Breslau-Dürrgoy concentration camp

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The Breslau-Dürrgoy concentration camp existed as an early concentration camp between April and August 1933 in the Breslau district of Dürrgoy (Polish: Tarnogaj). The concentration camp, which was guarded by SA members, was mostly made up of political prisoners.

history

After the transfer of power to the National Socialists in Breslau in March and April 1933, political opponents of the National Socialists were taken into “ protective custody ” in several waves of arrests and housed in the soon overcrowded police headquarters. On April 28, after another wave of arrests, the concentration camp was set up in the warehouse of a fertilizer factory on Strehlener Chaussee (Polish: ulica Bardzka). Prisoners of war had already been held there during the First World War .

The Breslau police chief Edmund Heines (1897–1934) was largely responsible for the Dürrgoy concentration camp. Heines, involved in a fememicide in 1920 , later a member of the Reichstag of the NSDAP, led the SA group "Silesia" with the rank of SA-Obergruppenführer. The Dürrgoy concentration camp is also known as Heines' "private camp"; Heines' "personal thirst for revenge" apparently stood behind the imprisonment of the former Social Democratic Reichstag President Paul Löbe in Dürrgoy: The Parliament President had excluded Heines from the Reichstag in 1932 for assaults in the parliament building . After the National Socialist “seizure of power”, Löbe was initially in “protective custody” in Berlin before he was kidnapped in August 1933 by a Wroclaw SA command without the knowledge of the Berlin Gestapo . In his memoirs, Löbe reported on a “festive greeting” staged by the camp management in Dürrgoy, at which a shawm band made up of communist prisoners played and a prisoner had to present him with a “bouquet” of nettles and potatoes.

In order to demonstrate their own power and to deter or intimidate the population, prominent prisoners were often humiliated by the SA and the police in a kind of “triumphal procession” through Breslau to the concentration camp. The following politicians from the SPD , KPD and the SAPD , which is strongly represented in Breslau, were among the other politicians imprisoned in Dürrgoy :

  • Heinrich Bretthorst (1883–1962) politician (SPD / SED).
  • Ernst Eckstein (1897–1933), chairman of the Central Silesia party district of the SAPD
  • Karl Elgas (1900–1985), member of the Reichstag (KPD)
  • Hermann Lüdemann (1880–1959), Upper President of Lower Silesia (SPD)
  • Karl Mache (1880–1944), Deputy Mayor of Breslau (SPD)
  • Paul Seibold (1871–1954), Prussian member of the state parliament (SPD)
  • Arthur Ullrich (1894–1969), member of the Reichstag (KPD)
  • Fritz Voigt (1882–1945), member of the National Assembly 1919 (SPD)
  • Berthold Weese (1879–1967), Prussian member of the state parliament (SPD)
  • Wilhelm Winzer (1878–1957), Member of the Prussian state parliament (SPD)

In his memoirs, Löbe described the conditions of detention in Dürrgoy:

“Eighty cot places stood in double rows one above the other in the barrack, one hundred and twenty prisoners lay on the stamped ground, including myself. My camp was about four meters from the buckets in which 200 trapped people met their needs. Thousands of flies brought a lot of traffic. The newly arrived prisoners washed themselves and ate from the same cans because there were no dishes for them. In the night uniformed criminals came, shoved individual prisoners awake with their boots and drove them out. They could be heard screaming and whimpering under blows in the 'medical barracks' until they were dragged out unconscious and put their heads into the rain barrel so that they would come to. "

To accommodate the prisoners, a corrugated iron barrack was initially used, and later a second . Another barrack, officially known as the "medical barrack", also served as a torture facility . A second place of torture was the "Brown House" located outside the camp on Neudorfer Straße (Polish: ulica Komandorska), called the facility for "special interrogation" (e.g. V.), in which police auxiliary commissioners took prisoners "in all forms, mentally and physically" tortured. "Fire alarms" took place at night, during which the inmates had to drill for hours. The beating of the inmates with rubber truncheons and riding crops, officially called a physical "educational measure", was commonplace.

The guards, who had their own barracks, consisted mainly of young SA members and a few auxiliary police officers. The first camp commandant was SA-Sturmbannführer Heinze; he was replaced by SA Standartenführer Rohde after complaints about prisoner abuse and an attempt at blackmail . The area of ​​the concentration camp was fenced in with barbed wire and surrounded by a high-voltage line; the policemen and auxiliary policemen used to guard were armed with submachine guns.

The inmates had to work nine to twelve hours a day. Working hours and breaks were handled arbitrarily; the transition from work to torture was fluid. Initially, the prisoners were used to further expand the camp; Later work - also outside the camp - was the desludging of a pond that was to be converted into an outdoor swimming pool, as well as construction work on buildings for the police and SA in Wroclaw.

The number of prisoners rose with strong fluctuation from initially 200 to 423 when the camp was closed on August 10, 1933. On this day 343 prisoners were transferred to the Emsland camps; the other prisoners were taken to the Breslau police headquarters and mostly released from there.

Today there are no remains of the concentration camp; The Wzgórze Gajowe rubble pile that was piled up after the end of the Second World War is located on the site .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Rudorff, Breslau-Dürrgoy , p. 85.
  2. ^ Memories of Löbe from 1949, quoted in Schumacher, M. d. R. , p. 370.
  3. ^ Kurt Pätzold : Prisoner Society. In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel : The Place of Terror. History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. (Volume 1: Early camps, Dachau Emslandlager. ) CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52961-5 , pp. 110–125, here p. 115.
  4. ↑ Martin Schumacher (Ed.): M. d. R. The members of the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation 1933–1945. Droste, Düsseldorf 1991, ISBN 3-7700-5162-9 , p. 194.
  5. ↑ Schumacher, M. d. R. , p. 370.
  6. ↑ Schumacher, M. d. R. , p. 381.
  7. ^ Biography of Paul Seibold . In: Wilhelm H. Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1876–1933 (BIOSOP)
  8. ↑ Schumacher, M. d. R. , p. 596.
  9. ↑ Schumacher, M. d. R. , p. 605.
  10. ↑ Biography of Berthold Weese . In: Wilhelm H. Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1876–1933 (BIOSOP)
  11. ^ Biography of Wilhelm Winzer . In: Wilhelm H. Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1876–1933 (BIOSOP)
  12. ↑ Paul Löbe: The way was long. Life memories. arani-Verlag, Berlin 1954, p. 226; quoted by Christoph Hamann: The photo and its viewer. ( Memento of the original from September 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lmz-bw.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
  13. ↑ a b Rudorff, Breslau-Dürrgoy , p. 86.

Coordinates: 51 ° 4 ′ 23 ″  N , 17 ° 3 ′ 3 ″  E