Brünnlitz subcamp

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The Brünnlitz subcamp existed from October 21, 1944 to May 8, 1945 in Brünnlitz , Zwittau district (today: Okres Svitavy, Czech Republic). As a satellite camp, it was subordinate to the Groß-Rosen concentration camp in Lower Silesia (today: Poland). It became known to the general public in 1993 through the film Schindler's List .

prehistory

From 1939 to 1944, Oskar Schindler had an enamel and ammunition factory near Kraków, where he had kitchen utensils made from sheet metal and later also shell casings for the Wehrmacht . His armaments factory there had been subordinated to the Plaszow concentration camp ( Plaschau ) in 1944 as a so-called concentration camp external command . Due to the advance of the Red Army , the evacuation and closure of the Plaszow concentration camp and its external commandos began in autumn 1944. The SS deported the majority of these Jewish forced laborers, over 20,000, to extermination camps .

Schindler was faced with the decision to leave the country with his millions in profits from armaments deals and to leave his Jewish workers to certain death, or to try at great expense to save their lives.

Thanks to his high reputation with the SS , through negotiations, bribes, gifts, cunning and deception, he and his wife Emilie Schindler succeeded in obtaining permission from the Wehrmacht High Command to build a new armaments factory. The SS granted him 800 men and 300 women as slave labor for his new factory. Schindler then began to draw up the life-saving list with his closest Jewish confidante .

Brünnlitz subcamp

Choice of location

The Schindler couple bought the former Löw-Beer textile factory in Brünnlitz in the Zwittau district, home of Schindler, as the basis for the new production facility. His new armaments factory was no longer in the General Government , but in the Greater German Reich , where prices and acquisition costs were higher.

Schindler and his armaments factory in Brünnlitz were under the control of the Groß-Rosen concentration camp near Breslau , but Brünnlitz was geographically far away from the Groß-Rosen concentration camp. Other concentration camps , such as Flossenbürg , Theresienstadt or Mauthausen , were also far away. This represented a certain safety aspect for Schindler, as he had less to fear, for example, from unannounced, spontaneous control visits by employees of the inspection of the concentration camps .

camp

Schindler's factory (photo from 2004)
Schindler's Factory (2004)

The relocation of the 1200 forced laborers began in October 1944 when the Plaszow concentration camp was in the process of being cleared.

The concentration camp commandant Johannes Hassebroek from Groß-Rosen was responsible for the administrative supervision of Schindler's satellite camp . There was a group of concentration camp guards who controlled the camp, led by SS-Obersturmführer Josef Leipold.

The food shortage in the camp was compounded by the approaching front and the beginning of winter. Medicines were also hard to come by.

In January 1945 cattle wagons with around 80 concentration camp prisoners arrived. The transport started in the Golleschau subcamp , which was cleared. Emilie and Oskar Schindler outwitted the SS by claiming that they had requested the prisoners as new workers. The inmates were in poor health and needed medical help. Thirteen were frozen to death from the bitter cold. Schindler negotiated with the SS camp commandant in order to be able to bury the bodies of those who had frozen to death according to the Jewish rite instead of burning them. He bought a piece of land for the tombs.

At the end of January 1945, the SS was forced to evacuate the Groß-Rosen concentration camp. A few days later the Red Army captured it. Schindler had to fear that the murder of the concentration camp prisoners or an evacuation order was imminent for his subcamp, which would have meant arduous marches to assembly and transit camps. However, the approach of the Eastern Front was initially delayed by the Wehrmacht, and at the beginning of May 1945 by the Prague uprising .

While death marches and executions had taken place in other subcamps , the Brünnlitz camp ended without deaths. When the end of the war was announced on the radio, Schindler successfully requested the SS to leave the camp without violence. He left the camp on May 8, 1945 and fled the Red Army. His workers had written him a letter that was supposed to prove how much he had done for the Jews as a cover letter. He also received a gold ring as a gesture of thanks.

Schindler later stated that he had invested over 2.6 million Reichsmarks in saving his workers in Brünnlitz and Krakow. After the end of the war, the loss of both companies amounted to millions. The historian Erika Rosenberg estimates Schindler's total expenditure to save the Jews at today's purchasing power of the equivalent of 26 million euros.

Commemoration

Memorial stone near the birthplace

At the birthplace of Oskar Schindler, Czech citizens erected a memorial stone for Schindler in 1994, following the worldwide success of the feature film Schindler's List . At times there were plans to build a Schindler Museum in the Brünnlitz factory. Between 2003 and 2010, however, the factory building of the former satellite camp changed hands several times.

media

literature

  • Erika Rosenberg (Ed.): Me, Oskar Schindler. The personal records, letters and documents . Herbig, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-7766-2204-0 .
  • Mieczysław Pemper: The saving way. Schindler's List - the real story . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-455-09493-7 .

Movie

Internet

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Multi-part series about the experiences of Stane Ponikvar: Bil sem Schindlerjev vojak ( Eng . "I was Schindler's soldier") in the Slovenian Dolenjske novice (supplement in Dolenjski list), April 1, 2010, p. 24.
  2. ↑ cf. Directory of the concentration camps and their external commandos, Brünnlitz subcamp = No. 202
  3. ↑ On the website (second picture) you can see the great distance from Brünnlitz to Groß-Rosen: katalog.terezinstudies.cz
  4. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from January 4, 2015 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.realschule-im-stiftland.de
  5. ↑ Website with photos
  6. ↑ The difficult legacy of Oskar Schindler on landeszeitung.cz

Coordinates: 49 ° 37 ′ 36 ″  N , 16 ° 31 ′ 26 ″  E