Gut Jungfernhof (warehouse)

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The ruins of the camp (2011)

The Jungfernhof estate (Latvian Jumpravmuiža ) was a makeshift camp for four transports of Jews from the “ Greater German Reich ” to the “ Reichskommissariat Ostland ”, today's Baltic States. The camp existed between 1941 and 1944, when the last prisoners were transferred to the Riga ghetto .

location

Today there are only a few remains of the camp. One and a half kilometers, it was south of the freight depot Skirotava and about 12 kilometers from the Riga city center in the southwest of the road between Riga and Daugavpils in the municipality Katlakans on the eastern bank of the Daugava .

prehistory

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Jungfernhof was a state property in independent Latvia with the name Klein-Jungfernhof (Latvian Mazjumpravmuiža). During the Soviet occupation of Latvia (1939–1941), the Red Army decided to build a military airfield here. Until the German invasion, however, only the runway was completed.

After the occupation of Latvia by the Wehrmacht , the estate and the remains of the airfield were leased to the security police by the civil administration of Riga . In August 1941 Rudolf Lange , commander of the security police, commissioned SS-Unterscharfuhrer Rudolf Seck with the management of the property. The area covered approx. 200 hectares and was later to be converted into an SS manor. At that time the complex consisted of a manor house, three wooden barns and five smaller houses and stables. Most of the buildings were dilapidated and needed to be repaired before they could be converted into an estate.

On October 31, 1941, the Eichmann Department published guidelines for the deportation of German Jews to the Reichskommissariat Ostland with the destinations Minsk and Riga. The tense transport situation in Belarus led to several deportation trains originally intended for Minsk being diverted to Riga. Before the murder of the local Jews on Riga Bloody Sunday and the following days in the Riga Ghetto had created space for the German Jews, a transport with 1,053 Jews from Berlin arrived early in the morning of November 30, 1941. They were shot immediately in the Rumbula forest . because a planned camp in Salaspils was not yet ready for reception either.

For the next four transports, the Jungfernhof manor, whose location near the city of Riga appeared to be ideal. The designated warehouse manager Rudolf Seck was probably only informed late about the incoming transports and was surprised by the large number of people.

History of the Jungfernhof camp

Until the Dünamünde campaign (November 1941 to March 1942)

The buildings were unsuitable for accommodating many people. Nevertheless, in November 1941, the barns and stables were briefly equipped with wooden beds. The area owned by the SS could be used immediately without consulting the regional commissariat and was now used as emergency accommodation and intermediate quarters to provide workers for the construction of the Salaspils camp . The work was done by Latvian Jews from the Riga ghetto, by Soviet prisoners of war and by civilian workers. But most of the buildings remained without heating and structurally in a desolate condition. Some of the buildings were leaking and it was snowing inside.

On December 2, 1941, Jews from Franconia reached Jungfernhof on the first transport . The 1008 people came from the cities of Bamberg , Fürth , Nuremberg and Würzburg as well as other, smaller places and had left the Langwasser camp on November 30th on the Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg. The newcomers had to vacate their compartments and line up in rows of five. Now they were led to the camp along the Dünaburger (German name of Daugavpils) road. They took up positions in the camp and, separated into men and women, were taken to the accommodations.

On December 4, 1013 Jews from Wuerttemberg were transported from the assembly camp at Killesberg in Stuttgart , which means that around 2,000 people were now on the area. 1001 Jews from Vienna came to Jungfernhof on December 6, 1941. On December 9th, a transport of 964 people from Hamburg , originally planned for Minsk, followed , which also included people deported from Lübeck and Danzig . A total of four transports initially arrived at the Jungfernhof camp. Another transport in January 1942 brought Jews from Vienna to the camp. A total of just under 4,000 people were accommodated in the camp.

For these crowds, even the simplest accommodation requirements were initially lacking. The inmates had to seal the accommodations and provide firewood themselves . They also built makeshift infirmaries. The supply of medication was so poor that from January 1942 the sick were transported away to be shot.

During the harsh winter of 1941/1942, between 800 and 900 inmates of the camp died. They froze to death, succumbed to malnutrition or the diseases that were soon to spread. The frozen ground did not allow the dead to be buried. Only after an SS man had blasted two holes underground were the bodies buried in a mass grave.

Soon after the arrival of the transports, camp manager Rudolf Seck selected several men whom he called in to set up the Salaspils camp. He also established several work detachments that he sent to nearby Riga to clear snow. These work details also had to clean the trains at the Šķirotava freight yard. A quarry detachment got the urgently needed stones for the construction of the warehouse.

With the arrival of the transports, a kind of storage order was also established. Rudolf Seck appointed the Würzburg businessman Gustav Kleemann as camp elder . The order stipulated that the inmates had to stay in their sleeping quarters from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. every day. As a result, a boy was shot dead by the Latvian police guarding the camp when he made his way to the latrine too early the first morning after his arrival . There were no watchtowers or continuous fencing, but a mobile chain of posts of ten to fifteen Latvian auxiliary police officers who shot those fleeing immediately. Seck also set up a camp police composed of 20 men under the direction of the Jew Josef Levy, who were supposed to enforce the orders of the SS man. The camp manager himself shot inmates for the most trivial reasons.

Shortly after the arrival of the deportees, those responsible set up temporary kitchens (but only one kitchen per transport). The meager meals could soon be eaten here, which consisted only of a watery soup, a few slices of bread, a little margarine and, more rarely, a little sausage. The bartering with the Latvian population flourished therefore, although he death penalty stood. Most of the time, however, Seck refrained from using the death penalty and the convicts received cane blows in front of the assembled camp staff. The SS man could thus forego reports to his superiors that would have damaged his authority.

In January 1942, Seck transferred around 200 women to the Riga ghetto, and in February the sick were transported from the camp. In mid-March the prisoners were truthfully informed that they could work in a canning factory in Dünamünde in the future. The SS man Gerhard Maywald used this lie to avoid possible resistance to evacuation. He promised that better accommodation would be available there and that work would be easier, whereupon many people volunteered. The initiator of the camp, Rudolf Lange, himself attended the evacuation. On the morning and afternoon of March 26, 1942, a total of between 1,700 and 1,800 people were transported away and taken by bus to a nearby forest. Here, in the Biķernieki forest , they were shot during the day and buried in mass graves.

Until the camp was closed (March 1942 to 1944)

After only the 450 strongest prisoners remained, camp manager Rudolf Seck began building an estate . For this purpose, the prisoners worked the Soviet runway and sown vegetables. The ailing barns were demolished and replaced by barracks that could also be heated. The rich harvests in the following year led to a rapid improvement in the supply situation in the warehouse. Seck also organized dance evenings in the Jungfernhof. Soon the Jungfernhof attracted the envy of the other offices in the area. In the summer of 1942, a forge and a laundry were set up in the camp premises for the needs of the SS.

At the beginning of July 1942, the camp had to surrender a total of 130 workers to the Riga ghetto. Further evacuations followed in 1943. In order to make up for the losses, Seck had to oblige residents of the ghetto to do duty in the camp's fields. In August 1943 only 82 workers were registered at the Jungfernhof. In 1944 the Jungfernhof camp was abandoned and Rudolf Seck and a small group of forced laborers moved to another unknown estate. Of the approximately 4,000 people who were deported to the Jungfernhof, only 148 survived.

Statistics of the camp inmates

In December 1941, a total of 3984 people were brought to Jungfernhof in four trains, including 136 children up to ten years of age and 766 people of retirement age. 1013 Jews from Württemberg were deported from Stuttgart to the camp on December 1, 1941 . A further 964 who were deported on December 6, 1941 came from Hamburg and Lübeck - there were 90 Jews still living in the city - and other communities in Schleswig-Holstein . Further transports came from Nuremberg with 1008 people and Vienna with 1000 people.

gender Average age
male 47.0
Female 48.4
total: 47.7
Transport out Deportees Survivors
Nuremberg 1008 52
Stuttgart 1012 43
Vienna 1000 18th
Hamburg 964 35
total: 3984 148

Fate of the prisoners

One survivor wrote of the shelter: “There were no doors and no stove, the windows were open, and the roof was not in order. It was 45 degrees cold and the snow swept through the barn. ”The claim of a contemporary witness that gas vans were also used there is not further substantiated and is considered unlikely.

Viktor Marx from Württemberg, whose wife Marga and daughter Ruth were shot, reported on the Dünamünde campaign on March 26, 1942: “In the camp we were told that all women and children would be leaving the Jungfernhof, namely to Dünamünde. There are hospitals, schools and solid stone houses where they can live. I asked the commandant to send me to Dünamünde as well, but he refused because I was too good a worker. ”Max Kleemann (* 1887), a participant in the First World War , who was abducted from Würzburg with his daughter Lore, was also shot had been.

The murdered inmates of the camp include the parents of the rabbi and Lübeck honorary citizen Felix F. Carlebach , his sister-in-law Resi Carlebach (née Graupe) and his uncle, the rabbi Joseph Carlebach (1883-1942) with wife Charlotte (née Preuss) (* 1900 ), and their three youngest children Ruth (* 1926), Noemi (* 1927) and Sara (* 1928). They were shot dead on March 26, 1942 in the Biķernieki forest . The banker Simson Carlebach (1875–1942), the brother of Rabbi Joseph Carlebach, had collapsed before he died on the way to the camp. The second oldest son of Joseph Carlebach's nine children, Salomon (Shlomo Peter) Carlebach (born August 17, 1925), survived because he had been assigned to the work detachment. He later became a rabbi in New York.

Salomon Carlebach reported in an interview in 1994 about the moment when he saw his father for the last time: “I know that my blessed father knew at that moment that the last hour had come and that he would go to certain death, although he didn't say anything. Of course, many of the people thought that they would really be brought to another camp now, where the circumstances would be much better. ”Regarding his personal fate, he said:“ Without a firm belief one could not have survived something like this. ”

The Nuremberg Higher Regional Court Judge Hugo Ehrenberger and his wife Lotte b. Steinheimer died in Jungfernhof in March 1942.

SS camp personnel

See also

literature

  • Andrej Angrick , Peter Klein: The “Final Solution” in Riga. Exploitation and extermination 1941–1944 . Darmstadt 2006, ISBN 3-534-19149-8 .
  • Fanny Englard: From the orphanage to the Jungfernhof. Deported from Hamburg to Riga - report by a survivor . Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-89965-388-5 .
  • Josef Katz: Memories of a Survivor . Kiel 1988, ISBN 3-89029-038-8 .
  • Interview with the surviving Salomon (Shlomo Peter) Carlebach (born August 17, 1925). In: Sabine Niemann (editor): The Carlebachs, a rabbi family from Germany . Ephraim Carlebach Foundation (ed.), Dölling and Galitz, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-926174-99-4 .
  • Miriam Gillis-Carlebach : "Light in the Dark". Jewish lifestyle in the Jungfernhof concentration camp. In: Gerhard Paul, Miriam Gillis-Carlebach: Menorah and swastika. Neumünster 1988, ISBN 3-529-06149-2 , pp. 549-563.
  • Peter Guttkuhn: The Lübeck siblings Grünfeldt. About the life, suffering and death of 'non-Aryan' Christians . Schmidt-Römhild, Lübeck 2001, ISBN 978-3-7950-0772-0 .
  • Wolfgang Scheffler: The fate of the German, Austrian and Czechoslovak Jews deported to the Baltic States 1941–1945. A historical overview . In: Wolfgang Scheffler, Diana Schulle (arrangement): Book of memories. The German, Austrian and Czechoslovak Jews deported to the Baltic States . KG Saur, Munich 2003, Volume 1, ISBN 3-598-11618-7 , pp. 1-78.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Wolfgang Scheffler: The fate of the German, Austrian and Czechoslovak Jews deported to the Baltic States 1941–1945. A historical overview . P. 9.
  2. ↑ Andrej Angrick, Peter Klein: The "Final Solution" in Riga. Exploitation and extermination 1941–1944 . P. 121.
  3. ↑ Alfred Gottwald, Diana Schulle: The "Deportations of Jews" from the German Reich 1941–1945 . Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-86539-059-5 , p. 87.
  4. ↑ Alfred Gottwald, Diana Schulle: The "Deportations of Jews" from the German Reich 1941–1945 . Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-86539-059-5 , p. 121 / For more detailed information see Christoph Dieckmann: Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Lithuania 1941–1944. Göttingen 2011, Vol. 2, pp. 960–967 / The fact of their murder reached Victor Klemperer as a rumor , who wrote in his diary entry of January 13, 1942, “Evacuated Jews were shot in rows near Riga as they left the train been ".
  5. ↑ Andrej Angrick, Peter Klein: The "Final Solution" in Riga. Exploitation and extermination 1941–1944 . P. 121.
  6. ↑ Andrej Angrick, Peter Klein: The "Final Solution" in Riga. Exploitation and destruction . P. 217.
  7. ^ Alfred Gottwaldt, Diana Schulle: The "Deportations of Jews" from the German Reich 1941–1945. Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-86539-059-5 , pp. 125f.
  8. ↑ Andrej Angrick, Peter Klein: The "Final Solution" in Riga. Exploitation and destruction . P. 220.
  9. ↑ a b c Wolfgang Scheffler: The fate of the German, Austrian and Czechoslovak Jews deported to the Baltic States 1941–1945. A historical overview . P. 10.
  10. ↑ Wolfgang Scheffler: The fate of the German, Austrian and Czechoslovak Jews deported to the Baltic States 1941–1945. A historical overview . P. 11.
  11. ↑ Andrej Angrick, Peter Klein: The "Final Solution" in Riga. Exploitation and destruction . P. 220.
  12. ↑ Andrej Angrick, Peter Klein: The "Final Solution" in Riga. Exploitation and destruction . P. 223.
  13. ↑ Wolfgang Scheffler: The fate of the German, Austrian and Czechoslovak Jews deported to the Baltic States 1941–1945. A historical overview . P. 11.
  14. ↑ a b Andrej Angrick, Peter Klein: The "Final Solution" in Riga. Exploitation and destruction . P. 344.
  15. ↑ Wolfgang Scheffler: The fate of the German, Austrian and Czechoslovak Jews deported to the Baltic States 1941–1945. A historical overview . P. 12.
  16. ↑ Wolfgang Scheffler: The fate of the German, Austrian and Czechoslovak Jews deported to the Baltic States 1941–1945. A historical overview . P. 13.
  17. ↑ All precise figures from: Alfred Gottwald, Diana Schulle: The "Deportations of Jews" from the German Reich 1941–1945 . Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-86539-059-5 , pp. 114/115.
  18. ↑ Transport from Stuttgart ( Memento of the original from January 30, 2009 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.zeichen-der-erinnerung.org
  19. ^ Transporting Jews from Lübeck .
  20. ↑ Nuremberg Transport .
  21. ^ Quote from Herbert Mai, one of the two survivors from Würzburg, taken from Roland Flade: Destination Jungfernhof. In: Mainpost of December 2, 2010, KIT edition, p. 32.
  22. ↑ Interview in Die Carlebachs , p. 82 / on the other hand Angrick / Klein, ISBN 3-534-19149-8 , p. 338 with note 3.
  23. ↑ Report by survivor Viktor Marx ( memento of the original from October 2, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.geschichtswerkstatt-tuebingen.de
  24. ^ Camp elder Max Kleemann
  25. ↑ Miriam Gillis-Carlebach: "Light in the Dark" . ISBN 3-529-06149-2 , p. 553.
  26. ^ Sabine Niemann (editor): The Carlebachs, a rabbi family from Germany , Ephraim Carlebach Foundation (ed.). Dölling and Galitz. Hamburg 1995, p. 83.
  27. ^ The Carlebachs, a family of rabbis from Germany , p. 85.
  28. ↑ W. Holy Achneck, Looking for clues , Nürnberger Nachrichten, July 23 of 2010.

Coordinates: 56 ° 53 ′ 32.3 "  N , 24 ° 11 ′ 53.2"  E