Julian Milejski

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Memorial plaque (on the memorial stone on the Unter den Linden street outside of Stelle (Harburg district) )

Julian Milejski (also: Mileyski , born October 10, 1921 in Zawiercin, Poland ; † May 4, 1942 in Stelle , Harburg district ) was a Polish slave laborer who was punished with death for " racial disgrace " during the Nazi era . A group of former students in Hamburg received the 2007 Bertini Prize for coming to terms with his fate .

Life

Facsimile of one of the Poland decrees of March 8, 1940
A " Poland badge " that Polish forced laborers had to wear due to the Poland decrees.

Julian Milejski was employed as a Polish slave laborer on a farm in the community of Stelle in the district of Harburg during the Second World War . He had a love affair with a German woman from Hamburg , who had also found accommodation in the village and lived in the immediate vicinity of the farm. Milejski wanted to end this illegal relationship after he had been warned by residents of the village about persecution by the National Socialists. The woman then reported him to the police for sexual assault . As a result, Milejski was picked up by the Gestapo and taken to the Lüneburg prison, where he was interrogated and also mistreated.

On May 4, 1942, Milejski was transported back to Stelle by an SS commando from the Neuengamme concentration camp , where other Polish forced laborers from the area had already been summoned in the former schoolyard (today: square in front of the town hall). The group had to march to a piece of forest outside the village, where Milejski was executed in front of their eyes on a specially constructed gallows. Milejski died at the age of 20.

The basis for this act was the so-called Poland decrees that the Nazi regime had decreed in March 1940. According to these regulations, which, according to the racial ideology of National Socialism , assumed that Polish forced laborers were inferior, they had to wear a so-called Poland badge on their clothing at all times .

The Polish forced laborers were strictly forbidden to have closer contact with Germans, whereby sexual contact with relatives of “German or related blood” was considered “ racial disgrace ” and was punished with death in accordance with Nazi racial laws .

Effects and remembrance

In 2003, a resident Stelles who had remembered the young Poles tried to the establishment of a memorial stone for Milejski, but this time by the Management Committee rejected the community. The case then attracted renewed attention through a publication by the local archivist Gerhard Rieckmann in 2005 on the National Socialist past of Stelle, which also reported on the murder of the forced laborer Milejski in 1942.

The documentation prompted a group of students from Harburg's secondary and secondary school in Hanhoopsfeld to start looking at it at the end of 2006. After the citizens and the local administration had shown little interest in further research, the young people, supported by some citizens and church representatives, suggested commemorative events and the provisional installation of memorial plaques. This also led to first coverage of the case in the Polish press , which in turn set off a search for Milejski's relatives.

For their commitment in the Milejski case, even after their active school days, the group was awarded the Bertini Prize 2007 , which was presented to them on January 27, 2008, the day of commemoration of the victims of National Socialism . The award and the fate of Julian Milejski were reported in several German and Polish media as well as in the largest German-language newspaper in the USA, America Week . The efforts to erect a memorial stone were then supported by the Hamburg Consul General of the Republic of Poland , Jerzy Kaczmarek.

Triggered by the activities of the young people, the work group Ein Stein für Julian was formed in Stelle , and in spring 2008 a memorial stone was erected near the crime scene. This memorial consists of a large, more than two meters high boulder , on which a plaque of bronze is attached. The young people donated part of their cash prize, which they had received with the Bertini Prize, for the construction costs. The memorial located on the road Among the Linden outside the place site toward Holtorfsloh on the left side, about 200 meters behind the Ortsschild in a small grove , which via the Wirtschaftsweg Suerfeld is accessible. A bench was set up near the memorial stone.

The memorial stone with the plaque

The memorial stone with the plaque was ceremonially unveiled on May 4, 2008, exactly 66 years after Milejski's execution. The memorial, which commemorates the fate of Julian Milejski, has since been looked after by the citizens of Steller and the working group.

The bronze plaque contains the following inscription:

IN MEMORIAM

JULIAN MILEJSKI
GEB. 10/7/1921 IN ZAWIERCIN,
POLAND
ON 4/4/1942 NOT FAR FROM HERE

EXECUTED BY THE SS

meaning

The public attention for historical and structural analysis of National Socialism in Germany, as it was discovered in 1996 by the American historian Daniel Goldhagen 's work Hitler's Willing Executors , which triggered the so-called Goldhagen debate about a people of perpetrators , increasingly stimulated research exemplary individual cases in order, for example, to assess the spread of the resistance against the National Socialists.

Also since the 1990s, the tendency to concretise the idea of ​​the victims of National Socialism in Germany has been combined with the processing of individual cases from their own neighborhood by interested citizens. For example, the stumbling blocks by Cologne artist Gunter Demnig have led to individual, independent citizens' initiatives in many places since they were first installed in 1993.

In addition to the victim groups of Jews as well as Roma and Sinti, the group of forced laborers increasingly came under the spotlight for the clarification of individual fates, as documented, for example, in the research and filming of the authentic case of a young Pole named Walerian Wróbel in 1990.

The question of the effects of National Socialism in one's own neighborhood aroused interest, especially among young people, whose curiosity, however, not infrequently met with local resistance; For example, the feature film The Terrible Girl at the beginning of the 1990s drew the general public's attention to the underlying authentic case of Anna Elisabeth Rosmus , whose research had provoked rejection from her immediate surroundings.

literature

  • Gerhard Rieckmann: murder of a forced laborer . In: Past, but not forgotten. Place under the swastika . Self-published, Stelle 2005, pp. 69–72.
  • Renzo Vespignani: Fascism . Hamburg u. a. 1976; Licensed edition, 6th edition, Elefanten Press Verlag, Berlin 2002 (= Elefanten Press, 3), ISBN 3-88520-003-1 . (Source collection; former exhibition catalog, published by the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst and the Kreuzberg Art Office, Berlin)

Web links

Commons : Julian Milejski  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gerhard Rieckmann: Murder of a forced laborer . In: Past, but not forgotten. Place under the swastika . Selbstverl., Stelle 2005, pp. 69–72.
  2. ^ A b Renzo Vespignani: Fascism . Hamburg 1976, p. 114ff .: "Ostarbeiter"
  3. ↑ Pamięć wraca do Stelle , report by Bartosz T. Wieliński in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza , June 27, 2007 (Polish; accessed September 12, 2009).
  4. ↑ Reports (selection; links last accessed on September 12, 2009):
  5. ↑ 10 years of the Bertini Prize. Schoolchildren on the trail of a Nazi crime. Young people researching the lynching of a young Pole , report by Rainer Krey , Hamburger Morgenpost , January 28, 2008 (from: PressReader.com , accessed April 18, 2018)
  6. ↑ Memorial stone for lynched Poland , report in the Hamburger Morgenpost , May 5, 2008 (accessed on September 12, 2009).
  7. ↑ See Memorial Day in Stelle ( memento of June 18, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), reports and newspaper clippings from 2007/2008 on the website of the Hanhoopsfeld School in Hamburg-Wilstorf in the Hamburg-Harburg district (accessed on September 12, 2009).

Coordinates: 53 ° 22 ′ 30.9 ″  N , 10 ° 6 ′ 17.7 ″  E

personal data
SURNAME Milejski, Julian
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mileyski, Julian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish slave laborers and victims of National Socialism
DATE OF BIRTH October 10, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Zawiercin, Poland
DATE OF DEATH May 4, 1942
Place of death Job