Lochau subcamp

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Lochau subcamp
Number: 422
Gau : Tyrol-Vorarlberg
Area: Vorarlberg administrative district
Place: Lochau
Opening: April 7, 1945
Closure: April 25, 1945

The Lochau satellite camp was a satellite camp of the Dachau concentration camp in Lochau near Bregenz in Vorarlberg . It was the only Nazi concentration camp in what is now the Austrian state of Vorarlberg.

Official satellite camp of the Dachau concentration camp

Former Reiner brewery in Lochau

In Lochau, the attempts to manufacture the hemostatic Polygal tablets from beet residues, which were started by Sigmund Rascher in the Dachau main camp and continued by Kurt Plötner there and in the butcher's concentration camp outside command near Lindau , were to be continued. After preparatory work in March, the Lochau satellite camp was officially opened on April 7, 1945, just under a month before the end of the war in Europe. The production and testing facility was set up in the vacant, multi-storey building of a brewery in the center of the village. Between 8 and 20 prisoners from Slovenia, Poland and Germany (according to witness reports there were also a medical professor, an engineer and an Argentine consul among them) were accommodated in a large hall on the upper floor.

The prisoners were busy transporting and setting up the laboratory and office equipment delivered by rail from Dachau and / or butcher and starting the Polygal production. The laboratory could only be partially built. The inmates reportedly successfully refused to participate in human trials with the hemostatic agent. The concentration camp on the brewery grounds made a relatively human impression: no barbed wire to the outside and a certain degree of freedom of movement internally, so that contact with Polish forced laborers and the slipping of food was possible. The guards consisted of 5 older SS men.

The 39-year-old doctor and SS-Sturmbannführer Kurt Plötner, who had already carried out experiments with pectin in the Dachau main camp and in Schlachters, was in command of the camp. The Austrian chemist and founder and head of the Opekta -Werke Cologne, Robert Feix , had developed a hemostatic drug and had pectin-containing tablets patented under the name "Polygal". As a concentration camp special inmate, Feix was “allowed” to continue working for Sigmund Rascher in Dachau under the direction of the SS facility Ahnenerbe . After Rascher fell out of favor with Himmler , Plötner continued research and production with Feix as an assistant in Dachau, Schlachters and then in Lochau. Because of the collaboration with Plötner, the Allies arrested the former concentration camp inmate Robert Feix a year later.

As the Allied French troops approached , the camp was abandoned 19 days after its opening on April 25, 1945. Plötner hid the equipment with local residents and went to the neighboring town until he was arrested. Most of the five older SS guards fled when the Allied troops approached. A small part of the prisoners managed to move to the location of the previous camp after Schlager, where a small resistance group had formed. As early as April 30th, soldiers of the 1st French Army , especially the 1st and 4th  Moroccan Infantry Divisions , crossed the border at Hohenweiler and thus initiated the liberation of Vorarlberg.

Prehistory as a forced labor camp

The camp was evidently not founded by the transfer of concentration camp prisoners from Schlachters in the last month of the war (April 1945). As early as 1942, forced laborers and prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp were deployed in the branch of the "Bayerische Leichtmetallwerke" (BLM) in Lochau. The relocation of the concentration camp external command prisoners from Schlachters was probably only the reason for the existing Lochau camp to be officially run as a satellite camp of the Dachau concentration camp for a short time.

Post-history as an internment camp

The French occupying power used the Lochau camp for a year and a half as an internment camp for Nazi-polluted celebrities from politics, business and the newspaper industry. The former editors-in-chief of the Vorarlberger Tagblatt Karl Otto Dyllus and Hans Nägele , District Administrator Walter Didlaukies , ex-state governor Rudolf Kopf , the doctors Ernst Stolz and Karl Sollgruber and the textile industrialist Hermann Rhomberg were imprisoned here .

See also

literature

Final phase as a satellite camp of the Dachau concentration camp
Prehistory as a forced labor camp
  • Johann August Malin Society (ed.): From gentlemen and people. Persecution and resistance in Vorarlberg 1933–1945 (= contributions to the history and society of Vorarlberg. Volume 5, ZDB -ID 2290344-6 ). Fink's Verlag, Bregenz 1985, p. 184, online excerpt .
  • Other archive holdings: Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Rep. 14-300, inventory of the Bregenz District Office 1940–1945, Sch. 41, line 46; Bavarian light metal works in Bregenz-Lochau, Sch. 70, Z. 123/10/2/4 Greek workers of the light metal works in Lochau - behavior

References and comments

  1. ↑ see section Prehistory
  2. ↑ Important information from Kurt Greussing taken from the discussion page of the article
  3. ↑ see lit. Manfred Stoppel: Ida Bammert-Ulmer

Coordinates: 47 ° 31 '52 "  N , 9 ° 45' 7"  E