Barth concentration camp

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The concentration camp or subcamp Barth (November 1943 - April / May 1945) was a subcamp of the Ravensbrück concentration camp and was located near the town of Barth (today the district of Vorpommern-Rügen ). The concentration camp was created in order for the Heinkel aircraft plants much needed and cheap labor available to provide. A total of around 7,000 concentration camp prisoners in the Barth camp were guarded by the SS with armed force and forced to work. The head of the security team was also part of it ( nothing is known about legal prosecution of the perpetrators after the Second World War ).

prehistory

The city of Barth received an economic boom during the Nazi era through the establishment of industrial companies and an air base. Growing income made the population rise. Numerous armaments companies such as the Pomeranian iron foundry, the Ernst-Bachmann-Flugzeugwerke , the Ernst-Heinkel-Flugzeugwerke and the Pommerschen Industrie-Werke settled here. On July 10, 1936, Barth Airport was opened on the southern outskirts of the city .

camp

In order to meet the labor shortage in the ongoing war and to be able to produce at low cost, concentration camp prisoners were used as forced laborers . This is how the management wanted to meet the growing production pressure. The Heinkelwerke set up arms factories at Barth Air Base. In 1943, six barracks were separated from the existing barracks, fenced in and accommodations were created for concentration camp prisoners. In a 15-square-meter room, 20 prisoners were accommodated, who had to sleep there on three-story bunk beds. All prisoners were given a cotton blanket, a straw mattress and a small pillow.

The first 200 prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp arrived in November 1943, followed by another 300 from Dachau on November 9, 1943 . In the course of 1944 they were supplemented by around 2,700 forced laborers from the Ravensbrück, Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. Between January and the end of April, the last 770 prisoners from the Pölitz , Karlshagen subcamps and the Born SS dairy reached the subcamp.

Men and women from more than 20 nations worked twelve hours a day in a fortnightly changing two-shift service. A large number of those persecuted as Jews, Sinti and Roma as well as homosexuals were interned in the camp.

The prisoners' meals were extremely poor. It usually consisted of a liter of thin potato , turnip or cabbage soup . In addition, there was substitute coffee and a ration of 100 grams of substitute bread , a small amount of jam, margarine, cheese or sausage. The rations were not enough to fill themselves, so the inmates suffered from starvation every day. If prisoners were absent due to weakness or illness, they were sent back to the Ravensbrück concentration camp and replaced by other prisoners.

The detainees' clothes were inadequate. It consisted only of a blue and white prisoner suit, which offered little protection from the cold, and wooden clogs.

Many prisoners developed tuberculosis . A large number of the weakened succumbed to the rigors of camp life, starved to death or were shot.

The numbers of sick people and the number of deaths on site have not been passed down to this point. In a report on the memorial in the Ostsee-Zeitung on May 8, 2006, it says: Thousands of forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners lost their lives for the He 162 a few weeks before the end of the war.

From the summer of 1944 until the camp was closed, the camp manager was SS Obersturmführer Paul Josef Heussler .

Death marches

Memorial plaque at the Ribnitz town hall

After the SS had shot the sick prisoners beforehand, they sent the survivors on a death march towards Rostock on April 30, 1945 . The male prisoners left the camp in three columns, avoiding major roads.

A first group of female prisoners left the camp a little later. When around 800 female prisoners remained in the camp and their SS guards fled, they were able to escape to the neighboring town. They were picked up there by armed Hitler Youth . The intended shooting was prevented by the population of Ribnitz . The second column of women was released during the march.

memorial

In 1955 a memorial was erected to commemorate the dead of the concentration camp, with numerous dead from the camp grounds being reburied here. On May 8, 1966, a new memorial was erected with a monument by Joachim Jastram , which includes eight stone tombstones, a tower and a concrete wall on a terrace. The dead were reburied again and buried together with dead from the surrounding mass graves Galgenberg and Rövershagen .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ M. Albrecht: Reports in the Ostsee-Zeitung from May 16 and 23, 2006 , printed by the memorial association
  2. ↑ Heussler Paul Josef. Retrieved February 9, 2018 .


Coordinates: 54 ° 20 ′ 57 ″  N , 12 ° 43 ′ 11 ″  E