Gelsenberg camp

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The Gelsenberg camp was a satellite camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Gelsenkirchen-Horst , where from July to September 1944 Jewish women from Eastern Europe who had to do forced labor in the Ruhr industry were detained. At least 150 of them were killed in bombing raids on September 11, 1944 because they were not allowed to seek shelter.

description

The warehouse, which was set up in the summer of 1944, was in an open field east of the Gelsenberg Petrol AG hydrogenation plant near the freight yard of the Hugo colliery in Sutum . It consisted of army tents and was surrounded by a barbed wire fence and watchtowers.

history

In July 1944, around 2000 Hungarian and Transylvanian Jewish women from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp were housed in the Gelsenberg camp . The forced laborers were supposed to be used on the site of the hydrogenation plant, which had been badly damaged by Allied air raids and no longer operational, to clear rubble and to rebuild, but also performed forced labor for the Todt organization in Essen-Kupferdreh and in the Gelsenkirchen harbor . 520 women were transferred to the subcamp Humboldtstrasse in Essen in August 1944 , where they had to work for the Friedrich Krupp AG company.

After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, the women were first taken to ghettos and then deported to Auschwitz from May 1944, where they were selected for work . In the final phase of the war, the Buchenwald concentration camp had the function of accepting transports of prisoners from abroad and from other camps and distributing them to external commands throughout Germany. Most of the women and girls deported to Gelsenkirchen came from Transylvania , mainly from the Sighet area , and were on average a little over 20 years old. They had to do heavy physical labor for about 12 hours a day on the already badly damaged factory premises. The female guards working in the camp were compulsory and completed a short course in the Ravensbrück concentration camp before they began their service. The command leader of the camp was SS-Obersturmführer Eugen Dietrich (1889–1966).

In heavy bombing raids on the hydrogenation plant on September 11, 1944, at least 150 of the women were killed because they were denied access to the plant's air raid shelters and protective trenches. The city of Gelsenkirchen put the death toll among female concentration camp prisoners on December 31, 1946 in a questionnaire by the CHC (Central Historical Commission of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews) as 250. The Westfälische Rundschau also reported 250 victims in 1954. Numerous women were injured and brought to Gelsenkirchen hospitals, which seemed remarkable to contemporaries.

After the Gelsenberg camp was closed in mid-September 1944, 1,216 women remaining in the camp and, successively, most of the injured people housed in hospitals were taken to a satellite camp in Sömmerda in Thuringia for forced labor at the Rheinmetall-Borsig AG company . On the initiative of a doctor, 17 camp inmates were kept in a Gelsenkirchen hospital until the end of the war and thus released from concentration camp imprisonment, 7 other women survived in a hospital in Bottrop .

Commemoration

Memorial to the victims of the air raid (1948)

On July 14, 1948, the Gelsenkirchen Jewish Aid Committee, together with representatives of the city of Gelsenkirchen, other persecuted groups, Jewish institutions and state politics inaugurated a memorial at the site of the mass grave in which many of the bomb victims were buried on the camp grounds. When the Gelsenberg plant was converted into an oil refinery and expanded in the early 1950s, the memorial was moved together with the remains to the nearby Horst-Süd cemetery. The names of 140 of the victims have now been determined. Since 2003 there has been an information board on the grave, on which the known names and life dates of the victims of the bombing are recorded. Every year in September, the victims are remembered in Gelsenkirchen-Horst. In 2018, the memorial and information boards at the grave site were renewed and the monument erected in 1948 was supplemented by a seated female figure on a plinth created by stonemason students from a vocational school in Gelsenkirchen , which was placed on the path in front of the memorial site on September 16, 2018.

literature

  • Stefan Goch: The Buchenwald subcamp in Gelsenkirchen-Horst. In: Jan Erik Schulte (Ed.): Concentration camps in the Rhineland and in Westphalia 1933–1945. Between central control and regional initiative. Schöningh, Paderborn 2005, ISBN 3-506-71743-X , pp. 271-278.
  • Marlies Mrotzek: The subcamp of Gelsenberg Petrol AG. Germinal, Fernwald 2002.

Web links

Commons : Gelsenberg-Denkmal  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. a b 70 years ago: Bombs on Gelsenberg In: www.lokalkompass.de , September 2014, accessed on August 21, 2018.
  2. List of names of the victims and information on the memorial at the Horst-Süd cemetery , photo from September 2016.
  3. New list of names , information board and complete ensemble of the grave site at the Horst-Süd cemetery after the renovation in 2018, photos from January 2020.

Coordinates: 51 ° 32 '24 "  N , 7 ° 3' 4"  E