Boelcke barracks subcamp

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Inmate bodies on the grounds of the Boelcke barracks. Taken on April 13, 1945.

The Boelcke-Kaserne subcamp was a subcamp of the Mittelbau concentration camp for male prisoners that existed from January 8, 1945 to April 11, 1945 . It was located on the site of the former Boelcke barracks in the south-east of Nordhausen .

prehistory

As early as 1943 there was a forced labor camp at the site, in which Soviet and French forced laborers were housed. They worked in a local mechanical engineering company. In June 1944, more forced laborers were added who had to work at the Junkers factories and in the Kohnstein tunnel . Up to the beginning of January 1945, the camp was occupied by up to 10,000 forced laborers. There was also a Gestapo penal camp for their inmates on the site .

Boelcke barracks subcamp

Scheme of the sub-camp
Unknown prisoner sits with a cane in an armchair in front of the Boelcke barracks after the liberation on April 12, 1945.
On April 12, 1945, residents of Nordhausen carried dead prisoners from the Boelcke barracks under the supervision of soldiers of the US Army and put them in front of them.

The sub-camp was located in a separate section of the camp, which was fenced off with an electrically charged barbed wire. In this section of the camp, the prisoners 'quarters as well as the infirmary and the prisoners' kitchen were located in two halls, again isolated from one another. The number of prisoners rose from a few hundred in January 1945 to around 6,000 prisoners in April 1945. About a third of them were Jewish prisoners. Initially, prisoners were housed in the sub-camp who worked in local armaments factories or had to drive tunnels into the Kohnstein during the construction project B11 .

From the end of January, sick prisoners who were no longer able to work were transferred from the Mittelbau concentration camp , which was completely overcrowded with "evacuation transports" from the Auschwitz and Groß-Rosen concentration camps, to the Boelcke barracks subcamp. It thus became a “sick and death camp of the Mittelbau complex”. Around 3,000 prisoners, some of whom were terminally ill, were housed by the camp SS under inhumane conditions in two blocks of the hall, which was isolated from the camp, as a "sick bay", where, from March 1945, 800 prisoners suffering from TB were sealed off without medical care. As a result of malnutrition, neglect and the absolutely unsanitary conditions in this concentration camp, up to a hundred prisoners died every day from March 1945.

The Boelckekaserne was also partially destroyed by British bombing raids on Nordhausen on April 3 and 4, 1945 , killing 1,300 concentration camp prisoners. Then the camp SS left the Boelcke barracks. Several prisoners managed to escape during the bombing and to hide in the vicinity. However, many of them were tracked down and shot by members of the local police and the armed forces .

Liberation of the camp

On April 11, 1945, members of the US Army liberated the Boelcke-Kaserne satellite camp and found several hundred exhausted survivors and over 1,300 corpses already decaying. During the twelve weeks of the camp, around 3,000 concentration camp prisoners died in the Boelcke barracks, which is why this subcamp was also referred to as the “living crematorium” in prisoner jargon. The number of deaths does not include the 2,250 prisoners from the Boelcke barracks and the Ellrich-Juliushütte satellite camp transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on March 8, 1945 , of whom probably none survived. Despite immediate medical aid measures, other concentration camp prisoners and forced laborers died after the liberation.

Plaque

After the local population had been forced to go through the liberated camp as witnesses, men from Nordhausen, especially Nazi officials, had to bury the prisoners' corpses in mass graves on April 16, 1945 in a cemetery of honor in the Nordhausen municipal cemetery.

The gruesome recordings that members of the US Army Signal Corps took there after the liberation of the camp were soon shown on newsreels in the USA and Great Britain .

Prosecution of the camp management

The camp manager was SS-Obersturmführer Heinrich Josten . Josten, who was previously deployed in Auschwitz, received the death sentence in the Kraków Auschwitz Trial and was executed in 1948. SS-Hauptscharführer Josef Kestel acted as deputy camp manager . Kestel received the death penalty in the Buchenwald main trial and was hanged in Landsberg war crimes prison in November 1948 . The responsible camp doctor , SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinrich Schmidt , was only a witness in the Bergen-Belsen trial and was acquitted in 1947 in the Nordhausen main trial and in 1979 in the third Majdanek trial due to a lack of evidence.

Memorial site

The hangars for the planes in which the prisoners were housed were demolished after the end of the war. In the 1960s, new buildings were built on the site. Since the 1970s, a memorial stone in Rothenburgstrasse has commemorated the victims of the Boelcke-Kaserne satellite camp.

literature

  • Andrè Sellier: Forced labor in the rocket tunnel - history of the Dora camp , zu Klampen, Lüneburg 2000, ISBN 3-924245-95-9 .
  • Jens-Christian Wagner (Ed.): Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp 1943–1945 Accompanying volume for the permanent exhibition in the Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial. Wallstein, Göttingen, 2007. ISBN 978-3-8353-0118-4 .
  • Jens Christian Wagner: Nordhausen (Boelcke barracks). In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 7: Niederhagen / Wewelsburg, Lublin-Majdanek, Arbeitsdorf, Herzogenbusch (Vught), Bergen-Belsen, Mittelbau-Dora. CH Beck, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-406-52967-2 .
  • Jens-Christian Wagner: Production of death: The Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp , Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-89244-439-0 . (At the same time: University of Göttingen, dissertation 1999 under the title: Wagner, Jens-Christian: Verlagerungswahn und Tod).

Web links

Commons : Subcamp Boelcke-Kaserne  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Directory of the concentration camps and their external commands in accordance with Section 42 (2) BEG , No. 1071, Nordhausen / Saxony-Anhalt, Boelcke-Kaserne, Dora-Mittelbau, January 8, 1945 to April 11, 1945
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Jens-Christian Wagner : Nordhausen (Boelcke barracks). In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (eds.): The Place of Terror - History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps , Volume 7, Munich 2008, pp. 320f.
  3. ↑ a b c Jens-Christian Wagner (Ed.): Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp 1943–1945 , Göttingen 2007, pp. 185f.
  4. ↑ Jens-Christian Wagner: Production of death: Das KZ Mittelbau-Dora , Göttingen 2001, p. 284f.
  5. ↑ Jens-Christian Wagner: Production of death: Das KZ Mittelbau-Dora , Göttingen 2001, p. 495f.
  6. ^ Jens Christian Wagner: Ellrich-Juliushütte subcamp. In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (Eds.): The Place of Terror - History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps , Volume 7, Munich 2008, p. 316ff.
  7. ↑ Jens-Christian Wagner (ed.): Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp 1943–1945 , Göttingen 2007, p. 146f.
  8. ↑ Minutes of the Bergen-Belsen Trial, testimony by Heinrich Schmidt on October 25, 1945 ( memento of October 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), Mazal.org (English).
  9. ↑ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 545
    After acquittal, escape to the judge's room - tumult in the Düsseldorf Majdanek trial. In: Hamburger Abendblatt , issue 92 of April 20, 1979, p. 2.
  10. ↑ Memorial sites of the Mittelbau concentration camp subcamps (pdf) at www.dora.de
  11. ^ Bernhard M. Hoppe: Review of the exhibition at hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de

Coordinates: 51 ° 29 ′ 30 ″  N , 10 ° 48 ′ 31 ″  E