Flößberg subcamp

The Flößberg satellite camp was a satellite camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp from November 1944 to April 1945 . It was one of a total of seven satellite camps that were built on behalf of the Leipzig armaments company Hugo-Schneider-Aktiengesellschaft (HASAG). Flößberg is about 40 kilometers from Leipzig and is a district of Frohburg .

Flößberg subcamp

Location of the Flößberg satellite camp in today's state of Saxony

history

At the end of November 1944, the construction of a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp began in Flößberg. First of all, company employees and civil slave laborers began to build barracks and fences in a piece of forest belonging to the village. On December 28, 1944, 150 Jewish prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp arrived. In the following period the number of prisoners increased sharply. The peak was reached in February 1945 with 1,450 prisoners.

First of all, the prisoners set up production facilities for the armaments company HASAG, which wanted to manufacture bazookas here . In addition to the construction of production halls, storage rooms and living barracks, this also included the laying of tracks. On March 5, 1945, an Allied air raid destroyed the production facilities. To this day it is unclear whether bazookas were even produced before the destruction.

The prisoners were also used outside the camp for work, including defusing bombs after air attacks or during clearing work on damaged buildings.

The satellite camp was closed on April 13, 1945. SS-Obersturmführer Wolfgang Plaul was the head of all Buchenwald satellite camps operated by HASAG. Command leader in the Flößberg satellite camp was SS Oberscharführer Strese until February 1945 and then SS Oberscharführer Lütscher.

The victims

A total of 1,904 people passed through the Flößberg subcamp. The camp was run by the SS as a Jewish external command . It was mainly Jewish men from Hungary and Poland who were imprisoned in the camp. The prisoners were on average between 25 and 35 years old. At least 235 people were killed in the camp. First the camp dead were brought to Leipzig, then to Buchenwald for cremation . From March 1945 the dead were buried in mass graves in the surrounding Flößberg forest. After the end of the war, some of the dead were reburied by the US military government in a cemetery in nearby Borna .

Commemoration

Inmate cemetery at the Flößberg subcamp

In the 1950s, a memorial stone with the inscription “Die Toten Mahnen” was erected on the site of the former satellite camp. A red triangle marking political prisoners in concentration camps with the letters VVN above it is engraved in the stone. This information is misleading, however, as mainly Jewish prisoners were locked up here.

A citizens' initiative has been working since 2005, and since 2007 the Flößberg eV history workshop has been working on a review of the camp's history and the implementation of a new memorial site.

According to a proposal by the Chemnitz regional office , the prisoners who were still buried on the former camp site should be reburied in Borna. Both the Saxony State Association of Jewish Communities and the Central Council of Jews in Germany reject this proposal.

Memorial with the inscription "The dead admonish"

literature

Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (ed.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 3: Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald. CH Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-52963-1 .
Martin Schellenberg: The HASAG satellite camps of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Master's thesis (unpublished). TU Berlin 2005.
Martin Schellenberg: The "Schnellaktion Panzerfaust". Prisoners in the Buchenwald subcamps at the Leipzig armaments company HASAG. In: Dachauer Hefte 21/2005.