Obertraubling subcamp

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The Obertraubling satellite camp was built as a satellite camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp in the municipality of Obertraubling , a suburb of Regensburg , on the premises of Messerschmitt AG . It existed from February 20 to April 16, 1945 and contained around 600 concentration camp prisoners, around half of the prisoners were persecuted as Jews. Immediately after the war, the area was used as emergency accommodation for German refugees and displaced persons . In 1951, the town of Neutraubling was created on the former site of the aircraft company.

history

Obertraubling Air Base and Messerschmitt Works

In the context of the Obertraubling concentration camp are the local air base and the Messerschmitt works, the history of which is briefly mentioned here.

In Regensburg district Prüfening since the mid-1920s there was a loss-making urban transport airfield. Mid-1930s, there were plans by the Air Ministry , the plant into a military air base to convert, where a bomber group of the Air Force to deploy. The Luftwaffe did not get a chance, however, as Bayerische Flugzeugwerke AG leased the site for a longer period in June 1937 and had the workshops of Messerschmitt GmbH, founded in 1936 and based in Regensburg, built there. The Air Force's plans for a military base or an air base then concentrated on the wet meadow area northeast of Obertraubling, in today's Neutraubling, about twelve kilometers from Regensburg. The work on the airfield, classified as a secret Reichssache, began in 1937, and the topping-out ceremony for the main building was celebrated in the summer of 1938. An air base company was stationed on the approximately 250 hectare area in autumn 1938, for which the necessary training also took place in Obertraubling.

In order to increase the production of the Messerschmitt Group, which was important for the war effort, after the attack on Poland, another production facility was built on the site of the Obertraubling air base at the end of 1940 and the area was used as a works airfield. The company previously stationed there was relocated.

Messerschmitt forced labor camp

Aerial photo of the Messerschmitt works from summer 1943

To set up these workshops, 2200 German soldiers from the Grafenwöhr penal company were initially called in . As a result, this was replaced by so-called Eastern workers and mainly by Soviet prisoners of war (officers). To accommodate them, two so-called "Russian camps" were built on or right next to the factory premises. A total of around 2,750 prisoners had to live there under miserable conditions and do forced labor in aircraft production . From January 1941 to the end of 1943, large-scale transport aircraft (the so-called Messerschmitt giants), such as the Me 321 and Me 323 , were produced on the site . After the factory was placed under the administration of Messerschmitt GmbH in Regensburg at the beginning of 1942, large numbers of items were manufactured in Obertraubling. a. the Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter aircraft (since August 1943) and Me 262 (since January 1944), so that with the Regensburg and Obertraubling locations a "focus of German fighter aircraft production" was created. To maintain the logistics of this armaments center, the last external command of the Flossenbürg concentration camp, the Colosseum satellite camp , was set up in Regensburg .

Relocation of production to Flossenbürg concentration camp, the forest works

Maintenance of various aircraft etc. a. a Me 323 (probably in Obertraubling 1944)

In the further course of the war and in order to increase production again, thousands of concentration camp prisoners were forced to produce Messerschmitt aircraft. After the bombing of the Regensburg works in August 1943, for example, the production of certain individual parts of the Bf 109 fighter aircraft was relocated directly to the Flossenbürg concentration camp.

With the ongoing systematic bombing of the Messerschmitt factories by Allied associations, the production facilities were systematically decentralized and relocated to camouflaged "forest works". The Obertraubling plant with its sufficiently large airfield was greatly upgraded in this context and "retained as the main logistical base", since the final assembly and the entry of the fighter planes, ie the tests for commissioning, could be carried out there.

February 1945

But since these production facilities were also the target of Allied bombings since February 1944, B. on a large scale on February 16, 1945, the establishment of a further external concentration camp command there (February 20) to repair the bombing damage represents one of the last attempts to maintain the strategically important Messerschmitt site in Obertraubling.

The Obertraubling subcamp

Establishment of the concentration camp

At the beginning of 1945, thousands of concentration camp prisoners from concentration camps that had already been dissolved were collected in Flossenbürg and about 600 of them were transported on to the newly established Obertraubling external command. Their health was very poor, many were unable to work or completely exhausted. The largest group among the prisoners were Poles (191 people persecuted as Jews and 27 non-Jewish), followed by Czechs (102 non-Jewish and 8 so-called Jewish prisoners), 47 Croats, French (21 of whom were persecuted as Jews and 14 non-Jewish) and from nine other nationalities.
The prisoners were housed in the so-called casino building, which was built in the early 1940s for officers stationed there but was not completed. It was a two-story building shell, without windows, roof and doors. Dysentery, typhus, and typhus appeared in the first few days after the prisoners arrived. The food situation was so dire that prisoners tried, for example, to exchange gold for (more) food. At the end of March 1945, the command's "strength list" only showed 484 prisoners, which means a death rate of almost 20% in about five weeks. The dead were buried in mass graves on the premises.

Main task: construction and repair of the bombed runway

The main task of the prisoners was to repair the bombing damage on the company's own airfield on the Messerschmitt site. In addition to the repair and expansion work on existing flight paths, the prisoners were called upon to build a new, concrete runway. Such would u. a. was urgently needed for the weather-independent commissioning of the fighter aircraft, but it was not completed by the end of the war.

The dissolution of the concentration camp and the death march

On April 16, 1945, the Obertraubling external command was disbanded by the SS. They took the sick and unable to march to the Dachau concentration camp by truck . The others had to go there on foot. According to a survivor's report, only about 25 people from this death march arrived alive in Dachau.

Proceedings against security guards

The external command initially consisted of 50 SS guards who accompanied the prisoners, some of whom came from other "evacuated" camps, to Obertraubling. The SS guards were reinforced in March by eleven other SS men under the leadership of SS-Oberscharführer Johann Patron. The command leader was SS-Hauptscharführer Cornelius Schwanner , who had been part of the security service in Flossenbürg since September 1939 and from November 1943 until his transfer to Obertraubling led the Johanngeorgenstadt satellite camp . Schwanner was sentenced to death in the Flossenbürg main trial of 1947 for war crimes and was therefore executed. He denied to the last that he was involved in the mistreatment and killing of prisoners or that he was responsible for the miserable conditions in Obertraubling.

Because of the killing and mistreatment (in some cases resulting in death) of many Jewish prisoners, the Bremen Regional Court also tried against Obertraubling “ prison staff”. In November 1953 the following people were found guilty: Helmrich Heilmann (6 years imprisonment), Joseph Kierspel (life sentence) and Johann Mirbeth (6 years). The crimes were committed not only in Obertraubling, but also in the Golleschau subcamp and during the evacuation of the two concentration camps.

The site in the post-war period

The Ratskeller was built on the basement of the former casino, with the town hall to the right.

After the liberation or occupation of the Obertraublinger Messerschmitt works by American troops , the facility was used as a troop base. This was followed by the withdrawal of the US Army in November 1946, and after handing over to the German authorities, these accommodations were converted into a reception camp or a settlement for displaced persons and German refugees. In 1951, the town of Neutraubling was founded following a resolution by the municipality bordering the factory premises .

The former Messerschmitt site is now the center of Neutraubling; it is roughly delimited by the following streets: Walhallastraße to the west (then and now the approach from Obertraubling), to the east Neudeker Straße and Bayerwaldstraße (the former provisional flight path ), Böhmerwaldstraße in the south and Eichendorffstraße in the north. The converted former prisoner building, the so-called casino, is now used by a “Ratskeller” restaurant, and Neutraubling's town hall is right next to it.

Commemoration

In 2005 this sign was placed next to the cross.

In the area of ​​today's Breslauer Strasse Neutraubling, the Bavarian State Compensation Office under Philipp Auerbach had a concentration camp cemetery built in 1949 , where around 280 corpses were buried. A five-meter-high iron cross with the inscription “Requiescant in pace”, Rest in Peace, was erected as a memorial. Just six years later, the bones were exhumed and partly reburied in the former home of the deceased and partly in the Flossenbürg concentration camp cemetery in the memorial that had just been laid out. The iron cross was moved to the parish cemetery without adding any explanatory references to its origin. The concentration camp cemetery, on the other hand, was turned into building land, as Neutraubling grew rapidly like hardly any other Bavarian community of that time.

Memorial stone from 2006, which is to commemorate the victims of the concentration camp subcamp and all other dead at the airfield.

Since 2006 there has been a two-ton boulder made of Flossenbürger granite in front of the Neutraublingen town hall, on which a plaque was attached with the following inscription:

"A NUMBER OF UNKNOWN VICTIMS OF ENEMY 1933–1945".

Since 2006 there has also been a circular route called “On the trail of the airfield”, along which information boards should provide information about the previous use of the area.

On the official website of the city of Neutraubling one would look in vain for a reference to a concentration camp subcamp or the forced labor camp. There is only talk of the production of the "Messerschmitt giants" or the Me 262.

literature

Web links

Commons : Neutraubling  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Obertraubling subcamp. Website of the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial. Retrieved July 6, 2016.
  2. Helmut Halter: City under the swastika. Universitätsverlag Regensburg 1994, p. 314. Bayrische Flugzeugwerke AG, founded in Augsburg in 1926, was awarded far-reaching (development) armaments contracts by the Nazi authorities in spring 1933 and renamed after its chief designer Willy Messerschmitt in the summer of 1938 . The aircraft factory, trading since then as Messerschmitt AG, was privately owned from the spring of 1940, whereby the Regensburg Messerschmitt GmbH had been independently managed as a subsidiary since 1938 and is said to have been the second largest aircraft factory in Europe around 1943 (cf. Halter, pp. 317–328). However, there was a joint group management that led the Messerschmitt group, which was important for the war effort.
  3. ^ Fabian Dingebacher: The prehistory. Obertraubling Air Base. In: Heike Wolter (Ed.): Dying and Surviving in the Obertraubling Subcamp. 2011, p. 24.
  4. ^ Schmoll: Messerschmitt giants. 2002, p. 80. In December 1942, around 3800 people worked.
  5. ^ Fabian Dingebacher: The prehistory. Obertraubling Air Base. 2011, p. 25.
  6. ^ Schmoll: Messerschmitt giants. 2002, p. 88. Internally, the Obertraublinger aircraft factory was referred to as Plant II or Regensburg-Obertraubling . The Allied aerial photographs also bore the latter as a name. (See Halter, p. 123).
  7. For example, around 800 concentration camp prisoners worked there in August 1943 and around 5,000 concentration camp prisoners since autumn 1944 for Messerschmitt. The income of the SS in Flossenbürg for the “loan” of the prisoners as work slaves to Messerschmitt amounted to 533,000 RM “loan fee” in December 1944, according to a statement. See Halter: City under the swastika. 1994, pp. 332-336.
  8. ^ Peter Schmoll: The Messerschmitt works. 2004, p. 172. The forest works near Hagelstadt (camouflage name "Gauting") and Mooshof (camouflage name "Staufen") were chosen because they could be connected to the Obertraubling infrastructure in the best possible way. The relocation of the final assembly of the Me 262 jet fighter to Obertraubling is also worth mentioning, on which the Nazi regime placed far-reaching hopes for the air war. The assembly continued until the so-called tank alarm on the night of April 23, 1945; likewise the delivery. The last Me 262 was flown by Obertraubling on the same day to Munich Riem. (Schmoll, p 180.) the beginning of 1945 started from Obertraublinger work of all time completed Me 262, in the greater southern Germany to its components Mauthausen produced locally were. See Schmoll, p. 204.
  9. ^ Ulrich Fritz: Obertraubling. 2006, p. 215. Behind these machinations stood the “kitchen chaplain” Alfons Rösch, who was sentenced to imprisonment by the regional court of Regensburg in 1947. Cf. Miriam Betz: The Trials - Justice for injustice committed. In: Wolter (Ed.), 2011, p. 47.
  10. ^ Ulrich Fritz: Obertraubling. In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror. Flossenbürg, Mauthausen and Ravensbrück. Beck, Munich, 2006, p. 214. The digging of trenches and tank traps has also been handed down.
  11. ^ Schmoll: Messerschmitt-Giganten, 2002, pp. 152–157.
  12. Andreas Gröschl: The death march. In: Wolter (Hrsg.), 2011, p. 34. The information comes from an interview with Moishe Mantelmacher in June 2011. Supposedly another 30 to 40 people survived this forced march because they managed to escape on the way.
  13. See entry of the Flossenbürg memorial under the Obertraubling subcamp, where Schwanner is also shown.
  14. Justice and Nazi Crimes Volume XI, Procedure No. 379, file number: LG Bremen 531127 3Ks2 / 53. See: Justice and Nazi Crimes is available as an online version. ( Memento of the original from August 1, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) 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 / www1.jur.uva.nl
  15. If you compare current satellite images with the aerial photo from 1943 shown above, the old course of the road and many buildings can be clearly recognized.
  16. Florian Schmidbauer: Neutraubling: Entry of the post-war society. In: Wolter (Ed.), 2011, p. 50. As in many similar places, there were previously complaints about the neglect of the graves in the “concentration camp cemetery”.

Coordinates: 48 ° 59 ′ 38 "  N , 12 ° 11 ′ 42.5"  E