Leitmeritz satellite camp

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Leitmeritz subcamp (Czech Republic)
Leitmeritz satellite camp
Leitmeritz satellite camp
Leitmeritz subcamp near Litoměřice in the Czech Republic

The Leitmeritz subcamp near Litoměřice in the Czech Republic was the largest subcamp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp . In official documents it was listed as SS Command B 5 , External Command Leitmeritz or Leitmeritz Labor Camp . It was built in connection with the construction project for underground relocations started nearby under the National Socialist code name Richard and operated from March 24, 1944 until the Wehrmacht surrendered on May 8, 1945. Around 18,000 prisoners passed through the forced labor camp, around 4,500 of whom died.

The tunnel system has been used as a repository for radioactive waste since 1964 , see Richard (Czech Republic) .

history

This section is still missing the following important information:
Liquidation of the camp, last deportation train, "liberation"
Help Wikipedia by researching and pasting it .

The underground facilities of the Richard mine of Leitmeritzer Kalk- und Ziegelwerke AG near Leitmeritz (for the history of the mine see Richard (Czech Republic) #History ) were to be used as relocation objects during the Second World War by order of Adolf Hitler on March 5, 1944 , in which the Production of war goods could be continued undisturbed by bombing raids underground.

The first transport with 500 prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp reached Leitmeritz on March 24, 1944, while civil workers were preparing the Richard construction site . Initially, the prisoners were temporarily housed in the Small Fortress Theresienstadt , seven kilometers away , as there was no accommodation available in Leitmeritz. From March 27, 1944, they were put into forced labor , both underground and above ground, in Leitmeritz. The SS leadership staff B 5 was in charge of the preparatory work on the construction site, but after a short time left Leitmeritz closed because the SS leadership refused to assume responsibility for the risky construction project. In May 1944, the Reich Ministry of Armaments and War Production pushed through Hitler's re-deployment of the SS in Leitmeritz.

During the entire summer of 1944, the on-site satellite camp was set up in Leitmeritz in a former barracks of the Czechoslovak Army . While the camp management and SS guards were quartered in the original soldiers' quarters, the stables, the camps and the riding arena of the former barracks were converted into the actual subcamp and secured with a two-row fence and seven watchtowers.

With the arrival of 1,202 prisoners from the Groß-Rosen concentration camp on May 31, 1944, the subcamp was put into regular operation. Between July 1944 and mid-February, 17 prisoner transports reached the camp; 3,649 prisoners came from the main camp Flossenbürg, 2,051 from Groß-Rosen, 1995 from the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and 1,441 from Dachau. Jews were brought in for the first time on August 9, 1944 ; 760 of these Jews from Poland were deported to Dachau and Mauthausen on October 13, 1944 because of their high sickness and death rate . A total of around 4000 Jews, the majority of whom came from Poland, were forcibly transported to Leitmeritz.

After the provisional accommodation in the small fortress Theresienstadt, during which the guard consisted of 30 air force soldiers, external surveillance was taken over by the 6th Air Force Guard Company Leitmeritz , which was about 250 to 300 men and was subordinate to SS Special Inspection II Nordhausen .

The crematorium (2006)

From July 1944 the corpses were cremated in the Theresienstadt concentration camp . The fatalities were from December 1944 in consequence of Ruhr - epidemic so numerous that in early 1945 with the construction of its own crematorium began two incinerators. In January 1945 at least 935 prisoners died. The crematorium went into operation in April 1945 and 405 victims were cremated within that month. In the absence of capacity, burials were also carried out in mass graves on the camp grounds; After the war, 789 victims were exhumed from these mass graves and buried in the Terezín National Cemetery (Theresienstadt).

In March and April 1945 around 2000 prisoners were evacuated from other Flossenbürg satellite camps to Leitmeritz. Evacuation transports from Buchenwald subcamps also arrived with over 800 prisoners.

A total of around 18,000 prisoners - including 770 women - passed through the Leitmeritz satellite camp. The prisoners came from almost all of the countries occupied by the German Reich: Almost 9,000 Poles, 3,500 Soviet citizens, 950 Germans, 850 Hungarians, 800 French, over 600 Yugoslavs and over 500 Czechs were brought in. At times there were 6,000 to 7,000 prisoners on site. Around 4,500 prisoners were killed, 3,200 of whom are known by name.

The last deportation train (train no. 94803) from Leitmeritz, the presumable destination is the Mauthausen concentration camp , which was carried out with around 4,000 people in 77 open coal wagons, was the only transport that was stopped and liberated by the moral courage of the local population .

After the war, an extraordinary people's court of Czechoslovakia in Litoměřice sentenced the former camp leader, SS-Hauptscharführer Karl Opitz, to life imprisonment. The Czechoslovak army returned to the barracks; the barracks have been abandoned since 2003. The camp crematorium is the only building that has remained unchanged to this day and is open to the public as a memorial .

The Richard Underground Relocations

By order of Hitler from the beginning of March 1944, the secret project Richard was started. For this was by extension to a second construction project (Richard II) in May 1944 Richard I . At the end of the war in May 1945, Richard I was only being produced in the tunnel , while a third underground production facility (Richard III) was being planned.

Richard I

Richard I was a planned U relocation object for Elsabe AG, a cover company of Auto Union . The prisoners in the subcamp had to assemble Maybach HL 230 armored engines . The planned total subterranean object with an area of ​​60,000 m² had been expanded to a quarter by the end of March 1945 and had two tunnel mouth holes and a weather shaft . At the end of October 1944, Elsabe AG moved into 2,000 m² and set up high-quality machines for the manufacture of tank engines. Richard I had a siding.

Richard II

Richard II was intended for Osram GmbH. The planned total subterranean property with an area of ​​15,000 m² was still being expanded until the end of March 1945, but several rooms had already been completed. The sinking work for the weather shaft had not yet been completed, the connecting crosscut to Richard I and a tunnel opening had been completed. Osram had not yet moved into the property. Productivity was low because the prisoners were malnourished and weak.

Commemoration and reception

Jiří Sozanský: sculpture Memento mori from 1992 (2016)

On the site of the former subcamp there is a memorial in the former camp crematorium , as well as the Pietní Park (in Czech roughly 'devotional park' or 'pious park'). In 1992 a sculpture designed by the Czech artist Jiři Sozanský was inaugurated next to the crematorium. In the memorial of the Theresienstadt concentration camp , which is also the bearer of the Leitmeritz monument, there is a permanent exhibition on the Leitmeritz satellite camp.

In a US investigation report from the post-war period, the Leitmeritz satellite camp was referred to as a “death factory”.

In Volume 4 of The Place of Terror , a former prisoner is quoted as a representative of many survivors, who mostly also passed through other concentration camps, who describes the Leitmeritz subcamp in comparison to other camps as follows:

“There was a certain order everywhere: you knew when to eat and when to go to sleep. But not here [Leitmeritz], here there was only work, work always only work, one toiled for up to 14 hours. That was a real slave camp. "

- Břetislav Lukeš : Památník Terezín , Collection of Memories, no.352.

The prisoner's quote in The Place of Terror is supplemented with the note that hunger in connection with exhausting work was "one of the main instruments for exterminating the prisoners".

Film about a death train

The documentary film Death Train to Freedom ( Bayerischer Rundfunk , 2017, around 45 minutes, editor: Andreas Bönte ; first broadcast on January 29, 2018 in Das Erste ) by Andrea Mocellin (director and screenplay) and Thomas Muggenthaler (screenplay) tells the extraordinary story of a concentration camp -Transport in the spring of 1945, which was supposed to bring around 4,000 concentration camp prisoners from the Leitmeritz satellite camp to the Mauthausen concentration camp . Most of the deported concentration camp prisoners, who were initially transported in 77 open freight cars without food, survived.

On the route through what was then the “ Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia ”, the Czech people did a lot to free as many people as possible from the transport of death at various train stations or to increase the chances of survival of the deported by providing them with food and medicine. With the spontaneous and organized help of the Czech population, around 1,500 prisoners were freed from the freight train with the number 94803 set in motion by the SS in Leitmeritz on April 28, 1945. On May 8, 1945 in Velešín in South Bohemia , the train was finally liberated at gunpoint by men of the Czech resistance and Soviet soldiers from the Vlasov Army .

The documentary shows unique contemporary photos and films and interviews with contemporary witnesses (Czech helpers and liberators and former concentration camp inmates) from the present in order to document the course of the rail transport.

The cameraman Sorin Dragoi was awarded the German Camera Prize for the film in July 2018 . In November 2018, the film was awarded the German-Czech Journalism Prize (Milena Jesenská Special Prize) . The film was nominated for the Grimme Prize 2019.

literature

Web links

Commons : Leitmeritz concentration camp  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (ed.): The place of terror . Volume 4, 2006, p. 175.
  2. ↑ a b Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (Ed.): The place of terror . Volume 4, 2006, p. 177.
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (ed.): The place of terror . Volume 4, 2006, pp. 177-178.
  4. ↑ a b Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (Ed.): The place of terror . Volume 4, 2006, p. 178.
  5. ↑ a b c Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (ed.): The place of terror . Volume 4, 2006, p. 180.
  6. ↑ a b Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (Ed.): The place of terror . Volume 4, 2006, p. 182.
  7. ↑ Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (ed.): The place of terror . Volume 4, 2006, p. 179.
  8. ↑ Death train to freedom | Report & documentation. February 5, 2018, accessed September 24, 2018 .
  9. ↑ Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (ed.): The place of terror . Volume 4, 2006, p. 183.
  10. ↑ a b The satellite camps . Website of the working group for the former Flossenbürg e. V., accessed on March 10, 2017.
  11. ^ Klaus-Dieter Alicke: Leitmeritz (Bohemia). In: ders .: Lexicon of the Jewish communities in the German-speaking area . Volume 2: Großbock – Ochtendung . Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 2008, ISBN 978-3-579-08078-9 .
  12. ^ Story in First: Death Train to Freedom. Bayerischer Rundfunk , press release, December 21, 2017, accessed on April 11, 2020.
  13. ↑ Oliver Das Gupta: Death Transport in World War II: How Czech civilians became heroes. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 8, 2018, accessed on April 11, 2020 ( plus nine images ).
  14. ↑ Lucas Frings: Recommended film: "Death Train to Freedom". In: Learning from history , a project by the Agency for Education - History. Politics and media e. V., November 21, 2018, accessed April 11, 2020.
  15. ↑ Death train to freedom. Deutsche Welle , January 26, 2019, accessed on April 11, 2020 (with video).
  16. ↑ Sorin Dragoi - camera for "Death Train to Freedom" (documentation). German Camera Prize , 2018, accessed on April 11, 2020.
  17. ^ Death Train to Freedom: German-Czech Journalism Prize for BR production. Bayerischer Rundfunk, press release, November 9, 2018, accessed on April 11, 2020.
  18. ↑ Grimme Prize 2019: ARD enters the race with 42 nominations. Das Erste , press release, January 17, 2019, accessed April 11, 2020.

Coordinates: 50 ° 32 ′ 5.2 "  N , 14 ° 6 ′ 56.8"  E