Dulag air
The Dulag Luft , abbreviation for "Durchgangslager der Luftwaffe", was an interrogation and transit camp for mainly British and US prisoners of war of the respective air forces during the Second World War from 1939 to 1945 and the most important information gathering point for the German Air Force . It was officially called “ Auswertstelle West ” (AWSW) from the end of 1941 and from 1943 exclusively and officially . The camp was located on the north-western outskirts of the municipality of Oberstedten (today the largest district of Oberursel ) in the Hochtaunus .
prehistory
The camp was not rebuilt, like most of the others, but was simply integrated together with new barracks into an existing structure that already existed in the form of an agrarian school for settlement construction founded a few years earlier .
The "Haus am Wald" property, which was built in 1921 in the municipality of Oberstedten near Oberursel, was bought by Frankfurt University in 1933 in order to set up a training and recreation camp for the NS student union and the SA . Due to the increasing number of military sports exercises, it was later called "Geländesportschule Oberursel". A short time later the manor “Auf der Hohen Mark” (Luiserhof) was added to offer courses in settlement construction.
The Gauheimstättenamt under Wilhelm Avieny became interested in the site in 1936 and together with the university founded the association “Siedlungsschule Oberstedten e. V. "(complete: " Non-profit association for the promotion of the National Socialist settlement in the Rhine-Main area " ). In farmhouses, which are modeled on the Hessian construction, the instruction of farmer's sons and settlement applicants should take place in the sense of the National Socialist ideology. The inauguration took place as part of the 1st German Building and Settlement Exhibition in Frankfurt am Main (September 3 to October 9, 1938), in which the Gausiedlungshof was presented. Buildings presented at the fair were demolished in 1939 and rebuilt in Oberursel.
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The house at the forest was demolished in 1937/38 down to the basement and in its place the new main building (conference house) of the Reichssiedlungshof Oberstedten (RSH) was built. It contained two lecture halls and spacious lounge and dining rooms. Right next to it, a building for 60 course participants was built. After long negotiations and quarrels with the community of Oberstedten, which did not want to give up the community area as building land, the site finally grew to 18 hectares under the direction of Wilhelm Avieny.
A few months after the start of the war in 1939, some buildings were to be converted to military use, initially as prisoner-of-war and interrogation camps for French officers. If there were new quarrels at first, this time between the settlement school and the air force , the air force's hidden threat of expropriation achieved a compromise, after which the first camps could be set up in front of the RSH.
Avieny was also the first director. This made possible his military rank as major in the reserve and his personal proximity to the Gauleiter Hessen-Nassau Jakob Sprenger . However, due to a lack of competence and conflicts of interest, which affected his originally favored plans for the settlement school, he was replaced a few months later by Lieutenant Colonel Peterpaul v. Donat replaced, so that Avieny could devote himself again exclusively to the civil part of the settlement yard.
Contrary to its original far-reaching expansion plans (up to 30 hectares), the Reichssiedlungshof had to gradually cease to exist in the course of the war. Among the files of the planning documents there is a note from the university secretariat: “To be resubmitted after the war”. Until the closure there are contradicting findings about the existing tense relationship between Avieny and the neighboring camp management. After the end of the war in 1945, the settlement development association was able to resume its work.
The Luftwaffe did not have its own prisoner-of-war camp until the start of the war. Since some interrogations with prisoners-of-war airmen had already been conducted on the settlement yard, the Luftwaffe complained under v. Finally donate the area in Oberstedten to yourself. Disputes about rent payments and compensation payments by the Air Force to the owners of the Reichssiedlungshofes (RSH) initially determined the relationship to the RSH. Heavy frost in January 1940 also made the conversion to a transit camp more difficult than planned. An air force construction company headed by Hans Reus from the Central Office of the Air Force took over the construction of the new barracks. In the western barrack there were 14 rooms each for two officers and one senior officer, in the middle barrack 15 rooms each for 15 people of lower ranks. A small Gestapo office bordered the camp , to which special prisoners of war were sometimes handed over for further interrogation.
Health care
Regularly received Red Cross parcels with food, small gifts from relatives and medical items were used to take care of the Allied prisoners . The British Red Cross sent 19,663,186 parcels to German prisoner-of-war camps via Portugal and Sweden during the entire war period. There were also shipments of parcels from the Commonwealth such as Canada, Australia, etc.
A particularly simple but well-secured building was built to store the parcels assigned to the prisoners in Dulag Luft.
One wing of the three kilometers away, and by the armed forces since the end of August 1939 as a military hospital used Kuranstalt Hohemark was established in 1940 by the Air Force from the German community Diakonieverband taken over and converted into a military hospital with 50 beds. This facility was able to treat the burns and broken bones of the captured pilots and crews that occurred during air combat and parachute jumps.
However, after his capture by the victorious Allied powers, the last camp manager (Killinger) was accused of having excluded prisoners of war from comprehensive medical treatment.
management
On December 7, 1939, Lieutenant Colonel and SA member Peterpaul v. Donat took over the management of Dulag Oberursel, who previously worked as an interpreter and intelligence officer.
One week after taking office, the first prisoners of war from officers' camp XI A Spangenberg arrived (five British officers from the RAF , two lower crew grades, seven French officers and two crew grades from the Armée de l'air ), who were the first to be questioned under the command of the Air Force were.
Administration and troop service management lay with Luftgaukommando VII in Wiesbaden ; In the security matters of the competent defense department, the superior department of the camp was the Air Force Command Staff Ic in all matters of prisoner interrogation. The prisoner-of-war department of the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) took care of all other prisoner-of-war questions.
The interrogation officer Major Theodor Rumpel arrived as early as November 1939 and shortly afterwards became the successor to camp manager Peterpaul v. Donat. He was previously active in the General Staff of the Air Force in the department for foreign air forces and was now able to supplement his theoretical knowledge of the IC service in Oberursel. In addition, he was at times a comrade in arms of Göring during World War I and, due to his commercial activities abroad, spoke Dutch and Malaysian, among other things .
He sat down u. a. advocated releasing members of third nations (including Czechs) who were serving in the British Air Force and who were illegally detained on the basis of an order by Göring (who wanted to set a horrific example by severely punishing these foreign volunteers).
He also showed a very philanthropic definition of a prisoner of war camp. The officers' treatment was unusually courteous. German and British officers regularly went to winter sports together and drank cognac together in the evenings, just as tobacco products and alcohol captured during the Western campaign were generously distributed to the prisoners. This was contrary to the existing statutes for prisoner-of-war camp management. A radio to receive the British " enemy broadcaster " BBC , which the German civilian population was forbidden to do under threat of severe penalties, was also permitted. These conditions, which are unusual for a POW camp, were confirmed by intercepted conversations between two generals in Trent Park, England : “ My brother went for walks with the prisoners, ate supper with them out in the Taunus; then they went skiing together in winter, that was an absolute cavalier point of view. "
During Rumpel's time there was also a successful escape through a self-dug tunnel in the night of June 1 to June 2, 1941 (Pentecost), although all fugitives could later be seized. One of the refugees was the lieutenant and later actor Peter Butterworth (including Carry on ... , Catweazle ) . This also led to displeasure on the part of the political leadership in Berlin: Hitler upset him in an outburst of rage: ... " not being able to win a war with a defeatist as advisor [...] ". Even Heinrich Himmler mission-critical research on Rumpel assumed negligent administration. In fact, there were no further outbreaks until Rumpel's detachment six months after this attempt to escape. This proximity to the prisoners of war, which could also have been calculated in order to make the prisoners more willing to give evidence, increasingly weakened his position, and he was replaced on November 14, 1941 by Erich Walter Killinger.
Due to the increasing number of refugees in German prisoner-of-war camps, the respective camp managements were under pressure from the Reich Security Main Office , who were no longer trusted to provide safe and efficient prisoner care. Himmler ( Reichsführer SS ) saw the Wehrmacht not in a position to safely accommodate prisoners of war or to recapture escaped prisoners on their own. Representatives of the Gestapo regularly visited the AWSW, also to monitor the interrogators' loyalty and efficiency.
Major Erich Walter Killinger graduated from King's College London and was then a naval aviator in World War I. So he got into Russian captivity, where he learned a lot about interrogation methods through constant harsh interrogations and also imposed (sham) death sentences. For this reason, during his tenure in Oberursel, he adhered to the Geneva Convention to a large extent (but according to the determination of the later Allied prosecutors) , because he knew that the use and threats of violence did not produce meaningful interrogation results. He also continued in parts of Rumpel's humane treatment of prisoners, but only for the purpose of obtaining information through accessibility. However, his otherwise latent arrogance (prisoners of war were referred to as primitive and naive), which he also liked to spike with Latin cues, did not meet with approval everywhere. He then quickly began to expand the camp significantly to the satisfaction of the air force command due to the greater demand. But here, too, there were occasional smaller escape attempts, which is why Killinger also pushed for a particularly safe construction method. After being captured by the British, Killinger was initially sentenced to five years in prison as a war criminal, but was released after three years. He is said to have been responsible for the fact that recalcitrant prisoners of war had to sleep in overheated cells, and were forced (with occasional blows) to give statements, the achievement of which, however, is not in accordance with the Geneva Convention (according to the prosecution).
End of war and re-use
As the American army drew closer, the camp was abandoned in mid-March 1945, and the prisoners were distributed to other camps, where further interrogations took place. The Americans took the camp on March 25, 1945 and initially used it for their own purposes as a prisoner-of-war camp and "interrogation center" for high-ranking National Socialists. Later it served as an intelligence military base for the US armed forces ( Camp King ).
In 1993 the American military left the site and it became the property of the Federal Republic of Germany. In May 1998 the area was acquired by a housing company to build a residential area for around 1,200 people, which was completed in 2006.
literature
- Stefan Geck: Dulag Luft - Evaluation Point West. Air force interrogation camp for Western Allied prisoners of war in World War II (= European university publications. Series III: History and its auxiliary sciences; Bd. 1057), Bern / Frankfurt a. M. [u. a.]: Peter Lang 2008, ISBN 978-3-631-57791-2
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ In the Oberursel City Archives there is a postcard with the motif of the former "Haus am Wald" with the caption "Geländesportschule Oberursel Ts.", Stamped on December 28, 1933
- ↑ Federal Archives military personnel 6/2911
- ^ The National Archives, AIR 40/1909 Camp History of Dulag Luft, Oberursel Air Force Personnel, December 1939-June 1941, p. 3.
- ↑ BA-MA Pers. 6/4573 Rollings p. 7.
- ^ The National Archives, WO 32/18490, Reports on Dulag Luft No.288, Inspection […] Fred.K.Salter, Jan. 1941 p. 2.
- ↑ The National Archives, WO 208/4178, CSDIC (UK) GRGG 302, Appendix [Lieutenant General von Massow, General der Fliegerausbildung, in conversation with Lieutenant General Ferdinand Heim, most recently fortress commander of Boulogne, May 1945, p. 2
- ↑ FAZ of September 24, 1976, p. 10 - Letter to the editor from Rumpel
- ↑ BA-MA RL II / 986 Prisoner Interrogation and Loot Evaluation P. 35f.
- ↑ http://www.phdn.org/archives/www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/WCC/killinger.htm Trial and judgment of the British military court WUPPERTAL from November 26th - December 3rd 1945
Coordinates: 50 ° 13 ′ 7 ″ N , 8 ° 33 ′ 8 ″ E