

Forced Labor and Extermination

While in the rest of German-occupied Poland the Jews were systematically murdered from December 1941 in Kulmhof and later in other extermination camps, the slave laborers in Upper Silesia, who were important for armaments production, were initially spared. The carrier of this "Jewish policy" oriented towards the needs of the war economy was the Schmelt office, which in the spring of 1942 had around 40,000 forced laborers and had some of them trained as skilled workers . Richard Korherr , statistician with the Reichsführer SS, gives the number of 50,570 workers for January 1943 who were subordinate to the Schmelt office. This corresponded to a third of all Jewish forced laborers deployed across the Reich. 

Monument in Kosel

With inadequate clothing and poor nutrition and twelve hours of heavy labor, the number of Jewish slave laborers able to work fell. From the end of 1941 there were selections in some camps ; the "retired" Jews were killed in Auschwitz I (main camp) . This anticipated the selection process introduced in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in the summer of 1942 . In August 1942, around 11,000 Jews from Sosnowitz and Bendzin, who were unsuitable for work in war-essential factories, were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau; between May and August 1942, almost 35,000 Upper Silesian Jews from the Schmelt camps fell victim to the murders. Between August 26 and November 9, 1942, Schmelt had several deportation trains from Western Europe stop in Kosel with Himmler's permission in order to recruit a total of 8,000 to 10,000 strong Jews as forced laborers. Old people and women with children were transported to Auschwitz and many of them were murdered there immediately.

After the suppressed uprising in the Warsaw ghetto , on May 21, 1943, Himmler ordered all Jews to be deported “to the East”. In August 1943, more than 30,000 Jews from Sosnowitz and Bendzin were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where 24,000 of them were killed immediately.

resolution

In September Schmelt moved his office to Annaberg . It is unclear which camps were still under his control and how many Polish forced laborers he used instead of the Jews. Most of the camps were closed or placed under the supervision of the WVHA between September 1943 and July 1944 . 28 labor camps were taken over by the Groß-Rosen concentration camp , 15 from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and five became satellite camps of the main camp .

In March 1944 Albrecht Schmelt was given leave of absence from the office of District President Opole and at the end of 1944 had to answer to an SS court for enrichment in the office. No further details are known.

Historical classification

The Schmelt office (often referred to as the "Schmelt Organization") is only mentioned in passing in historical accounts, despite its importance for the extermination policy. All of the agency's documents have been destroyed. Sybille Steinbacher was able to reconstruct a number of things by sifting through the scattered recipient correspondence.

With the camps of the “Organization Schmelt”, the SS exploited the labor of Polish Jews at a very early stage and developed and tested forms that were used in the later sub-camp system.

With the Schmelt office he set up, Himmler succeeded in installing the economization of prisoner labor on a large scale and in promoting the economic independence of the SS. Schmelt created working conditions that were later taken over by the Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA) : Schmelt had already paid 6 RM per day per skilled worker for work through a collective  agreement; for unskilled workers he charged 4.50 RM for a twelve-hour working day. Schmelt had selections carried out in his camps and from February 1942 sent Jews unable to work to be exterminated in Auschwitz.

Sybille Steinbacher comes to the conclusion that "the systematic forced labor was a stage in the murder trial, delayed it, but not prevented it, but rather paved the way for a smooth transition to mass murder." Racial policy-oriented authorities were essentially concerned only with the question of when the “working Jews” should also be deported and murdered.

literature

  • Mary Fulbrook : A small town near Auschwitz. Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust. Oxford University Press, Oxford et al. 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-960330-5 .
  • Wolf Gruner : Jews build the “Fuehrer's streets”. In: Journal of History . Vol. 44, 1996, pp. 798-808.
  • Andrea Rudorff: Organization Schmelt. In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 9: Labor education camps, ghettos, youth protection camps, police detention camps, special camps, gypsy camps, forced labor camps. CH Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-57238-8 , pp. 155-150.
  • Sybille Steinbacher : “Model City” Auschwitz. Germanization policy and the murder of Jews in Eastern Upper Silesia (= representations and sources on the history of Auschwitz. Vol. 2). Saur, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-598-24031-7 (also: Bochum, University, dissertation, 1998).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Sybille Steinbacher: "Model City" Auschwitz. 2000, p. 149.
  2. ^ Sybille Steinbacher: "Model City" Auschwitz. 2000, pp. 130 and 140, date p. 139.
  3. ↑ On the role of Merin and the opposition see Sybille Steinbacher: " Model City " Auschwitz. 2000, pp. 296-301.
  4. ^ Sybille Steinbacher: "Model City" Auschwitz. 2000, p. 275.
  5. ^ Sybille Steinbacher: "Model City" Auschwitz. 2000, p. 293.
  6. ^ 35,000 from Jan Erik Schulte : The Wannsee Conference and Auschwitz. The rhetoric and practice of Jewish forced labor as a prerequisite for genocide. In: Norbert Kampe , Peter Klein (ed.): The Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942. Documents, research status, controversies. Böhlau, Cologne et al. 2013, ISBN 978-3-412-21070-0 , pp. 216–238, here p. 235.
  7. ^ Sybille Steinbacher: "Model City" Auschwitz. 2000, pp. 288 and 278.
  8. ^ Mary Fulbrook: A small town near Auschwitz. 2012, p. 291 ff.
  9. ^ Andrea Rudorff: Organization Schmelt. In: In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel: The Place of Terror. Vol. 9. 2009, p. 159.
  10. ↑ Saul Friedländer: The Third Reich and the Jews. The years of persecution 1933–1939. The years of annihilation 1939–1945. Viewed special edition. Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-56681-3 , p. 741.
  11. ^ Sybille Steinbacher: "Model City" Auschwitz. 2000, p. 329.
  12. ^ Sybille Steinbacher: "Model City" Auschwitz. 2000, p. 293.