Subcamp Hamburg-Sasel

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Memorial stone in Sasel
Memorial plaque in Sasel
Axel Peters memorial in Bergstedt
Monument in Poppenbüttel

The Hamburg-Sasel subcamp was a women's subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg-Sasel that existed from September 13, 1944 to May 5, 1945 .

The warehouse

On September 13, 1944, the former prisoner-of-war camp near the Mellingburg lock was converted into the Sasel women's satellite camp. The camp site was on Feldblumenweg between the streets Saseler Mühlenweg and Hohensasel . 500 predominantly Polish Jewish women were imprisoned in the camp. They were deported to Hamburg via the Litzmannstadt ghetto and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and initially housed there for four weeks in the Dessauer Ufer subcamp. For the companies Möller and Wayss & Freytag , the women had to work building temporary accommodation in the Hamburg districts of Poppenbüttel and Wandsbek . In addition, some women had to work on the Heiligengeistfeld to make concrete slabs from rubble for the companies Moll and Kowahl & Bruns . Other locations were Sternschanze , St. Pauli , Altona , the free port of the Port of Hamburg and the Rübenkamp S-Bahn station . The leaders of the subcamp were at the beginning the captain of the Wehrmacht Merker and from November 1, 1944 the SS-Oberscharführer Leonhard Stark. To guard the prisoners outside the camp, 20 to 25 compulsory, former retired customs officers from Hamburg were deployed, and around 25 female guards inside the camp . On April 3 or 4, 1945, some women from the Hamburg-Langenhorn satellite camp were transferred to the Hamburg-Sasel satellite camp. Presumably on April 7th, the Sasel satellite camp was evacuated by the Waffen-SS and the women were deported by train to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

In the course of the clearing of the Neuengamme satellite camps, a train with 50 wagons of female and male prisoners started on April 10 from the Helmstedt-Beendorf satellite camp and drove via Magdeburg , Stendal and Wittenberge to Sülstorf , where the train from 13 to 15 April stopped because a track was blocked. There were 150 to 170 prisoners in each car. Hundreds of prisoners died in the transport with almost no water or food. On the 15th the train finally started and reached the Wöbbelin concentration camp near Ludwigslust , where the male prisoners had to get off. From there the odyssey for women continued. They had to spend another six days in the wagons and were then split up on arrival in Hamburg. Some of them arrived at the Sasel subcamp on April 21, completely weak. On May 1, 1945, most of the prisoners in the Sasel subcamp were able to leave Hamburg on a Swedish Red Cross train . They were brought to Sweden via Denmark . The women who remained in Hamburg were liberated by British soldiers a few days later, probably on May 4th or 5th .

At least 35 prisoners died of hunger, illness, abuse and exhaustion in the Sasel satellite camp. They were buried in the Bergstedt cemetery. Six of them had died by April 7, all the others were women who had been brought to Sasel from the Helmstedt-Beendorf satellite camp. In March 1957 they were reburied in the Ohlsdorf cemetery.

In total, around 1,500 female prisoners are said to have been in the camp over the course of time, including Jewish women , Sintezzas , Romnis and politically persecuted women . There were nationally Polish , Russian , Yugoslav , French , Dutch and German women represented.

Criminal penalties

From July 1946, the secondary trials to the Neuengamme main trial and the satellite camps of the British military court took place in the Hamburg Curiohaus . In the so-called Sasel case , SS-Oberscharführer Leonhard Stark was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The concentration camp guards Ursula Eberstein, Lieselotte Müller, Johanna Freund, Elfrieda Ignatowitz, Magdalena Roper, Ilse Sass, Sofie Wisch, Elisabeth Luth, Ida Römer and Hildegard Lenz were sentenced to prison terms ranging from a few months to several years for mistreating concentration camp inmates. The entrepreneur Emil Bruns was also convicted as the only civilian among the 24 accused .

In memory

A commemorative plaque from the plaque program of the Hamburg cultural authority sites of persecution and resistance 1933–1945 , which commemorates the prisoners of the Hamburg-Sasel subcamp, has been on the former camp site on Petunienweg at the corner of Feldblumenweg in Hamburg-Sasel since June 1982 . Right next to the memorial plaque, a memorial stone was also set up in June 1982 on the initiative of students in grade 10c of the Oberalster grammar school and their teacher Gerd Liszkowski. The class had researched the history of the camp in 1981 and 1982 and published a brochure about it and designed the design of the memorial stone. The first sentence of Article 1 , Paragraph 1 of the Basic Rights of the German Basic Law is quoted on the memorial stone : " Human dignity is inviolable." English-language board set up by the Hamburg Monument Protection Office .

The Poppenbüttel prefabricated house is reminiscent of the women of the Hamburg-Sasel subcamp, who had to build a prefabricated prefabricated concrete housing estate in Hamburg-Poppenbüttel. Since September 1, 1989, on the forecourt of the Poppenbüttler memorial, a wooden sculpture created as a peace tree by Franz Vollert has been commemorating the fate of the prisoners and the horrors of the Second World War .

On November 18, 1990, the facility in Hamburg-Bergstedt, designed by the sculptor Axel Peters from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania , was inaugurated. It consists of two steles made of Elbe sandstone , which were placed on both sides of a path directly behind the Bergstedt church . One of the steles bears the names or the prisoner numbers of the 34 women and a 33-day-old infant who perished in the Hamburg-Sasel subcamp and were buried in the Bergstedt cemetery until March 1957. The second stele lies broken on the other side of the path and is meant to remind of the violent circumstances of her death. It bears the translated words of a sentence from the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem : "Forgetting extends exile, remembering is the secret of redemption."

Dispute over the exact location and size of the warehouse

On June 1, 2017, the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg issued a positive preliminary building permit for the development of a green strip between the streets of Hohensasel and Aalkrautweg , which ends at Mellingburgredder and Feldblumenweg . The central coordination staff for refugees and the developer f & W are planning to build 12 residential accommodation with 160 apartments for refugees in the area. The district Wandsbek sees "no grounds for suspicion that in might be to tilling the field remains of the concentration camp outpost" according to spokesman Jacob lion power.

The Hohensasel Concentration Camp Memorial Initiative , on the other hand, is convinced that the camp was located in the area and relies on the research results of the students of the Oberalster grammar school and on contemporary witnesses. The initiative is for the preservation of the place and the establishment of another memorial site.

literature

Web links

Commons : Subcamp Hamburg-Sasel  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
  • Hamburg-Sasel satellite camp at the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial website
  • Wanda Edelmann and Suleika Klein at the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial website with PDF files (click on the font highlighted in red) and a sketch of the Sasel subcamp
  • Memorial for the victims of the Sasel subcamp near Bergstedter Church on gedenkstaetten-in-hamburg.de
  • Poppenbüttel Plattenhaus Memorial at gedenkstaetten-in-hamburg.de
  • Website of the Hohensasel Concentration Camp Memorial Initiative

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Arrival of the women on April 21st
  2. ↑ Source 2 : Page 418 in The Place of Terror: History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps , Volume 5
  3. ↑ Source 3 : PDF file of the Hamburg-Sasel subcamp from the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial
  4. ↑ Uwe Leps: The forgotten camp. Forced labor in the shadow of the airport 1943 to 1945. Hamburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-00-059388-8 , p. 66.
  5. ^ "Places of persecution and resistance 1933-1945" in: Detlef Garbe , Kerstin Klingel: Memorials in Hamburg. A guide to places of remembrance of the years 1933 to 1945 , new edition 2008, p. 104, no. 10 (PDF file) by gedennkstaetten-in-hamburg.de ( Feldblumenweg / Aalkrautweg is there, but the board is Feldblumenweg / Petunienweg )
  6. ↑ Regular maintenance of the Sasel concentration camp memorial at gymnasium-oberalster.de
  7. ↑ Commemoration at the memorial of the Sasel concentration camp in Heimat Echo , February 7, 2018
  8. ↑ Initiative for the Hohensasel concentration camp at initiative-gedenkstaette-kz-hohensasel.com
  9. ↑ The controversy on initiative-gedenkstaette-kz-hohensasel.com
  10. ↑ Nico Binde, Joana Nietfeld: Former concentration camp grounds: dispute over refugees and apartments in: Hamburger Abendblatt , November 6, 2018


Coordinates: 53 ° 39 ′ 53 ″  N , 10 ° 6 ′ 15 ″  E