Ellrich-Juliushütte subcamp

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Site plan of the Ellrich-Juliushütte satellite camp with the border between Braunschweig and Prussia (red)
The former roll call area of ​​the camp today with a memorial stone, on the right was the camp entrance (2019)

The satellite camp Ellrich-Juliushütte was on May 2, 1944 to April 6, 1945 existing satellite camp for an average of 8,000 male concentration camp prisoners . At first it was subordinate to the Buchenwald concentration camp and from November 1, 1944 to the Mittelbau concentration camp . It was located near Ellrich on the company premises of disused gypsum factories , such as the Juliushütte . This largest subcamp of the Mittelbau concentration camp was initially operated by the camp SS under the code name “Erich”, from June 1944 it was referred to as “Mittelbau II”. Another satellite camp of the Mittelbau concentration camp, the Ellrich-Bürgergarten satellite camp , was located in the town of Ellrich in the Bürgergarten restaurant.

Function of the camp and prisoners

Ellrich gypsum factories around 1890, area of ​​the later concentration camp sub-camp colored brown

For the construction of the Ellrich-Juliushütte satellite camp, SS members and Wifo employees confiscated the vacant buildings of the Julius Bergmann (Juliushütte) and Kohlmann gypsum factories and part of the Euling & Mack company premises in April 1944 . The buildings of the factories that had been closed in the 1930s were shabby and partly derelict. The area of ​​the subcamp was in the area of Ellrich, which belonged to Prussia , and extended to the area of Walkenried , then Brunswick , now Lower Saxony , just south of the Herzberg - Nordhausen railway line . It was secured by an electric fence and watchtowers. Located on the grounds of the center Small Pontelteich as a water-filled sinkhole . On May 2, 1944, the first 300 prisoners from the subcamp “Gut Bischofferode” (Anna) arrived. The prisoners were housed in the empty factory buildings. They later built several wooden barracks and a large brick building as a kitchen wing on the site. The prisoners used the camp as a lower camp as a demarcation from the upper camp in the form of the Ellrich-Bürgergarten satellite camp located in Ellrich.

The prisoners came from almost all European countries. For the most part they were of Russian , Polish and French origins. About a third came from the Soviet Union, including many Ukrainians, a quarter came from Poland and about 10% came from France, about 8% from Belgium. There were also smaller groups from Italy, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands. German prisoners were represented in a range of 2 to 4%, mainly by prison officials with the green triangle for professional criminals. The proportion of Jewish prisoners with 5 to 7% and that of Sinti and Roma around 10% was above average in comparison with other camps of the Mittelbau concentration camp. In May 1944 about 500 Hungarian Jews came from Auschwitz. Most of the prisoners were children or adolescents; At the end of 1944, 600 were under the age of 18.

The prisoners were deployed in the construction projects of the SS command staffs B 3a in Himmelberg as well as in the underground tunnel expansion in Kohnstein at Mittelwerk GmbH (B11 and B 12 near Woffleben ). They had to do heavy labor in 13-hour shifts with only five hours of sleep. There was not enough concentration camp clothing available and some were not washed for months. Due to lack of clothing, one category of inmates gave no clothes , and their relatives had to stay naked in their sleeping quarters. In addition, the infirmary was set up in much too small rooms and poorly equipped only weeks after the establishment of the subcamp. Due to the inhumane living and working conditions, over 4,000 prisoners died before the Ellrich-Juliushütte subcamp was evacuated. The corpses were initially brought to the Mittelbau-Dora main camp and cremated in the local crematorium . Due to the immense increase in deaths in the winter of 1944/1945, a newly built crematorium in the Ellrich-Juliushütte concentration camp began operations in early March 1945 to dispose of the corpses. Up to the beginning of April, more than 1000 deceased prisoners, 830 of whom are known by name, were burned in the crematorium and on stakes .

After the end of the war, the Polish Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes compiled a list of the number and nationality of the prisoners for the main camp of the Mittelbau concentration camp and the largest satellite camps in the summer of 1945:

was standing nationality total
Soviet Poland French people German Belgian Others
Satellite camp
Ellrich-Juliushütte 		Nov 1, 1944 2419 1786 1389 203 670 1535 8002
April 1, 1945 2135 1495 676 294 490 1462 6552

Warehouse management

Former camp leader Otto Brinkmann , June 1947

Camp leader was initially SS-Untersturmführer Hans Joachim Ritz , and then from August to probably September 1944 SS-Untersturmführer Karl Fritzsch . Then SS-Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Stötzler was camp leader until the camp was evacuated, and SS-Hauptscharführer Otto Brinkmann from October 1944 to April 1945 was the camp leader . Brinkmann, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the main Nordhausen trial, was described by the prisoners as the “horror of the camp”. The camp doctor was Günther Schneemann.

Soldiers from an air force guard battalion were deployed to guard, and they were on duty outside the fenced-in area and also guarded the work details. On September 1, 1944, the guards were formally accepted into the SS. It was located to the west of the camp in buildings belonging to the Juliushütte settlement and in three newly built wooden barracks. The strength of the guards is not recorded. Together with the security guards of the Ellrich-Bürgergarten satellite camp housed in the Burgberg restaurant in Ellrich, it is estimated at almost 1,000 soldiers.

Final phase of the camp

Liberated Polish prisoners from the Ellrich-Juliushütte satellite camp in conversation with liberated Polish forced laborers in Ellrich, April 16, 1945

From the Ellrich-Juliushütte subcamp, which was completely overcrowded with evacuation transports from the Auschwitz and Groß-Rosen concentration camps, as well as from the Boelcke-Kaserne subcamp, sick prisoners who were no longer able to work were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the beginning of March 1945 .

The satellite camp was cleared from April 4 to 6, 1945 before American troops reached Ellrich on April 12, 1945. Of the 7,000 evacuated prisoners, 4,000 were transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and 3,000 to the Heinkel-Werke satellite camp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated on April 15, 1945. The other prisoners had to start another death march north from Sachsenhausen between April 20 and 21, 1945 . Of the total of 12,000 prisoners who passed through the camp between May 1944 and April 1945, around 4,000 were killed.

Maheu report

René Maheu (1899–1980), a doctor of dentistry , was arrested by the Gestapo in Rennes on December 27, 1943 and deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp on January 27, 1944. After a quarantine period of six weeks, the camp asked about dentists. After an examination in the Buchenwald dental station, he was accepted and two days later transferred to Ellrich. In his report he describes the different worlds of experience of the so-called “celebrities”, the prison functionaries , in contrast to the experience of the ordinary prisoners. Delivered to a work detachment in February 1944 for lack of subservience, he survived the evacuation to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he was liberated on April 15, 1945.

post war period

After the Second World War, the former camp site was initially divided by the border between the British zone of occupation and the Soviet zone and later by the inner-German border . In the west the site belonged to the Walkenried community and to the east to the town of Ellrich. The city developed into a transit point for illegal crossings from east to west across the zone border, as the railway ran until shortly before the demarcation line . A stealth path led through the former camp area to Walkenried. In 1946, serial killer Rudolf Pleil murdered a young woman while sluicing across the border near the former camp .

  • Construction remains

  • Foundations of a sick barrack (2012)

  • Remnants of the accommodation block 3

  • Memorial stone and path at the location of the crematorium that was blown up in 1964

On the East German side, the camp buildings were demolished from 1952 when border security systems (“death strip”) were set up. In the course of the end of the 1950s, before the “Block 4” accommodation building was demolished, frescoes were secured and brought to the East Berlin Museum of German History . They showed Parisian street scenes and depictions of Cinderella . It was painted by a French prisoner on the instructions of a prison officer. They were only partially rediscovered in the museum in 2009.

On the West German side, the site gradually became neglected, especially since the adjacent Juliushütte settlement fell into disrepair after a factory fire in 1955. This was used by the East German leadership's propaganda to portray the alleged decline in the western areas. In 1963, the then Minister for Pan-German Issues, Rainer Barzel, decided during an on-site visit that the "Schandfleck Juliushütte" should be removed. As a result, the structural remains of the Juliushütte and the former concentration camp on the west German side were largely removed, the area leveled and the crematorium blown up by the Federal Border Guard in 1964 . Later the area was afforested and designated as a nature reserve because of its location in the karst landscape of the southern Harz . Parts of some buildings have been preserved in the form of wall remnants, basements or barrack foundations, such as Block 3, Block 4 and the barracks foundations of the infirmary. Similarly, the 1944 has brick built basement of the kitchen tract preserved.

  • Ruin of the kitchen wing

  • Side view

  • Top view

  • Room in the basement with the rest of the pool

  • Lower floor with remains of partition walls

Memorial site

The first memorial stone erected in 1989 for the victims at the former location of the crematorium
The second memorial stone on the former roll call area of ​​the camp near the camp entrance, donated in 1994 by the Belgian city of Leuven

In the 1980s, historical initiatives in Walkenried and Ellrich researched the history of the camp. In November 1989 a memorial stone was inaugurated on the site of the crematorium that was blown up in 1964. After reunification , the Lower Saxony part of the camp site was declared a memorial site in 1993 . During this time, a circular path was laid out over the site. In 1994, a second memorial stone donated by the Belgian city of Leuven was inaugurated on the site near the former camp entrance . In 1998 the Thuringian part of the camp was designated a cultural monument . In the same year an international summer work camp of the association "Youth for Dora" took place, during which the foundations of a camp barrack and a watchtower were exposed and landscape maintenance work was carried out. In 2010 information boards were set up on the former camp site.

Expansion to a place of learning

In 2019, plans were announced for the dignified design of the site and the expansion of the former Ellrich-Juliushütte satellite camp into a place of learning . Various institutions formed a working group for this purpose. An ideas competition was announced in 2020 to redesign the site.

In 2020, citizens from Ellrich and Walkenried founded a citizens' initiative called “We show face”, which wants to help shape the site into an appropriate place of mourning. The citizens' initiative intends to set up a contact point in the station building at the former warehouse. In 2020, around 60 residents from Walkenried and Ellrich were put to work by cleaning up the former camp site.

Mass grave finds

In 2019 it became known that there are remains of mass graves in two places on the former camp site. There are corpses and the bones of more than 1000 prisoners. These are prisoners who died as a result of the inhumane living and working conditions inside the subcamp and whose bodies were burned in March 1945 in the camp's own crematorium and on stakes on the camp grounds. According to the surviving “cremation lists” of the SS, around 1040 corpses were burned. The names of 830 dead are known. Most of them were Soviet and Polish prisoners as well as French, Belgians and Dutch. While the corpse fire that had started in the crematorium was tipped down the slope at the back of the building, pyre as additional cremation sites could not initially be located. The Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp memorial was only able to do this on the basis of photos of a US soldier that appeared in 2017 and who took them on the site in May 1945. They show a pyre and bone material from burns. The mass grave was localized and superficially examined by archaeologists.

Jens-Christian Wagner from the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation announced after the discovery in 2019 that the two grave sites would be dignified. To this end, a working group was formed under the leadership of the municipality of Walkenried, in which the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation, the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, the Göttingen district , the Lower Saxony Ministry of the Interior and Sport , the Lower Saxony State Office for Monument Preservation , the Lower Saxony State Forests , the City of Ellrich and the Green Belt of Thuringia are involved. The design of the grave sites is to be done in close coordination with prisoner associations from France, Belgium and Poland.

meaning

The Ellrich-Juliushütte subcamp is listed under the name “Dora-Ellrich” at the entrance to the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation in Paris in a list of the most important camps alongside Auschwitz , Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald. According to Jens-Christian Wagner from the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation, the Ellrich-Juliushütte satellite camp in Germany has been largely forgotten and the site has been neglected for decades. In France, Ellrich is considered to be one of the most horrific concentration camps, to which numerous French members of the Resistance were deported. Besides Dora, Ellrich is also the largest French cemetery outside of France.

literature

  • Manfred Bornemann: Chronicle of the Ellrich Camp 1944/45. A forgotten concentration camp is discovered , Nordhausen, 1992
  • Edgar Van de Casteele: Leven en dood in een Concentratiecamp , 1946, Ruth Monicke: Ellrich. Life and death in a concentration camp (translation), Bad Münstereifel, 1997, ISBN 3-929592-33-9 .
  • Britta Scheuer: An (un) known place in: Gedenkstättenrundbrief 88 of the Topography of Terror Foundation of April 15, 1999, pp. 17-20. ( Online )
  • Andre Sellier: A History of the Dora Camp: The Untold Story of the Nazi Slave Labor Camp that secretly manufactured V2 Rockets. Ed .: In Association with the United States Holocaust Museum. Ivan R. Dee., Chicago 2003, p. 199–221 (English, google.de ).
  • Jens-Christian Wagner: Ellrich 1944/45 - Concentration camp and forced labor in a small German town , Göttingen, 2009, Wallstein
  • Otto Rosenberg : The burning glass . Autobiography, recorded by Ulrich Enzensberger , foreword by Klaus Schütz , Eichborn-Verlag, Berlin 1998, Knaur-Taschenbuch, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-426-61815-X ; New edition of Wagenbach-Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-8031-2692-4 . (Translation into Polish: Palace szkło ... Wyd Relacji wysłuchał Ulrich Enzensberger Przedm do polskiego Petra Rosenberg Słowo wstępne Klaus Schütz Przekł Ewa Kowynia Kraków:.... Tow Autorów i Wydawców Prac Naukowych Universitas 2010. ISBN 978-83-242- 1284-2 )
  • Jens-Christian Wagner: Newly found or localized ash graves in the former Ellrich-Juliushütte satellite camp in the 2019 annual report of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation, pp. 108-109 ( online )

Web links

Commons : Ellrich-Juliushütte subcamp  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Directory of the concentration camps and their external commands in accordance with Section 42 (2) BEG , No. 357 Ellrich, Nordhausen district (Mittelbau II)
  2. ^ A b c Jens-Christian Wagner (ed.): Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp 1943–1945 . Göttingen 2007, p. 187ff.
  3. ↑ a b c d e Jens Christian Wagner: "Subcamp Ellrich-Juliushütte", in: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (ed.): The Place of Terror - History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps , Volume 7. Munich 2008, p. 302ff.
  4. ^ Jens-Christian Wagner: Mass deaths in the Ellrich-Juliushütte satellite camp at the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation
  5. ↑ a b c Heidi Niemann: Nazis burn more than 1000 prisoners in the Ellrich-Juliushütte subcamp in Göttinger Tageblatt on June 9, 2019
  6. ↑ Information from Jens-Christian Wagner (ed.): Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp 1943–1945. Göttingen 2007, p. 68 - The Jewish prisoners are not listed separately, but are subsumed under the individual nationalities. The Austrian prisoners are grouped together with the German prisoners under the German nationality.
  7. ↑ mainly Roma , Sinti , Hungarians, Czechs, Italians, Yugoslavs, Dutch, source: Jens-Christian Wagner (ed.): Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp 1943–1945. Göttingen 2007, p. 68.
  8. ^ Jens-Christian Wagner: Production of death: The Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp . Göttingen 2001, p. 653f.
  9. ↑ Xavier Riaud: Trois destins tragiques de chirurgiensdentistes: M. Bernard Holstein, Mme Danielle Casanova et le Dr René Maheu pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. In: Vesalius, XI, 11. 2005, pp. 91–94 , accessed on December 27, 2019 (French).
  10. ^ The pictures from "Block 4" in nnz-online from March 3, 2010
  11. ↑ Heidi Niemann: Collective graves of concentration camp subcamps should be dignified in the Göttinger Tageblatt of June 6, 2019
  12. ↑ "Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation - Memorial Sites Subcamps" (pdf)
  13. ^ Project Ellrich with youth for Dora
  14. ↑ Hans-Peter Blum: New ideas competition for Ellrich-Juliushütte in Thüringer Allgemeine from December 16, 2019
  15. ↑ Hans-Peter Blum: Ideas competition for Juliushütte has started in Thüringer Allgemeine on July 29, 2020
  16. ↑ Hans-Peter Blum Ellricher initiative receives a great response in Thüringer Allgemeine on January 14, 2020
  17. ↑ Hans-Peter Blum: Praise for the new citizens' initiative in the Ellrich City Council in Thüringer Allgemeine from December 17, 2019
  18. ↑ Volunteers whip up the concentration camp memorial in Harzkurier on February 17, 2020
  19. ↑ Ellrich: Ashes of 1,000 dead in the concentration camp mass grave at ndr.de from June 6, 2019
  20. ↑ Nordhausen. New mass grave in the former Ellrich concentration camp in Thuringia discovered on June 6, 2019 on mdr.de
  21. ↑ a b Jens-Christian Wagner: Newly found or localized ash graves in the former Ellrich-Juliushütte satellite camp in the 2019 annual report of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation, pp. 108-109
  22. ↑ Andreas Arens: Dignified collective graves for people murdered by Nazis in HNA from June 7, 2019
  23. ↑ New findings on mass graves in the former Ellrich satellite camp in Göttinger Tageblatt from June 6, 2019

Coordinates: 51 ° 34 ′ 45.5 ″  N , 10 ° 39 ′ 50.7 ″  E