Bolzano transit camp

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Bolzano transit camp 1945

The Bolzano police transit camp (also Dulag Bozen , Bozen or Sigmundskron concentration camp ) was a prisoner and transit camp in the operational zone of the foothills of the Alps in Italy occupied by the German Wehrmacht towards the end of the Second World War . It was located in the South Tyrolean capital Bozen , district Gries , on today's Reschenstrasse. At least 11,000 prisoners were taken there; another source gives the number 15,000. In contrast to other camps in Italy, it was directed and administered by German offices.

history

Concentration camps and deportation routes in World War II

The Nazi transit camp in Bolzano was in operation from July 1944 to May 3, 1945, one day after the Wehrmacht surrendered in Italy.

Some South Tyroleans had been held prisoner in the camp since the winter of 1943; it served as a kind of punitive battalion . Up until the summer of 1944, expansion work continued in a large brick-built aircraft shed (blocks A to F) to accommodate a large number of prisoners. After the Fossoli transit camp had been cleared in front of the advancing West Allied troops, an additional camp prison was built from October 1944, which included the so-called cells and six other barracks (G to M). After Fossoli, Bozen-Gries became a transit and assembly camp for further deportation to the concentration camps north of the Brenner Pass.

The commandant of the camp was SS-Untersturmführer Karl Friedrich Titho , the former commandant of the transit camp Fossoli , with SS-Hauptscharführer Hans Haage as deputy - as in Fossoli.

Imprisoned in the Bolzano camp were Jews , members of resistance groups, families of conscientious objectors, people in clan custody (by order of Gauleiter Franz Hofer ), but also fascist dissidents or collaborators. Initially there were 1200 prisoners, later over 2000. On the orders of the two SS-Sturmbannführer Friedrich Boßhammer (responsible for Jews) and Friedrich Kranebitter (responsible for political prisoners) 13 transports brought some of the prisoners (3405) to the concentration camps of the Third Reich, to Mauthausen (1930), Flossenbürg (636) , Dachau (609), Ravensbrück (68 women) and Auschwitz (136). Around 2050 of them were murdered. The inmates planned for further deportation to other concentration camps and also those who remained in the camp in Bolzano had to perform forced labor within the camp (laundry, electromechanical workshop, printing, carpentry, tailoring) or in its subcamps (e.g. Virgltunnel / ball bearing factory IMI or Sarntal / road construction work). At Kranebitter's orders, a total of 23 internees were brought to the former Mignone barracks in Oberau-Haslach during the “Bolzano Massacre” on September 12, 1944 , where they were liquidated and buried in a mass grave.

A political resistance group of the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale (CLN) (translated: Committee of National Liberation) was formed in the camp, which tried to improve the poor supply situation for the prisoners and to establish secret correspondence with their families of origin.

The murder of around twenty cell prisoners by the two ethnic Germans Otto Sein and Michael Seifert from Ukraine became known .

Plans for an uprising by the prisoners ultimately turned out to be invalid, as the German occupying forces left the camp in the last days of April without any further massacres. Then the Red Cross became active.

Known inmates of the Bolzano assembly camp

The in January 2015 at the Bozen fruit market moved stumbling block for Wilhelm Alexander Loew-Cadonna (1873-1944)

Subcamp

The sub-camps of the Bolzano camp were prison facilities for the inmates enrolled in the Bolzano camp who had to work in other communities from 1944 to 1945. All satellite camps were located in what is now the province of Bolzano. Their establishment was used for unpaid forced labor for the benefit of the war economy. Planning took place centrally, but the local economic conditions determined the work organization.

The eight subcamps of the Bolzano camp were:

The camps were mainly located along the transport axes to the Alpine passes in the north (Sarntal, Vinschgau, Upper Eisack Valley and Pustertal). There is no evidence of a satellite camp south of Bolzano.

The work in the individual camps served the following purposes:

  • Manufacture of weapons (Oberau / Bozen, Sarnthein, Sterzing),
  • Construction and maintenance of roads and railways (Gossensaß, Sarnthein, Sterzing, Moos in Passeier, Toblach),
  • Storage of stolen goods (Karthaus in Schnalstal, Gossensaß, Meran / Untermais),
  • Support of the German occupation (Gossensaß).

post war period

Further use

One of the Bolzano memorials in memory of the deportations
NS camp Bolzano light installation 2019.jpg
The light installation erected in 2019 in memory of the inmates
Kompatscher, Van der Bellen, Mattarella and Caramaschi by the wall of the Bolzano transit camp.jpg
Alexander Van der Bellen and Sergio Mattarella honor the prisoners with the light installation


From May 1945 to autumn 1949, parts of the camp were used as a reception camp for displaced persons , including deported forced laborers but also optants , i.e. South Tyroleans who had opted for Germany in 1939 and are now being resettled. From 1960 to 1968, the buildings of the former camp were demolished and social buildings were built for Italian state officials. Only three sides of the encircling wall of the camp have been preserved (since 2012 “Passage of Remembrance”, a side street of Reschenstrasse), the area of ​​which was built over with apartment blocks in the post-war period. In 2017, the western wall of the transit camp was restored, as it has been accessible at this point since 2016 after the construction of a cycle and walkway. In 2019, a black glass wall was erected opposite the south wall, which reminds of the names of the inmates with the help of alternating light projections. In the vicinity of the parish church of Pius X. , also in Reschenstrasse, there has been a memorial designed by the young South Tyrolean artist Christine Tschager since 2005 to commemorate the victims of the collection camp. A memorial stone from the Italian partisan associations from 1962 commemorates the fate of partisans, but hides other groups of prisoners.

Legal processing

From 1946 an Italian military court investigated the camp officials Karl Friedrich Titho , Hans Haage , the overseer of the women's block Hildegard Jungs and Paula Plattner. The investigations were discontinued out of consideration for the NATO partner Germany and the incriminating documents were "archived" with the Italian attorney general of Rome in the cupboard of shame . The Ukrainian ethnic German camp supervisor Michael Seifert was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2002 in absentia for the murder and rape of two twelve-year-old female prisoners and in 2008 extradited from Canada to Italy. More than half of the Bolzano guards have never been prosecuted.

literature

  • Ada Buffulini: The Bolzano Concentration Camp. In: Roter Winkel No. 1/2, 1976.
  • Costantino Di Sante: Criminali del campo di concentramento di Bolzano. Deposizioni, disegni, foto e documenti inediti. Bolzano: Edition Raetia 2018. ISBN 978-88-7283-674-3
  • Carla Giacomozzi: In the memory of things. Testimonies from the camps. Donations to the Bolzano City Archives. Edited by the Bolzano City Archives , Bozen 2009.
  • Luciano Happacher: Il Lager di Bolzano, con appendice documentaria. Trento 1979.
  • Sabine Mayr, Hannes Obermair : Talking about the Holocaust. The Jewish victims in Bolzano - a preliminary assessment . In: The Sciliar . Monthly magazine for South Tyrolean regional studies. No. 88 , 2014, ISSN  0036-6145 , issue 3, p. 4-36 .
  • Giorgio Mezzalira, Cinzia Villani: Anche a volerlo raccontare è impossibile: scritti e testimonianze sul Lager di Bolzano. Bolzano 1999.
  • Barbara Pfeifer: In the forecourt of death. The Bolzano police transit camp 1944–1945. Diploma thesis, Innsbruck 2003 (basic monograph)
  • Anita Rauch: Police transit camp in Bolzano. Diploma thesis, Innsbruck 2003.
  • City of Bozen (ed.): Il Lager di Bolzano / NS-Lager Bozen. Immagini e documenti del Lager nazista di Bolzano / Pictures and documents from the Nazi camp Bolzano (1944–1945). Bolzano 2004.
  • Dario Venegoni: Men, women and children in the Bolzano transit camp. An Italian tragedy in 7,800 personal stories. Bolzano 2004.
  • Dario Venegoni: Uomini, donne e bambini nel Lager di Bolzano. Una tragedia italiana in 7809 storie individuali . Milano 2005. PDF, 3 MB (with prisoner biographies)
  • Cinzia Villani: Between Racial Laws and Deportation. Jews in South Tyrol, in Trentino and in the Province of Belluno 1933–1945 (=  publications of the South Tyrolean Provincial Archives . Volume 15 ). Wagner Verlag, Innsbruck 2003, ISBN 3-7030-0382-0 .
  • Juliane Wetzel: The Bolzano police transit camp. In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel : The forgotten camps. (Dachauer Hefte 5), Munich 1994.
  • Juliane Wetzel: Italy In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (Ed.): 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 .

Web links

Commons : Bolzano transit camp  - collection of images, videos and audio files

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Juliane Wetzel: German Police Detention and Transit Camp Bozen / Bolzano-Gries , 2009 (like literature list).
  2. ↑ a b c d e Martha Verdorfer: Familiar fascism. In: Gottfried Solderer (Ed.): The 20th Century in South Tyrol. Total war and a difficult new beginning. Bozen 2001, p. 57f.
  3. ↑ a b c d Buffulini ( Memento of the original from April 16, 2005 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.agfossoli.de
  4. ↑ Cf. Thomas Albrich: Jewish life in historical Tyrol. Vol. 3, Innsbruck 2012, pp. 340f.
  5. ↑ Juliane Wetzel: Italy , p. 298 f.
  6. ↑ a b Ludwig Laher : Bitter. Novel. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8353-1387-3 , pp. 141f.
  7. ↑ Men, women and children in the transit camp in Bolzano. An Italian tragedy in 7,800 personal stories. Research report by Dario Venegoni, Bozen 2004 (PDF; 316 kB), p. 26; Overview of the individual transports, p. 27
  8. ↑ Sabrina Michielli, Hannes Obermair (Red.): BZ '18 –'45: one monument, one city, two dictatorships. Accompanying volume for the documentation exhibition in the Bolzano Victory Monument . Folio Verlag, Vienna-Bozen 2016, ISBN 978-3-85256-713-6 , p. 74 .
  9. ^ Giorgio Mezzalira: "Mischa", l'aguzzino del Lager di Bolzano - dalle carte del processo a Michael Seifert. Bolzano 2002.
  10. ↑ Sabine Mayr, Hannes Obermair: Speaking about the Holocaust. The Jewish victims in Bolzano - a preliminary assessment . In: The Sciliar . Monthly magazine for South Tyrolean regional studies. No. 88 , 2014, ISSN  0036-6145 , issue 3, p. 4–36, here: p. 22 .
  11. ↑ Sabine Mayr, Hannes Obermair: Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Bozen . Ed .: City Archives Bozen. January 2014, p. 22 ( PDF ).
  12. ↑ See the web link “The sub-camps of the Bolzano transit camp”.
  13. ↑ Juliane Wetzel: Italy , p. 301 f.
  14. ↑ Bolzano transit camp: new display boards unveiled
  15. ↑ 15 Meter Reminder , article on salto.bz from October 9, 2019, accessed on October 25, 2019
  16. ^ Memorials of Christine Tschager
  17. ↑ Juliane Wetzel: Italy , p. 301 f.
  18. ↑ Juliane Wetzel: Italy , p. 302 f.

Coordinates: 46 ° 29 '9.04 "  N , 11 ° 19' 5.86"  E