Überlingen-Aufkirch subcamp

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Memorial stone on the concentration camp cemetery near Birnau

The Überlingen-Aufkirch satellite camp was a satellite camp of the Dachau concentration camp and existed from September 1944 to April 1945. An average of 700 concentration camp prisoners were used in the construction of the Goldbacher tunnel , to which armaments factories were to be relocated from Friedrichshafen . At least 170 prisoners were murdered by the SS or died of the living and working conditions.

prehistory

The Überlingen- Aufkirch subcamp was created in the course of the underground relocation of war-important companies from Friedrichshafen, a center of the armaments industry of the National Socialist German Reich . From June 1943 the production facilities of the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin , Maybach-Motorenbau , Zahnradfabrik Friedrichshafen and the Dornier works were the target of Allied air raids , in which almost all factories and large parts of the Friedrichshafen city area were destroyed by the end of the war. From 1943 onwards, parts of the armaments production were relocated to the Friedrichshafen area.

On May 1, 1944, three days after another heavy air raid on Friedrichshafen, ordered the " Fighter Staff ", the Ministry of Munitions for the increased production of fighter planes in charge, construction of tunnels for the Friedrichshafen-based companies in Hohenems in Vorarlberg and in Ueberlingen on Lake Constance on . In Überlingen there were rocks made of molasse , a soft and easily excavated rock , directly on the Stahringen – Friedrichshafen railway line . Construction work began in early June 1944; a construction time of 100 days was planned.

Subcamp

Prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp were requested to accelerate the construction work . The Überlingen-Aufkirch satellite camp is first mentioned on September 2, 1944 in documents that have survived from the main camp. In two transports in September and on October 3, around 700 prisoners came to Lake Constance. In Dachau, the prisoners were assembled under the slogan “Fruit Command” in order to give the impression that they were planning to work in fruit growing on Lake Constance.

A concentration camp was set up in Überlingen near Aufkirch, about 1.5 kilometers from the tunnel. The concentration camp consisted of three sleeping barracks for 270 prisoners each, a smaller barrack with the kitchen and the infirmary, and the roll call area . The total area of ​​about 3600 m² was surrounded by two parallel, 2.8 meter high barbed wire fences on which electrically charged wires were located. At the four corners stood 6.5 meter high watchtowers equipped with spotlights. Outside the fenced area, opposite the camp entrance, there was a barrack for the SS, a dog kennel and accommodation for the guards. The camp commandant was Georg Grünberg , who was already working in the same function in the Friedrichshafen satellite camp . 25 SS members who guarded the prisoners were subordinate to him.

Most of the prisoners were political prisoners as well as those classified as “criminal” or “ asocial ” by the SS . The largest national group were Italians, including military internees . 55 Slovenes were captured as partisans of the Osvobodilna Fronta during fighting in the Ljubljana area. Other prisoners were of Russian, Polish or German origin. One of the Slovenian prisoners was Boris Kobe, who shortly after the end of the war drew tarot cards that gave an insight into the life of the prisoners.

The prisoners worked six days a week in twelve-hour shifts building the Goldbacher tunnel. Without taking any precautions for their personal protection, they were busy both driving heavy equipment such as pneumatic drills and pneumatic hammers and transporting the excavated material , which was loaded onto tipping lorries , driven to the shore of Lake Constance and dumped there. In the event of explosions , inmates were forbidden to retreat to the safe areas of the tunnel system. One of the prisoners, Anton Jež, reported in 1998 that the rock in the roof of the tunnels was constantly falling off , in which prisoners were killed or seriously injured. Other accidents occurred when unexploded charges were removed. Jež described the relatively mild temperatures that would have prevailed in the tunnel in winter as "luck" for the inadequately clad and poorly fed prisoners.

The existence of the subcamp was known in Überlingen : Guarded by the SS and dogs, the prisoners marched through the streets of the city to change shifts. Local residents sometimes tried to deliver food and medicine to the inmates. This was tolerated by some guards, and prevented by others by kicking or using dogs. The prisoners were also supported by the later SPD member of the state parliament, Karl Löhle , in whose butchery prisoners picked up meat and sausage for the camp kitchen.

Tilting lorry exhibited in the Goldbacher adit, which was used to remove the spoil

On March 21, 1945, two prisoners, the Ukrainian Wassili Sklarenko and the Austrian Adam Puntschart, managed to escape to Schaffhausen . Both were hiding under the rock in a tilting lore in the tunnel. Fellow prisoners showered the truck with diesel oil in order to deceive the guard dogs at the tunnel entrance. The refugees reached Swiss territory in night-time marches. Both report that a Russian's escape had previously failed: after his arrest, he was pushed into the dog kennel and torn to pieces by the guard dogs in front of the prisoners.

According to Alfred Hübsch, block elder in the subcamp, a lice plague spread in January 1945, as a result of which prisoners fell ill with dysentery , phlegmon and typhus . The inmates' sleeping blankets and straw sacks were completely soaked and the toilets and washrooms were soiled with feces; there was no heating material, no soap and no towels. On April 4, Camp Leader Grünberg had 214 seriously ill prisoners singled out and taken by train to the Saulgau satellite camp . Eyewitnesses describe those who arrived in Saulgau as "completely emaciated, almost starved and completely lousy", as "half corpses" and "doomed". Hübsch describes the effects of the prison conditions on the prisoners:

“The terrible hardship, the cold, the hunger, the vermin, the exhaustion, the illnesses, the envy of the parcel recipients, all the almost unbearable, the fear of infection, the thought of dying shortly before the liberation troops to be hoped for soon General de Gaulle […] - all of this made people mad, hysterical, hard, angry and uncomfortable. Each became the other's enemy. "

It is not known how many prisoners died in Überlingen. A minimum of 170 results from two burials in the Überlinger Friedhof, 71 corpses that were cremated in the Konstanz crematorium , and 97 bodies that were found in a mass grave in the Degenhardt grove after the end of the war. The mass grave was used from February 1945 after the burnings in Konstanz had probably been stopped due to a lack of coal. Other prisoners were killed in other camps; 37 of the 214 people transported to Saulgau died there.

liberation

Birnau concentration camp cemetery: graves with two high crosses

On April 25, 1945 , units of the 1st French Army liberated Überlingen. Four days earlier, the prisoners in Überlingen had been evacuated by train to the Allach subcamp, which was reached on April 29 by American units. The Überlingen fire brigade burned the barracks of the subcamp on April 23; officially to prevent the spread of epidemics.

In April 1946, the French occupation authorities called on interned National Socialists and former members of the guards to rescue the bodies from the mass grave in the Degenhardt grove. An investigation found that ten of the 97 victims had fatal gunshot wounds; the others had died of weakness, abuse, starvation or accidents at work in the Goldbacher tunnel. The dead were buried after a nightly wake in the city center of Überlingen at the Birnau concentration camp cemetery not far from the Birnau pilgrimage church . The cemetery, which was redesigned in 1962 by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, was the target of a cemetery desecration in October 1992, in which all gravestones were overturned and a memorial was smeared with swastikas. The perpetrators were caught and sentenced. Since autumn 2001, a board at the cemetery has been providing information about the names of the inmates buried there, as far as they are known.

A guard at the subcamp was sentenced to death and executed in the Rastatt trials in the spring of 1947 . In the 1950s and 1960s, the German judiciary investigated the camp commandant Grünberg. An indictment was not brought because the public prosecutor's office at the Munich II regional court closed the proceedings on December 13, 1965 “for lack of well-founded suspicion”. With the support of the Central Office in Ludwigsburg (ZStL), the Konstanz public prosecutor carried out extensive investigations into the Überlingen-Aufkirch satellite camp in the 1960s. The proceedings were discontinued on November 16, 1967 by the ZStL, as the results of the investigation were insufficient to accuse individuals.

The entrances to the Goldbacher tunnel were blown up in 1947 by order of the French occupation authorities. In the 1960s a new entrance was built to allow maintenance work. The entire tunnel system was renovated between 1983 and 1989; at present it is used as winter quarters for boats and caravans. Since 1981 there have been regular guided tours in the gallery. The city of Überlingen set up a memorial at the entrance to the gallery in 1984. A documentation center has been located in the tunnel since 1996. A memorial was built near the satellite camp in 1993, and an information board has been added since 2001.

literature

  • Oswald Burger: The Stollen . Ed .: Association of Documentation Center Goldbacher Stollen and Aufkirch concentration camp in Überlingen eV 12th edition. Edition Isele, Eggingen 2017, ISBN 978-3-86142-087-3 .
  • Oswald Burger: Überlingen (Aufkirch). In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 2: Early camp, Dachau, Emsland camp. CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52962-3 , pp. 514-517.

Movies

  • Medienwerkstatt Freiburg: Under Germany's Earth. Video, Freiburg im Breisgau 1983.
  • Stephan Kern, Jürgen Weber: How Dachau came to the lake ... Video, Querblick Medien- und Verlagswerkstatt, Konstanz 1995, ISBN 3-9804449-1-0 .

Web links

Commons : Überlingen-Aufkirch satellite camp  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ For the prehistory see Burger, Stollen , p. 11f.
  2. ↑ Anton Jež: The tunnel was our misfortune and our luck. Memories of the Überlingen / Aufkirch concentration camp external command. In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (Eds.): Subcamp concentration camp - history and memory. (= Dachauer Hefte , Heft 15) Verlag Dachauer Hefte, Dachau 1999, ISSN  0257-9472 , pp. 46–53, here p. 46; Burger, Stollen , p. 60.
  3. ↑ Plan of the camp see Burger, Stollen , Fig. 1 in the appendix.
  4. ↑ Burger, Stollen , p. 79ff. The cards of the tarot game at: Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies ( University of Minnesota ): Boris Kobe.
  5. ↑ Jež, Stollen , p. 49.
  6. ↑ Burger, Stollen , p. 27.
  7. ↑ Burger, Stollen , p. 50.
  8. ↑ Burger, Stollen , pp. 48, 55.
  9. ↑ Referring to Alfred Hübsch: Die Insel des Standrechts. (Unpublished manuscript in the archive of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site) Georg Metzler: “Secret commando matter”. Missile armor in Upper Swabia - the Saulgau satellite camp and the V2 (1943–1945). Eppe, Bergatreute 1996, ISBN 3-89089-053-9 , pp. 213f.
  10. ↑ Quotes from investigations by the German judicial authorities on the Saulgau subcamp and from eyewitness interviews with Metzler, "Kommandosache" , p. 215f.
  11. ↑ Hübsch, Insel , quoted in Metzler, “Kommandosache” , p. 214.
  12. ↑ a b Burger, Stollen , p. 28ff.
  13. ↑ Metzler, “Kommandosache” , p. 217.
  14. ↑ Burger, Stollen , p. 27.
  15. ↑ Burger, Stollen , p. 68.
  16. ^ Burger, Überlingen (Aufkirch) , pp. 516f.
  17. ↑ Burger, Stollen , p. 69.

Coordinates: 47 ° 46 ′ 36 ″  N , 9 ° 9 ′ 2 ″  E