Internment camp Frøslev
The internment camp Frøslev (Danish: Frøslevlejren ) was set up in 1944 in the municipality of the same name Frøslev just behind the German-Danish border and at that time had the official German name "Police prisoner camp Fröslee".
History of origin
Denmark had declared itself neutral at the beginning of the Second World War and also concluded a non-aggression treaty with Germany in the spring of 1939 . Nevertheless, it was from the army in April 1940 as part of the operation Weserübung occupied . The Danish government and King Christian X remained in office under protest, and the administration such as the mayor, local police and courts remained in Danish hands. At first, isolated resistance groups were formed , which carried out acts of sabotage against railway lines and against companies that collaborated with the occupying power.
In the following years the situation for the Danish population worsened until on August 29, 1943 the Danish government resigned and all cooperation with the German occupying power ceased. At the same time, the resistance movement gained significant support and massively stepped up its actions, also with the support of equipment that was dropped from British planes (in particular weapons, explosives, radios).
Deportations to German concentration camps
From autumn 1943 the Germans began the first major deportations of Jews and “political prisoners”. Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz was a shipping expert at the German legation in Copenhagen and was close friends with leading Danish social democrats and trade unionists. At the end of September 1943, Duckwitz learned of the final date of the planned deportation of Jews and informed his Danish friends that the deportations were to begin on the night of October 2nd. Within a very short space of time, most of the Danish Jews were shipped to the Swedish coast in 600 to 700 fishing trawlers, small barges and boats. Sweden had been informed in good time. By October 16, almost 6,600 Jews were already in safety, a total of 7,742 Jews were rescued, including Fritz Bauer . The German patrol boats, which otherwise guarded the sea area, had remained in the port on Duckwitz's instructions.
The interned Danish communists were taken to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig and the Danish resistance fighters to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Danish Jews who were arrested on the night of October 1st and 2nd were brought to the Theresienstadt ghetto , Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück. This confirmed the danger that Danish nationals would be transported directly to German concentration camps on a large scale. The Frøslev camp was therefore primarily intended for political prisoners and not for the imprisonment and deportation of Jews.
In March, a transport of 100 prisoners to German concentration camps was planned because the Danish prisons were overcrowded. The department head in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nils Svenningsen , protested and suggested the establishment of an internment camp in Denmark. In negotiations with the Reich Plenipotentiary in Denmark, Werner Best, in March 1944 he succeeded in having the internment camp in Frøslev built and set up for Danish prisoners under the supervision of the Gestapo and SS . In return, the Germans promised not to be deported to German concentration camps.
Installation
The camp, which was not yet completely built by a Danish company, was put into operation on August 13, 1944 and was intended for around 1,500 prisoners in its final state. The first prisoners came to the camp on August 13th. The total number of detainees was about 12,000.
Working on the delousing barrack
Excavation work
February 5, 1945 Occupancy
Management, administration and security
It was headed by SS-Standartenführer Otto Bovensiepen , head of the state police stations and the Berlin state police headquarters and, until the end of the war in 1945, the commander of the security police and the security service in Denmark . The camp management consisted of SS personnel, the German police were responsible for internal camp management and supervision of the prisoners. A guard company of 150-300 police soldiers was responsible for the external guarding and manning of the six watchtowers equipped with light machine guns.
In contrast to previous camps, the Frøslev internment camp was managed by Danish staff who were housed outside the camp area. What was unusual was that the prisoners received the same food as the guards. The company was organized by Denmark, but soon passed into German hands. The supply of food and medicines was ensured by Danish authorities as best it was possible in times of war, so that, unlike in German concentration camps, there was no risk of malnutrition or lack of medical care.
As in other camps, there was limited self-administration by the camp elder selected by the camp commandant. In each barrack a barrack elder was appointed as an inmate functionary, who ensured order in the barracks and the work of the prisoners. The prisoners were almost exclusively Danish, so that the German supervision could not take advantage of conflicts and resentments between different nationalities. Since there was no shortage of food, the inmates were spared a fight for bare survival and the prisoners could show solidarity. The prisoner self-government had the inner camp largely under control, as the Danish camp elder PM Digmann explained, who was in office from September 1944 to May 1945.
Forced labor of the inmates
Forced labor had to be done, but it differed from the all too often fatal Nazi forced labor in the German Reich.
The prisoners set up a kind of "Potemkin backdrop" by presenting the commandant with embellished work schedules. In addition to the carpentry and metal workshop, there was a “doormat grate cleaning” work group with ten prisoners full-time. The carpenter's workshop delivered its products, mainly window frames and wooden shoes, to the Flensburg merchant Walter Lausen. Since the camp built by a Danish company had many defects, the craftsmen and engineers among the prisoners were busy clearing up the botched construction. In other areas of the camp, doctors, lawyers, officers and administrators could exert a great influence on the operation of the camp.
Deportations to Germany
The occupying power did not adhere to the clear agreements, because on September 15, 1944, one month after it was put into operation, 195 prisoners were transferred to the Neuengamme concentration camp . Of the approximately 12,000 prisoners who passed through the camp, approximately 1,610 were deported to German concentration camps. Some of them were used in the notorious Husum-Schwesing , Porta Westfalica and Stutthof subcamps. 220 of the Danes deported to Germany were murdered. The death rate among Danish concentration camp inmates, known as anti-social and criminals, was 30 percent, that of political concentration camp inmates between 18 and 20 percent. A plaque of honor in the museum of the internment camp Frøslev names the dead.
| date | Number of prisoners | concentration camp |
|---|---|---|
| September 15, 1944 | 196 people | Neuengamme |
| September 25, 1944 | 288 people (police officers) | Buchenwald and other camps |
| October 5, 1944 | 190 people (including 141 police officers) | Neuengamme |
| October 20, 1944 | 196 people | Neuengamme |
| November 21, 1944 | 3 persons | ? |
| November 29, 1944 | 118 people | Neuengamme |
| December 14, 1944 | 11 people | Ravensbrück |
| December 21, 1944 | 112 people | Neuengamme |
| January 12, 1945 | 226 people | Neuengamme |
| January 19, 1945 | 6 persons | Neuengamme |
| February 16, 1945 | 252 people | Dachau |
| March 13, 1945 | 8 people | Neuengamme |
| March 20, 1945 | 5 people | Neuengamme |
| total | 1,611 people |
December 1944, homecoming
In April 1945 the maximum number of prisoners was reached with about 5,500. This was because the evacuation of concentration camp prisoners from Germany reached its peak at this point. As early as December 1944, four Danish buses and four ambulances had brought the first concentration camp prisoners back to Denmark, there were 198 Danish police officers and border gendarmes. Several small Danish transports followed by March 1945.
White buses rescue operation
At the end of March 1945 the rescue operation of Count Folke Bernadotte's white buses began to transport Scandinavian concentration camp prisoners back. At the end of March 1945 around 50% of the Swedish relief corps returned to Sweden and were replaced by Danes. At Easter 1945 the Danes made two large convoys available to the Swedes and on April 20 and 21, 200 white buses brought more than 4000 Danes and Norwegians from the Scandinavian camp in Neuengamme to Krusa-Padburg, the important hub of the rescue operation.
This is where the convoys started and here the rescued were briefly housed and cared for in the Froslev camp and in the quarantine stations. The quarantine stations were set up as early as 1943, and here and in the Frøslev internment camp, the prisoners were bathed, deloused and thoroughly examined to prevent infectious diseases from being carried to Denmark. Doctors, nurses, Danish women's readiness activists, cooks, drivers as well as hundreds of volunteers from the Danish civil defense were involved in this work around the clock. For the prisoners, the smell of delousing powder and warm croquettes from the kitchen was an important reminder of their new freedom.
From December 1944 to May 1945 around 7,000 Danes and Norwegians arrived here in ambulances and white buses and were channeled through the Froslev camp and the quarantine stations. In addition, it was the path to freedom for around 10,000 concentration camp prisoners, mainly from Neuengamme concentration camp, who came from other countries, who then returned to their countries via Sweden.
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Padburg, white buses before departure
Kitchen in the quarantine station
Relief supplies are unloaded from a Swedish truck
After the end of the war (Faarhus camp)
Immediately after the end of the war in Denmark on May 5, 1945, the resistance movement took control and began to arrest members of the German minority and intern them in the camp together with Danish collaborators. Control of the camp passed to the state. At times there were more than 5,500 prisoners in the camp, which had been renamed Faarhuslager by order of the police commander Ernst Brix in order to draw a line under the past. Faarhus (German roughly: Schafhaus) was a neighboring village. In most cases, according to the retroactive legal settlement laws ( Retsopgør ), charges of collaboration were mainly charged, and some detainees were released after a few weeks or months without any charges having been made in the meantime.
In total, 2958 of the roughly 3,500 imprisoned members of the German ethnic group were convicted under these laws, most of them as so-called temporary or frontline volunteers, whereby it was sufficient to have taken part in a parade, but only around 3% of them for more serious acts such as denunciation . As a result of insufficient care by the Danish Red Cross, some of the inmates were killed. The last were released in October 1949.
The museum today
Part of the camp is now a museum and belongs to the Danish National Museum , whereby only the time as Frøslevlager, i.e. until 1945, is shown, the subsequent periods as Faarhuslager and Pattburgager not yet.
Parts of the original facilities and buildings were demolished after the camp closed, and watchtowers 3 and 4 were reconstructed in 1990 and 1991.
Some of the barracks are now used for other purposes, such as a nature exhibition, as an information barrack for the Danish civil protection, for an exhibition by Amnesty International . Some rooms are used as boarding school for students.
UN museum
Since 1992 there has also been a museum in the camp, which shows the Danes during peacekeeping measures. There documents about the international service of the Danish military are collected in memory of Danish units that were deployed in the context of the peacekeeping forces of the United Nations in crisis areas on November 15, 1956 in Egypt.
literature
- Sascha Grosser: The Froeslev Police Prison Camp - A photographic documentation, German information series, Padborgm 2019
- Henrik Skov Kristensen: En station på vej til helvede . Harreslev banegård and deportations af danske fanger fra Frøslev til tyske koncentrationslejre. Flensborg / Aabenraa 2002 (Danish).
- Henrik Skov Kristensen, Matthias Schartl: Harrislee-Bahnhof - a "station on the way to hell" . The deportation of Danish prisoners from the internment camp Frøslev to German concentration camps in 1944/45. In: Grenzfriedensbund ud Historik Samfund for Sønderjylland (Ed.): Grenzfriedenshefte . Issue 3. Flensburg 1996.
- Jørgen Mågård (Red.): Fanger i Frøslevlejren 1944–45 . Hernov 1988 (Danish, 1st edition 1974).
- Hanns Christian Jessen: Faarhus 1945–1949 - prison camp for the German minority in Denmark . Experiences, reports, documents. Husum Druck- und Verlagsgesellschaft, Husum 1987, ISBN 3-88042-365-2 .
- Gottfried Horstmann: Two years of my life - memories of Faarhus . The Nordschleswiger, Aabenraa 1954.
Web links
- Official website (Danish)
- Official website (English)
- Photo from the warehouse at www.graenseruten.dk (German)
- FN-Museet (Danish)
Individual evidence
- ↑ The Gode Tysker. In: FAZ. Oct. 9, 2018, p. 7. (online version) .
- ^ Jens-Christian Hansen: Danish prisoners in the Husum-Schwesing satellite camp. Publisher: ADS - Grenzfriedensbund e. V. Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutsches Schleswig, p. 25 ff.
- ↑ Henrik Skov Kristensen: A Station on the Way to Hell. P. 13. (German / Danish)
- ↑ Skov Kristensen, p. 14.
- ↑ Skov Kristensen, p. 15.
- ↑ The Frøslev Camp - then and now (ten-page brochure from the museum).
- ↑ Skov Kristensen, p. 15.
- ↑ Skov Kristensen, p. 64.
Coordinates: 54 ° 50 ′ 34 ″ N , 9 ° 19 ′ 42 ″ E