Schwarze Poth subcamp
The Schwarze Poth subcamp was a branch of the Buchenwald concentration camp in the center of Essen during World War II .
The official name was DESt Essen (Black Poth) . Up to 150 men were housed here as forced laborers for the removal and recycling of rubble in the already largely destroyed city center.
history
Name and location
The official naming DESt Essen (Black Poth) consists of two parts. DESt was the abbreviation for Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke , a company founded in 1938 under the leadership of the SS , which worked here for the waste disposal of the city of Essen with the help of forced labor. The name Schwarze Poth goes back to the street name and address Schwarze Poth 13 in Essen, where the SS administration was housed in the summer of 1944. It was called SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt WI, Essen branch, Schwarze Poth 13, DESt command, building rubble recycling .
The warehouse
The beginning of the Schwarze Poth satellite camp lies in the Essen Rubble Utilization Command , which was located with twenty prisoners in Essen- Rüttenscheid, near the police headquarters. This barrack camp belonged to SS Building Brigade III in the Cologne Exhibition Center and was subordinate to SS Sergeant Reinhard Sichelschmidt. It was first mentioned on January 2, 1944 in a list of the Buchenwald commandos.
Around April 1944, these twenty men were moved to the Essen city center to the Grinzing restaurant, which had already been partially destroyed and was located at 90 Adolf-Hitler-Strasse (where it is now known as Viehofer Strasse). The neighboring house at Königstraße 35 also served as a sleeping place, so that the command was increased to up to 150 forced laborers. The area of the warehouse now comprised 35,000 square meters within the streets Schwarze Poth, Königstraße, Kirchstraße and Postallee.
Usually the city administration initiated the establishment of building brigades to clear and recondition rubble and thus initiate reconstruction. However, this process has not been definitively proven in Essen.
The SS Building Brigade III in the Cologne Exhibition Center, which was subordinate to the Buchenwald concentration camp, was disbanded in early May 1944. This made the subcamp Schwarze Poth in Essen, which was part of SS Building Brigade III, an independent subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
The approximately 150 men (mostly Russians and Poles as well as some French, Danes, Belgians, Dutch, Luxembourgers and Germans) had to move rubble and recover duds since mid-1944, which were then carried out by the Kalkum Bomb Clearance Command , which was also subordinate to SS Construction Brigade III , have been defused. The inmates had to prepare the accommodations themselves. They had to do heavy labor, but received insufficient food, which consisted almost exclusively of some bread and soup. Even when dysentery was widespread in the camp, medical care was only improvised. Four deaths are documented for the camp.
resolution
Before the Allies took the Ruhr area , the camp was disbanded in March 1945. The prisoners were taken to Buchenwald concentration camp. The number of survivors is unclear.
Current situation
The small street Schwarze Poth ⊙ no longer exists. It ran roughly below today's Rathausgalerie shopping center , west of the Schützenbahn main street .
The area between the former street Schwarze Poth in the south, Königstraße ⊙ in the west (today inner courtyard to the east parallel to Viehofer Straße), Kirchstraße ⊙ in the north (today eastern extension of Kreuzeskirchstraße) and Postallee ⊙ in the east (today footpath west of the Schützenbahn ) is now completely overbuilt in the city center.
Stadtwunde Memorial
In 2002 the architect Werner Ruhnau and the artist Astrid Bartels erected the Stadtwunde memorial in the staircase to the Porsche pulpit from the 1950s . It is a group of trees stylized from seven tree trunks, which appear in artificial light, including word and text fragments and the plaque shown.
literature
- Michael Zimmermann : The Place of Terror: History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps, Volume 3. Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald . CH Beck, Essen 2006, ISBN 3-406-52963-1 , p. 328-360 .
- Ernst Schmidt : Lights in the Dark: Opponents and Persecutees of National Socialism in Essen . Klartext, Essen 2003, p. 328-360 .
- Ernst Schmidt: Lights in the Dark: Resistance and Persecution in Essen 1933-1945 . Röderberg, Frankfurt am Main 1980, p. 187-198 .
- Karola Fings : War, Society and Concentration Camps. Himmler's SS construction brigades . Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2005, p. 66-68 .
- Ernst Schmidt, Michael Zimmermann: Essen Remembers: Places of City History in the 20th Century . 3. Edition. Klartext, Essen 2002, ISBN 3-89861-073-X , p. 118 f .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Central office of the state justice administrations for the investigation of National Socialist crimes , IV, 429 AR 1959/66, Bl. 18-25
Coordinates: 51 ° 27 '25.2 " N , 7 ° 0' 48.6" E