Görlitz subcamp

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The Görlitz subcamp was a branch of the Groß-Rosen concentration camp in the city of Görlitz . The camp is popularly known as the Biesnitzer Grund concentration camp , although it never had the status of an independent concentration camp and was run in the Groß-Rosen main camp as the “Görlitz subcamp”. The camp existed from August 1944 until the end of the war on May 8, 1945.

prehistory

In 1939, Waggon- und Maschinenbau AG Görlitz (WUMAG) leased the site of the former Roscher brickworks from the city of Görlitz in order to build a barracks camp for forced laborers . Initially, 300 French prisoners of war were quartered there. After the start of the Russian campaign, so-called Eastern workers were imprisoned in the camp. In November 1940, WUMAG was declared a " war important company ". This was the prerequisite for the establishment of a “central labor camp” (ZAL) by the Schmelt organization at the end of April 1943. Between 270 and 350 Jewish prisoners from Upper Silesia worked for WUMAG until April 1944 and were transferred to the subcamp camp after the ZAL Görlitz was liquidated Brought putty vines. Adolf Eichmann had the ZAL Görlitz and 27 other Schmelt camps subordinate to the Groß-Rosen concentration camp .

Establishment and construction of the subcamp

The former sick barrack

The Görlitz satellite camp was first mentioned on June 9, 1944 in a report by the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office . On August 8 of the same year, Winfried Zunker took over the post of warehouse manager.

The camp was surrounded by four watchtowers and a five meter high, electrically charged barbed wire fence. Another fence divided the camp into two parts: the smaller, south-facing part formed the women's camp from September 1944, and the rest of the camp was intended for the male prisoners. The women's camp consisted of three, the men's camp of six wooden concentration camp barracks .

One of the two sick barracks was rebuilt around 1950 behind the parish of the Holy Cross Church . She served up in the 1970s as a youth center of the Catholic church and is still in place today.

Prisoners

Most of the inmates of the camp came from the Generalgouvernement or Upper Silesia and Hungary or the Carpathian Ukraine. There were also Romanians, Germans, Greeks, Dutch and Czechoslovaks among them. Until February 1945 there were only 300 Polish and Hungarian women in the women's camp.

Transports prisoners to the men's camp

  • August 10, 1944: 25 Germans from Groß-Rosen
  • Mid-August 1944: 225 from Slovakia, northern Hungary and the Karpatho-Ukraine via Auschwitz
  • End of August 1944: 400 men from Hungary via the AL Fifthichen concentration camp
  • 18./19. September 1944: 550 men from Litzmannstadt via Auschwitz

Function prisoners

Supreme function inmate was the camp elder Herman Czech - a German "criminal". The Polish Jew Jakob Tannenbaum and his compatriot Schneebau officiated as camp capos. In addition, there were nine block elders, who each controlled one block (part of the barracks), and working capos.

Camp management and guards

The camp commandant responsible for the Görlitz subcamp and for the Bautzen, Kamenz, Kratzau, Niesky and Zittau subcamps was Erich Rechenberg , who lived with his family in a wooden barrack in the immediate vicinity of the camp. Rechenberg was wounded several times while serving in the Wehrmacht and was finally transferred to the SS in Auschwitz. The trained gardener Winfried Zunker (1917–1946) had been the camp leader in the Görlitz satellite camp since August 1944. He joined the SS as early as 1936 and fought in the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler during the war , before working as an office clerk with the Security Police (SiPo) in Breslau. The camp's guards formed the 9th SS Totenkopf Battalion, which was made up of older reservists and World War II veterans.

Forced labor

Between August 1944 and April 1945, up to 1,450, mostly Jewish, prisoners worked in the Görlitzer Waggon und Maschinenbau AG (WUMAG) or in service companies that worked for WUMAG.

There are also assumptions that around 25 prisoners were used on the Görlitzer Stadtgut in the Kunnerwitz community in agricultural work. 25 to 50 prisoners worked within the camp as craftsmen, cooks and coachmen.

The prisoners were poorly fed and subjected to repeated abuse from their guards. With the exception of Sunday, the daily working time was twelve hours.

Death march

On February 11, 1945, NSDAP district leader Bruno Malitz ordered the evacuation of the camp due to the advance of the Red Army . During this evacuation march, prisoners who were sick or unable to walk were shot. The march led through the villages of Kunnerwitz , Friedersdorf , Sohland , Lehdehäuser and the Buschschenke to Berthelsdorf and finally to Rennersdorf , where they were housed in the temporary Rennersdorf satellite camp. About 25 prisoners who were unable to start the march for health reasons were shot dead by the guards before they left. About 40 prisoners remained in Görlitz.

Malitz ordered the march back on March 8, so that the remaining prisoners could be used for digging and building anti-tank traps. On May 8, 1945 the prisoners were released by the Soviet army.

After the end of the war, it became known in the trials against Mayor Hans Meinshausen and NSDAP district leader Bruno Malitz that the Biesnitzer Grund concentration camp also served as a place of execution for Soviet prisoners of war.

Commemoration

323 former prisoners of the camp are buried in the Jewish cemetery in Görlitz . A memorial was inaugurated there in 1951 for the Jewish prisoners murdered in the concentration camp and buried in the cemetery. In 1959, students and teachers at the Melanchthon School put a memorial stone, the "Froebeldenkmal", in honor of the prisoners and their relatives. The location chosen was a place that the prisoners had to march past every day. In the 30 years after its establishment, several commemorative ceremonies and roll calls took place there. In 2003 the monument was restored. Other memorial sites for the victims of the Görlitz satellite camp are located in Deutsch-Paulsdorf (at the “Waage”) and at the Rennersdorf cemetery.

literature

  • Niels Seidel : The Görlitz and Rennersdorf satellite camps 1944/45 - A contribution to the processing of the events in the Groß Rosen concentration camp , Neiße Verlag, 2008, 256 pp.
  1. p. 45 ff.
  2. P. 71 ff.
  3. p. 72 f.
  4. p. 81 ff.
  5. p. 184.
  • Kurt Wolf: The Görlitz Biesnitzer Grund subcamp , Görlitz city administration, 2005.
  • Shlomo Graber: Sly. From Hungary through Auschwitz-Birkenau, Fifthichen and Görlitz to Israel. Jewish family history 1859-2001. HARTUNG-GORRE Verlag, 2002, 160 pp.
  • Wolfgang Benz / Barbara Diestel (ed.): Places of Terror. History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps Volume 6 Natzweiler Groß-Rosen Stutthof. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2007.
  • Karl-Heinz Gräfe, Hans-Jürgen Töpfer: Separated and almost forgotten. Concentration camp satellite camp on the territory of today's Saxony , Dresden 1996.
  • LG Hamburg, November 6, 1951 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal convictions for Nazi homicides 1945–1966, Vol. VIII, edited by Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1972, No. 297, pp. 801–812. Abuse of Jewish inmates, sometimes resulting in death (judgment against block elder Adolf Eichner)

Single receipts

  1. ^ Görlitz local section of the Sächsische Zeitung, sensational discovery in the city center , January 26, 2013
  2. The Jewish cemetery in Görlitz. Retrieved May 21, 2013 .
  3. Monument Biesnitzer Grund. (No longer available online.) European City of Görlitz / Zgorzelec, archived from the original on July 17, 2012 ; Retrieved May 21, 2013 . 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.goerlitz.de

Coordinates: 51 ° 8 ′ 32 "  N , 14 ° 57 ′ 52"  E