Subcamp Hamburg-Eidelstedt
The Hamburg-Eidelstedt subcamp was a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp that existed from the end of 1944 to May 22, 1945, initially for 500 female prisoners. It was located on Friedrichshulder Weg, which formerly belonged to the Hamburg district of Eidelstedt and is now part of Lurup . The barrack camp was located in the immediate vicinity of a railway line.
Function of the camp, inmates and camp management
On September 27, 1944, 500 Czech and Hungarian Jewish women arrived at the Hamburg-Eidelstedt satellite camp, which was set up as a barrack camp and previously used for Italian prisoners of war. The 500 female concentration camp prisoners, along with 1000 other women, were brought from Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp to the Neuengammer subcamp Dessauer Ufer in northern Germany for forced labor in July 1944 . From there the women were transferred to the Wedel satellite camp on September 13, 1944 and two weeks later to the Hamburg-Eidelstedt satellite camp.
In the camp there were two barracks with bedrooms as well as one barrack with washrooms, laundry, storage and latrines. The barracks camp also included a clothing store, the infirmary and a prisoners canteen. Immediately next to the sub-camp were the bedrooms for twenty former customs officers who placed the guards outside the camp. Concentration camp guards were deployed inside the camp . SS-Unterscharfuhrer Walter Kümmel was the camp manager . Sentenced to ten years in prison by a British military tribunal in 1946, he was released early in 1952. His activity in Eidelstedt was not the subject of the negotiations. In 1970 he was charged with murdering two newborn babies in the Eidelstedt concentration camp. The public prosecutor's office in Hamburg only brought charges against him in 1980. In 1982 he was acquitted due to the statute of limitations.
On behalf of the City of Hamburg, the female prisoners had to build temporary accommodation ( panel houses ) for bombed-out Hamburgers under the guidance of German specialists in Eidelstedt. The building material required for this was delivered to the Eidelstedt train station and brought to the construction site by the prisoners in lorries. A small proportion of the women were also deployed to clear snow and clear debris in the Hamburg city area at the end of the war. The women were taken to the work sites by special trams.
Final phase of the camp
At the beginning of April 1945, the Hamburg-Eidelstedt satellite camp was evacuated and the female prisoners were transported by train to the Bergen-Belsen reception camp .
On 20/21 In April 1945, in the course of the closure of the Helmstedt-Beendorf subcamp, a few hundred women arrived at the Eidelstedt subcamp. At the beginning of May 1945, the camp was also occupied with female prisoners from the evacuated Langenhorn and Wandsbek satellite camps of the Neuengamme concentration camp. At that time, a typhus epidemic was rampant in the subcamp , from which several inmate women died. The Eidelstedt satellite camp was taken over by the police on May 3, 1945. On May 5, 1945, the camp was liberated by soldiers from the British Army and initially quarantined. British soldiers discovered 30 bodies of female concentration camp prisoners buried on the camp grounds and found the conditions to be appalling. Many of the freed women were sick, emaciated and sometimes undressed. The liberators distributed food, took the seriously ill to hospitals and had the dead reburied. They declared the camp a camp for Displaced Persons (DPs). Many of the survivors stayed in the Eidelstedt camp for a good two weeks. The German women were then taken to urban accommodation, while foreign women were taken to other DP camps. On May 22, 1945, the British military government closed the camp.
It is not certain how many inmates of this subcamp died. In a report by the Neuengammer SS medical officer Alfred Trzebinsky dated March 29, 1945, the occupancy of the Hamburg-Eidelstedt subcamp was given as 469 female prisoners. However, there is evidence of a serious tram accident on March 1, 1945, in which 14 inmates of the Eidelstedt subcamp died immediately and 74 others were injured, some seriously, as the front of a house fell after a heavy storm on a special tram.
post war period
Today there is a playground and a soccer field on the former warehouse. Today two memorial stones commemorate the former storage location. The working group against neo-fascism , founded by the Emmaus parish Hamburg-Lurup, produced a brochure "About the Friedrichshulder Weg Outside Commando" in 1979 and a memorial stone for Nazi victims was erected in Kleiberweg 115, on which a bronze plaque was later placed with a reference to the Hamburg subcamp. Eidelstedt was attached. Directly on the former site of the subcamp (today opposite Randowstraße 14), another memorial stone for the victims of the subcamp Hamburg-Eidelstedt has been standing at the instigation of students from the National Socialism student project in the district of the Geschwister-Scholl-Gesamtschule since 1985. Next to this memorial stone is a bronze plaque with the inscription: We commemorate the girls and women who suffered from the terror of the Nazis here in the 'Eidelstedt' concentration camp .
literature
- Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (ed.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 5: Hinzert, Auschwitz, Neuengamme. CH Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-52965-8 , p. 399f.
- Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial (ed.): The exhibitions. Edition Temmen , Bremen 2005, ISBN 3-86108-075-3 .
Web links
- Internet presence of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial with a list of the satellite camps
- Hans Ellger: A barrack camp on Friedrichshulder Weg - a women's subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp. (geschichtswerkstatt.lurup.de)
- Memorial sites of remembrance in Hamburg
Individual evidence
- ↑ Alyn Beßmann / Lennart Onken: Survived! And now? - Victims of Nazi persecution in Hamburg after their liberation, publisher: Hamburg Memorials and Learning Places Foundation, p. 21
- ↑ a b c d Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (ed.): The place of terror. History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 5: Hinzert, Auschwitz, Neuengamme. Munich 2007, p. 399f.
- ↑ a b c d e Hans Ellger: A barrack camp on Friedrichshulder Weg - a women's subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp. (geschichtswerkstatt.lurup.de)
- ↑ Alyn Beßmann / Lennart Onken: Survived! And now? - Victims of Nazi persecution in Hamburg after their liberation , publisher: Hamburg Memorials and Learning Places Foundation, p. 21
- ↑ Guide to places of remembrance of the years 1933 to 1945. (PDF; 1.1 MB). updated second edition. 2008, p. 19, accessed October 6, 2011.