Bredow concentration camp

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The Bredow concentration camp , also known as the Vulkanwerft concentration camp , was located in Bredow (today: Drzetowo), a district of Szczecin . It was erected on October 20, 1933 on the demolition site of the AG Vulcan Stettin, which was closed down in 1928, on the banks of the Oder , at the instigation of SS-Oberführer Fritz Karl Engel, who had recently been appointed police president . The camp commandant was Joachim Hoffmann , who has a doctorate in law and SS-Sturmbannführer , field service manager of the regional Gestapo office .

history

The Bredow concentration camp was the latest of the early or “wild” concentration camps in the whole of Germany, which were established in the course of 1933, immediately after the National Socialist seizure of power . It was a very small camp with up to 40 inmates, but it was characterized by the extraordinary brutality that the SS guards used against the inmates. Individual abused prisoners had contacts with people who had an influence on Nazi leaders. For example, the former Field Marshal August von Mackensen wrote a letter to Göring , whereupon charges were brought against Hoffmann, Gustav Fink , Fritz Pleines and three other SS guards at the Stettin Regional Court with the support of Göring and the Gestapo . All of the accused were convicted “because they had tortured their victims to the extreme in an inhuman way out of sheer sadism”, even after the need to secure the people and the state had ceased to exist. On March 11, 1934, the Prussian Ministry of State closed the camp . On June 30, 1934, Hoffmann, Fink and Pleines were shot in the course of the Röhm affair .

literature

  • Andrea Rudorff: Systematic abuse and blackmail. The “Vulkanwerft” concentration camp in Stettin-Bredow, in: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (eds.): Instrumentarium der Macht, pp. 35–69.

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