Izbica Ghetto

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In the so-called shtetl , the predominantly Yiddish- speaking residents mostly lived in wooden houses.
Visitors labeled pebbles in memory of deportees from Constance . Track system in Izbica, 2013.

The izbica ghetto was in World War II from 1942 for deporting Jews a transit station, and transit ghetto or passage ghetto called, in the extermination camps of the Holocaust , in particular for Belzec and Sobibor extermination camp . The commandant was SS-Hauptsturmführer Kurt Engels , whose deputy was Ludwig Klemm .

The place Izbica is located in Poland, southeast of Lublin . The place was a transit ghetto between Belzec and Sobibor . Other places other than transit ghetto were Piaski , Rejowiec, Krasnystaw , Opole Lubelskie, Deblin, Zamosc , Chelm , Wlodawa and Międzyrzec Podlaski . All except Miedzyrzec Podlaski were close to or directly on the railway lines that led to Belzec and Sobibor. Miedzyrzec Podlaski was on the route to the Treblinka extermination camp . A transit ghetto meant that the prisoners were accommodated in the existing apartments and that there was no guarded fence. The death penalty prohibition and widespread surveillance were enough to keep the prisoners in this remote location.

history

As part of Aktion Reinhard , thousands of Jews were initially quartered in small towns as temporary camps until the extermination camps were completed. The former Gauleiter of Vienna , Odilo Globocnik , now in charge of the action, set up a Judenrat in Izbica with previous experiences from Vienna , which was forced to participate in the ghetto in the interests of the SS.

On January 3, 1942, the head of the governor general's office , Josef Bühler , informed the governor of the German district of Lublin , Ernst Zörner , that around 14,000 German, Czech and Slovak Jews would be brought to the Lublin region and remain imprisoned there for a while should. Then Izbica u. a. set as the location for a transit ghetto. In order to improve its "reception capacity", around 1,500 Polish Jews were initially deported to Krasniczyn and Gorzkow.

SS-Hauptsturmführer Richard Türk headed the responsible department “Population and Welfare” (BuF) in the Lublin district until May 1941 and planned the deportations. His successor until February 1943 was Georg Hartig, a member of the Bund Deutscher Osten . The BuF department in the administration of the Krastnystaw district, in whose area Izbica was located, was headed by the Justice Secretary Rudolf Rieger.

Thomas Blatt , a survivor of the Holocaust from and in this region, experienced several surprising roundups, raids and deportations as a child ; his father was a member of the Judenrat. Leaf finally came to Sobibór with his family, where his relatives were killed immediately, while he survived as a prisoner of work and as a participant in the Sobibór uprising .

In addition to the occupied part of Poland named Jews from the General Government, Jews from Western Europe also passed through this concentration camp. On March 11, 1942, a train with a thousand Jews from Theresienstadt arrived . From March to June 1942, 17,000 foreign Jews were deported to Izbica. At times, over 19,000 people lived in a place with wooden houses, the population of which had previously only been 4,500. Rail transports went from the collection camp to the Belzec and Sobibór extermination camps . 4,500 Jews were shot by the SS during various "evacuations" in the local cemetery. The concentration camp as a transit ghetto was closed on April 28, 1943 after the last deportation train.

The Polish resistance fighter and officer Jan Karski , disguised as a Ukrainian militiaman ( Trawnik ), was able to observe the mass murder of Jews in extermination camps and report it to the government in exile in London . After the war, however, he was also suspected that he had not seen the gruesome events directly in the Belzec camp, but in the Izbica transit ghetto.

An event that has only become known once in the history of National Socialism was unveiled in 2006: the Gestapo prison was built using Jewish gravestones from the local cemetery and is now a police post building. The stones have now been carefully removed and gracefully returned to the Jewish cemetery in Izbica, where they were attached to the outer walls of the Ohel , the burial place of Rabbi Mordechai Josef Leiner .

Use of Jewish police in deportations

The ethnic German mayor of Izbica, Jan Szulc (Jan Schultz), founded a separate department for Jewish police officers of Czech origin, the Jewish security service . The advantage for the occupiers was their knowledge of German; many had also done military service. This guaranteed the Germans order and discipline in the preparations for the deportations. There were also Jewish police officers (security service) who were subordinate to the Polish Jewish Council. These police departments could be used against the various national Jewish populations as needed.

Not only SS and Gestapo men from Izbica took part in deportations known as “evacuation operations”, but also SS men from Lublin, Zamosc and Krasnystaw. The representatives of the civil administration from Krasnystaw, headed by the mayor, also took an active part. In addition, units of the concentration camp guards from the SS training camp in Trawniki , which mainly consisted of Ukrainians and members of the Polish fire brigade, were called in.

For a long time, the foreign Jews in Izbica kept the hope that deportation from there would mean a trip to a job that obviously did not exist in Izbica.

The last deportations

The penultimate deportation in 1942 took place on November 2nd. After that, the place and region should be made completely “Jew-pure”. When the last train finally left, many remained on the meadow at the station. Kurt Engels then ordered all remaining Jews to be locked in the local cinema. They were held in this building for days until SS men finally led them out in groups to shoot them in the Jewish cemetery. This killing of more than 1000 people was observed by the local population.

Officially, Izbica was now considered “Jew-free”, although there were still people who had fled or hid in the surrounding area.

Ghetto as a collection camp

In December 1942, the Higher SS and Police Leader Krüger ordered “ the establishment of ghettos in the individual districts. A ghetto also arose in Izbica, which existed until its final liquidation in April 1943. Several hundred Polish Jews who had lived in the ghetto were murdered in Sobibór. "

Explanation for the different warehouse functions

Robert Kuwałek cites two explanations for the various camp functions: a) as a deception (which is reminiscent of the function of the intermediate institutions in the T4 euthanasia campaign in the Reich) and b) as reserve capacity until the extermination camps are expanded. Both explanatory approaches do not have to contradict each other and may well have deliberately served side by side as a reason. But it could also be that the SS was only interested in reserve capacity.

Already in the first half of March 1942, before the actual start of "Aktion Reinhardt", transports with foreign Jews arrived in the Lublin district and were mostly brought to Izbica. “The existence of Izbica and also of the other transit ghettos confronts historians with the fundamental question why, in the first half of 1942, thousands of foreign Jews were brought to the Lublin area and especially to these small towns. There are two hypothetical answers to this: The deportations to Izbica could simply have been used for propaganda. It was about the fact that the National Socialists wanted to demonstrate to the Jews who remained in Germany, the Czech Republic or Slovakia that they would actually only be "resettled" to work in the East. That is why you had the option to send messages at the beginning, even if in most cases it was heavily censored. The second reason could be that the extermination camps did not yet have sufficient capacity to accommodate so many transports. It was only when they were expanded in May and June 1942 with the enlarged gas chambers that it was possible to kill such a large number of people. ” The evacuations in October and November therefore made use of the killing capacities that were now available.

Commemoration

In Hetzerath , a memorial stele commemorates the deportation of 36 people from Erkelenz to Izbica.

In many cities there are stumbling blocks that name the deportation location Izbica in their inscriptions.

Several memorials commemorate the murdered. A memorial plaque was inaugurated on November 16, 2006 at the Jewish cemetery in Izbica. The Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich and the German Ambassador Reinhard Schweppe took part in the ceremony. The board tells the story of the former Jewish cemetery. On May 10, 2007, the Main Franconian municipalities erected a memorial stone for the deported Jews from the Franconian administrative districts on a small square in the village . It is a shell limestone block from Frickenhausen .

There is a stele in Hetzerath ( Erkelenz ). In Stuttgart, the memorial at the Nordbahnhof (North Railway Station ) reminds people of the deportation on April 26, 1942 to Izbica. On Bahnhof Wuppertal-Steinbeck an obelisk reminiscent of the deportees and their deportation places.

The memorial for the Austrian Jewish victims of the Shoah is also called Izbica.

Movie

  • Wolfgang Schoen, Frank Gutermuth (authors): Izbica - Turnstile of Death , TV documentary, D, 2006. (Film also about the bricked up tombstones)

Literature, sources

See also

Web links

Commons : Ghetto Izbica  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ rabinovici.at Doron Rabinovici: Instances of powerlessness. Vienna 1938–1945. The way to the Judenrat . Jewish publishing house in Suhrkamp, ​​2001
  2. ↑ Klaus-Peter Friedrich (editor): Poland: Generalgouvernement August 1941–1945 ( The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 , Volume 9) Munich 2014, p. 224.
  3. ↑ Bogdan Musial : German civil administration and the persecution of Jews in the Generalgouvernement . Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1999, p. 99.
  4. ↑ Shoot into the crowd. The Justice Secretary Rudolf Rieger in Izbica . In: Der Spiegel . No. 34 , 1951 ( online ).
  5. ↑ Thomas Toivi sheet: Only the shadows remain. The uprising in the Sobibór extermination camp . 1st edition. Structure paperback, 2001, ISBN 978-3-7466-8068-2 (English: From the Ashes fo Sobibor . Translated by Monika Schmalz).
  6. ↑ Stephan Lehnstaedt: The core of the Holocaust. Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka and Aktion Reinhardt. Munich 2017, ISBN 9783406707025 , p. 71.
  7. ↑ Stephan Lehnstaedt: The core of the Holocaust. Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka and Aktion Reinhardt. Munich 2017, ISBN 9783406707025 , p. 71.
  8. ^ DasErste.de : TV documentary about Jewish gravestones for Gestapo prison ( Memento from December 2, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ^ A b Robert Kuwałek: The Transit Ghetto Izbica . In: bildungswerk-ks.de . Retrieved September 13, 2018.
  10. ↑ kitzingen.info (PDF)

Coordinates: 50 ° 53 '  N , 23 ° 10'  E