Through road IV

Through road IV (abbreviated DG IV or Dg. 4 , also known as Rollbahn Süd or Straße der SS ) was the name for a 2175 km long long- distance route that ran from Berlin through the occupied territories of the Soviet Union to the after the German invasion of the Soviet Union Caucasus should lead. Like the other thoroughfares, it served to secure the area occupied by the Wehrmacht and to ensure supplies for the front.

The DG IV led via Vinnitza and Kirovograd to Stalino (Donetsk) and was supposed to lead via Taganrog into the Caucasus . The construction management was the responsibility of the Todt Organization , which commissioned private companies with the implementation. Soviet prisoners of war were initially planned as the workforce, but soon after the work began in the summer of 1941, forced laborers , mainly Jewish residents of Galicia, were also employed.

To secure the route and to guard the forced laborers, the Higher SS and Police Leader "Russia South" set up a separate command for the DG IV. Units of the law enforcement police and so-called protection teams , consisting of Latvian , Lithuanian and Ukrainian auxiliary police officers, were assigned to do this. Numerous smaller and larger forced labor camps, which were under the control of the SS, were set up along the route . DG IV was part of the Annihilation through Labor program ; more than 25,000 Jewish forced laborers were murdered in the area of ​​the route between 1942 and 1944.

On the section between Gaissin and Uman , the guarding of the forced labor camps was the responsibility of the SS construction section management of Gaissin. Head of this SS construction section management from May to October 1942 was SS-Hauptsturmführer Franz Christoffel, then until April 1943 SS-Untersturmführer Oskar Friese. Christoffel and Friese belong with Maas to the "main actors in the extermination" of the Jews on the Gaissin section.

In the case of the forced labor camps for Jews on thoroughfare IV, the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the investigation of National Socialist crimes in Ludwigsburg investigated 70 suspects from the 1960s onwards , of whom the whereabouts of 39 cases could be found. In 1967 the Lübeck public prosecutor prepared a trial at the Itzehoe district court, for which 1,500 witnesses (including 100 surviving Jews in Israel) were interrogated and 39 suspects were identified, one of whom was Christoffel's deputy, Oskar Friese. From 1970, various public prosecutors continued the proceedings against 10 other people. The investigation against the main culprits has been discontinued. The camp leader in Michailowka was SS-Unterscharführer Walter Mintel. The poet Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger was also killed there. The case against Mintel was closed in 1973. As a suspect, he testified that he had never been to Mikhailovka.

As a result of the criminal prosecution of this type of National Socialist crime, Bennett puts forward the thesis that German courts in the 1950s and 60s were cautious with defendants with a prominent background (such as Gieseke), while the trials against men "from the fringes of German society" ( like Friese and Mintel) were carried out with a certain persistence.

The Ukrainian trunk road M 12 uses the route of the former DG IV.

literature

• George Henry Bennett : The Nazi, the painter, and the forgotten story of the SS road. Reaction Books, London 2012, ISBN 978-1-86189-909-5 .
• Wolfgang Benz et al. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of National Socialism . Keyword DG 4 , pp. 431-432.
• Andrej Angrick : Annihilation and Labor: Jews and Thoroughfare IV in Central Ukraine. In: Ray Brandon , Wendy Lower (eds.): The Shoah in Ukraine. History, Testimony, Memorialization. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 2008, ISBN 978-0-253-35084-8 , pp. 190-223.
• Hermann Kaienburg : Jewish labor camp on the "Strasse der SS" . In: 1999 - Journal for Social History of the 20th and 21st Century , Issue 1/96. Hamburg Foundation for Social History of the 20th Century (Ed.) Janus Verlagsgesellschaft, Cologne 1996.
• Siegfried Wolf : Durchgangsstr. IV (PDF, 3 pages)
• Wendy Lower : Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in the Ukraine. The University of North Carolina Press 2005, ISBN 0-8078-2960-9 .
• John Goetz , Wiebke Hollersen : Fields of Remembrance . In: Der Spiegel . No. 37 , 2009, p. 45-47 ( online - Sept. 7, 2009 ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mykhaililivka Camp to village . By Marie Moutier . S. 2. http://www.yahadinunum.org/mykhailivka-camp-to-village//
2. ^ Mario Wenzel : Forced labor camp for Jews in the occupied Polish and Soviet territories. S. 147. In: The Place of Terror , History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps , Volume 9. CH Beck, Munich 2009. ISBN 978-3-406-57238-8 .
3. ^ SPD press service. Ed. Social Democratic Press Service Bonn. P / XXII / 60, March 29, 1967 http://library.fes.de/spdpd/1967/670329.pdf
4. ^ Mario Wenzel : Forced labor camp for Jews in the occupied Polish and Soviet territories. S. 147. In: The Place of Terror , History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps , Volume 9. CH Beck, Munich 2009. ISBN 978-3-406-57238-8 .
5. ↑ Jürgen Serke : History of a Discovery . In: Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger. I am wrapped in longing. Poems . Edited by Jürgen Serke. Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe 1980, pp. 5-33. ISBN 3455047904 .
6. ↑ https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/GRATJVXKW7NEHLUPPSRYEDKUZ5IQU242
7. ^ George Henry Bennett: The Nazi, the painter, an the forgotten story of the SS road. Reaction Books, London 2012, ISBN 978-1-86189-909-5 , p. 163