Bad Gandersheim concentration camp
The Bad Gandersheim concentration camp was a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp that existed from October 1944 to April 1945 in the former Brunshausen monastery near the town of Bad Gandersheim in what is now Lower Saxony. In the warehouse, aircraft parts were produced on behalf of Ernst Heinkel AG.
prehistory
Originally, the Carl Bruns tool factory was supposed to manufacture aircraft parts for the Focke-Wulf Ta 154 night fighter on the site of the later concentration camp . Due to a lack of workers and insufficient supplies of raw materials, production did not begin until April 1944 and was discontinued after a few weeks. The approximately 40,000 m² production halls did not remain idle for long, because Ernst Heinkel AG rented them because they had to relocate their production from Mielec due to the approaching Red Army .
History of the camp
Ernst Heinkel AG set up the external command in Brunshausen, Apparatebau, Plant A in October 1944. The first 200 prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp arrived on October 2nd. On October 18, a transport with 331 concentration camp inmates from Dachau reached the camp, followed by 50 others on October 19 from Sachsenhausen .
The Bad Gandersheim concentration camp had the highest number of forced laborers with 584 in November 1944. On average, between 520 and 550 prisoners from 14 nations worked in the plant and manufactured aircraft fuselages for the He 219 night fighter .
The prisoners' accommodation was extremely poor. They spent the first few months in the church of a Brunshausen monastery, which had been closed since 1803. This was neglected and not heatable. The low temperatures of the winter of 1944/1945 led to an extremely high level of sick leave, which hardly changed even after moving to a barracks camp in January 1945. In January 1945 five prisoners died and in February 1945 the camp commandant reported to the Buchenwald main camp that 65 of the 532 prisoners were unable to work due to illness. Exhaustion and tuberculosis resulted in 14 prisoners being sent back to Buchenwald. A total of 23 prisoners died in the camp between December 1944 and March 1945.
The work done by the forced laborers and paid for by Heinkel AG to Buchenwald was extremely high. From October 1944 to December it rose from 54,000 to 161,500 working hours per month, but then fell continuously until the camp was closed in April 1945.
On April 2, 1945, Gauleiter Hartmann Lauterbacher gave the camp commandant the order to dissolve the concentration camp. In a three-week evacuation march, the prisoners were taken to the Dachau concentration camp . The prisoners arrived at their destination two days before the American troops liberated this camp . Although exact figures are not available, hardly more than 200 inmates of the Bad Gandersheim subcamp experienced the liberation of the camp in Dachau. In a report from November 26, 1945, the US Army documents only 180 survivors. The reason for this was, in addition to the extreme marching conditions, the Gauleiter's instructions to shoot prisoners who could not be transported. For example, 40 prisoners had already been shot in a nearby forest before the camp was cleared.
The French writer Robert Antelme describes his time as a prisoner in this camp in his book Das Menschengeschlecht .
Web links
Coordinates: 51 ° 52 ′ 57 ″ N , 10 ° 1 ′ 52 ″ E