Regensburg subcamp

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Building of the former Colosseum subcamp (2011), Stadtamhof 5 (street side)

The Regensburg subcamp , also known as the Colosseum subcamp at the time, was built in 1945 as the last subcamp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp in the Regensburg inn "Colosseum".

history

In 1928, Ludwig Bergmann, the owner of the Regensburg Karmelitenbrauerei-Hotel at Dachauplatz 1, refused to let the NSDAP rent out his halls for NSDAP party events because of complaints from Jewish hotel guests. The Augustinerbrauerei and the Obermünsterbrauerei, Obermünsterstrasse 10 joined the refusal of halls. The city's magistrate also refused to let the Neuhaussaal in the Theater am Bismarckplatz 7 to the NSDAP because of the planned hanging of signs. Jews are not allowed in . Thereupon the Regensburg NSDAP local group leader Alois Bayer avoided the inns "Colosseum" Stadtamhof 5 and "Zur Glocke", where the NSDAP called for a boycott of the "renegade restaurants".

From March 19, 1945 to April 23, 1945, a temporary satellite camp was set up in the "Colosseum" inn, located in the Stadtamhof district of Regensburg , where around 400 male concentration camp prisoners are forced to repair damage caused by bombing. The work assignments were mainly at the station and on the railway facilities. About a third of the prisoners were persecuted as Jews (including 67 Polish and 42 Hungarian nationality), 84 of the prisoners were "non-Jewish" Poles, 63 Russians, 62 Belgians, 25 French, 22 Germans and the rest were made up of ten other nationalities . The prisoners were housed in the dance hall on the first floor of the inn, where the hygienic conditions were miserable. There was only one toilet and one tap available. There was no provision for the sick or unable to work. The food was inadequate and consisted only of bread and soup.

The stone bridge

The guards with 50 SS men were housed in the dining room on the first floor, including many so-called ethnic Germans . The commando leader was SS-Oberscharführer Ludwig Plagge , who was considered one of the "most brutal and cruel SS men" and was sentenced to death in the Kraków Auschwitz trial in January 1947 . His deputy was SS-Oberscharführer Erich Liedtke, who often beat and mistreated the prisoners for no reason. The completely emaciated prisoners had to repair the damage after air raids twelve hours a day on the station premises. To do this, they were driven over the stone bridge and through the old town of Regensburg every morning and returned in the evening after work that was life-threatening due to duds. According to other sources, the prisoners also had to do forced labor at the Messerschmitt GmbH plant in Regensburg . John Demjanjuk, who was convicted of aiding and abetting murder in 2011, is said to have been among the SS guards .

On the night of April 23, 1945, the camp was "evacuated" with the exception of 28 seriously ill people and one dead. That is, the prisoners were driven on a death march towards Landshut . It is estimated that only 50 of the prisoners survived this march, which ended in Laufen (Salzach) , where a small memorial marks the events.

The exact number of fatalities among the Colosseum prisoners is not known. In the Regensburg registry office I, 35 deaths were recorded for the period between March 23rd and April 10th alone; a grave list of the city contains the names of 44 dead. A survivor of the Colosseum estimates the number of dead in the five weeks of its existence at 70 men. It is believed that some corpses were thrown into the Danube without registering them.

Investigations in the post-war period

The central office for the investigation of Nazi crimes (Ludwigsburg) investigated in the 1960s because of the events in the Colosseum. The proceedings were later taken over by the Munich I Public Prosecutor's Office and discontinued in the 1970s.

After the end of the war, the "Colosseum" was used again as a bar with a dance hall and later as a performance location for a peasant theater . In the summer of 2005, a new owner had the building gutted and built a restaurant and a residential complex in it.

A neighboring sub-camp

The Obertraubling subcamp was operated by the SS from February 20 to April 15, 1945 as a subcamp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp in the municipality of Obertraubling , a southern suburb of Regensburg , on the premises of Messerschmitt AG . It was located next to a forced labor camp in the Messerschmitt factory. The completely emaciated concentration camp prisoners had to repair damage to the runway of a company airfield that had been bombed, at risk of death. After a regional reform and the incorporation of surrounding communities, the area of ​​one of the former forced labor camps, the so-called Russian camp II, now belongs to the city of Regensburg.

Commemoration

In October 1950, the then President of the Bavarian State Compensation Office, Philipp Auerbach, inaugurated a concentration camp memorial for an unknown number of foreign concentration camp prisoners in the Evangelical Central Cemetery in Regensburg. The Lord Mayor of Regensburg Zitzler laid a wreath. When the bones of several dead were exhumed in the spring of 1955, the concentration camp memorial and the associated small stone blocks with the engraved number of dead and their nationality were removed again. The background to the removal and the whereabouts of the memorial have not yet been clarified.

After the student work at the Regensburg Vocational School for Business with its theme of the Colosseum subcamp had won a second prize in the German History student competition in 1982/83, the question of an appropriate memorial for the victims was raised again. In the student work, a memorial plaque at the Colosseum is reminded that the city should, so the résumé, not forget or keep silent about the less pleasant aspects of its history. Although the city administration initially assured the students, who even donated part of the prize money to implement their demands, that they would put up a plaque, this has not yet been installed. In the early 1990s, on a non-partisan initiative, a plaque was made to commemorate the Colosseum subcamp, which was attached to the railing of the Stone Bridge without the support of the city administration. In 1994 this was replaced by a large memorial stone (see photo on the right). It was inaugurated by the then mayor Christa Meier .

Memorial stone from 1994

The abstract work of Flossenbürger granite and sandstone is currently in a free space opposite the Colosseum, but offset by approx. 40 meters on the other side of the street. The carved inscription avoids naming or specifying the exact location of the former Colosseum subcamp . It reads as follows:

Never again [yidd.]
THE MEMORY OF THE VICTIMS OF THE
EXTERNAL
CONCENTRATION COMMAND FLOSSENBÜRG IN STADTAMHOF FROM 19.3. - 23.4. 1945
400 PRISONERS PART OF JEWISH FAITH
FROM MANY COUNTRIES OF EUROPE
- THE DIGNITY OF HUMANS IS INVALIBLE -

On an initiative of the Regensburg city council group Die Grünen from 2008, a bronze floor slab was laid in front of the building of the former external command on behalf of the city of Regensburg in April 2011. Your lettering is:

STADTAMHOF 5

FOR
THE LAST
WEEKS OF THE NATIONAL
SOCIALIST DICTATURE, FROM MARCH 19 TO APRIL 23,
1945, PRISONERS OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP FLOSSENBÜRCHT WERE LOCATED IN THE REVERSE BUILDING OF THE
FORMER GUESTHOUSE COLOSSEUM.
IN FRONT OF THE HOUSE THE PRISONERS, WEAKENED
BY UNDERNUTRITION AND HUMILIATION,
HAD TO APPEAL.

The text was created under the auspices of the city's cultural department and was criticized in a public debate as trivializing and misleading after it became known. The politically responsible culture committee of the Regensburg city council then decided in November 2011 that the technically responsible culture department should invite a non-partisan working group. This should work out a proposal for an appropriate and politically meaningful inscription text or for an urban memorial concept regarding the Nazi era .

Since the end of the 1990s, there has been a memorial march in Regensburg on April 23, which is carried out by non-partisan work groups and also commemorates the fate of the prisoners in the Colosseum satellite camp. Official representatives of the city of Regensburg do not take part. The city administration has so far ignored suggestions from the voluntary working groups to commemorate all victims of National Socialism in an event together with the city of Regensburg .

literature

  • Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (ed.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 4: Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück. CH Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-52964-X .
  • Peter Brendel and others: The Colosseum camp in Regensburg. In: Dieter Galinski, Wolf Schmidt (Hrsg.): The war years in Germany 1939 to 1945. Results and suggestions from the German history student competition for the Federal President's Prize 1982/83 . Publishing house for education and science, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-8103-0808-3 , pp. 251-268.
  • Hans Simon-Pelanda: In the heart of the city. The Colosseum subcamp in Regensburg. In: Wolfgang Benz: Concentration Camp: Living World and Environment. Verlag Dachauer Hefte, 1996.
  • Henk Verheyen: Until the end of the memory. Pahl-Rugenstein, Bonn 2009, ISBN 978-3-89144-421-4 .

Web links

Commons : Stadtamhof  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Contribution of the Regensburg local history research . August 31, 2016 ( heimatforschung-regensburg.de [PDF; accessed on August 26, 2017]).
  2. ^ Ulrich Fritz: Regensburg. In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror. Flossenbürg, Mauthausen and Ravensbrück . Beck, Munich 2006, p. 240.
  3. ↑ These rooms were shortly before used by Messerschmitt GmbH to accommodate workers. See Helmut Halter: City under the swastika. Universitätsverlag, Regensburg 1994, p. 377; Wolfgang Benz: The Place of Terror , 2006, p. 213.
  4. ^ The Flossenbürg Memorial speaks of 50 SS guards. See entry on Regensburg subcamp.
  5. ↑ Ernst Klee : The personal lexicon for the Third Reich. Edition Kramer, Koblenz 2008, p. 462. A picture by L. Plagge can be found at the following web address (last accessed in November 2011).
  6. ^ Ulrich Fritz: Regensburg. 2006, p. 241.
  7. ^ Evelyn Zegenhagen: Regensburg Colosseum. In: The US Holocaust Memorial Museum (ed.): Early camps, youth camps, and concentration camps and subcamps under the SS-Business Administration Main Office (WVHA). part A, 2009, p. 662.
  8. ↑ a b Holder: City under the swastika. 1994, p. 378.
  9. ^ Ulrich Fritz: Regensburg. 2006, p. 239.
  10. ↑ In addition to the one in Regensburg, the following six newly designed “ concentration camp cemeteries ” were inaugurated: Saal an der Donau (380 dead); Wetterfeld , Roding district (600 dead); Muschenried district of Oberviechtach (333 dead); Flossenbürg (73,000 dead); Amberg ; Ansbach . See the program of the fifth trip to the inauguration of concentration camp memorials on November 4 and 5, 1950.
  11. ↑ Hans Simon-Pelanda: In the heart of the city. The Colosseum subcamp in Regensburg. In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel: Dachauer Hefte. 12, 1996, p. 167. Simon-Pelanda also reports in it that the search for the stones was unsuccessful.
  12. ^ Edited by class BFS 11a of the vocational school for business in Regensburg : The external commandos of the Flossenbürg concentration camp in and around Regensburg and their significance for the city and residents. 1983, p. 51, cf. annotated bibliography of the Körber Foundation p. 10. ( Memento of the original from January 16, 2016 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. (PDF; 274 kB) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.koerber-stiftung.de
  13. ↑ Hans Simon-Pelanda: In the heart of the city. 1996, p. 160. The students' donation was allegedly used for "similar" purposes.
  14. ↑ The defensive city administration feared that the city of Regensburg could be stigmatized as a “concentration camp community”. The victims of the concentration camp external command should be remembered in a central memorial. See Hans Simon-Pelanda: In the heart of the city. 1996, p. 161.
  15. ^ Politics of commemoration between abuse and ignorance. on: Regensburg Digital. November 13, 2011 (last accessed November 2011).
  16. ↑ Memorial plaque: Group should deliver worthy text. In: Mittelbayerische Zeitung. November 11, 2011 (last accessed November 2011).
  17. ^ Antifascist memorial path: Documentation center required. to: regensburg-digital . April 25, 2010 (last accessed November 2011)
  18. ↑ Cf. Open letter from the ArGE to Mayor Hans Schaidinger from July 2007 (see under Actions and Activities)


Coordinates: 49 ° 1 '28.8 "  N , 12 ° 5' 50.3"  E