Colditz concentration camp

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The Colditz concentration camp was an early concentration camp of the Nazi regime in the Free State of Saxony . It was set up at Colditz Castle on March 21, 1933, placed under the Sachsenburg concentration camp as a branch on May 31, 1934 , and declared dissolved on August 18, 1934.

From 1944 there was a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Colditz , which was also called Colditz concentration camp and was run by HASAG .

history

The complex of buildings of the concentration camp comprised two four-story buildings, the Princely House and House I, a church and several outbuildings in which prisoners were housed everywhere . In addition to them, 78 inmates of the workhouse, which had existed since 1803, lived on this site. Each floor in the respective building was more or less a concentration camp in itself, because “the camp management blocked each precinct from the other. So there were four precincts in the Princely House , four in House I and the ninth the church hall . ”At first the police guarded the prisoners; however, she was replaced by the SA and SS after two weeks . Joseph Knöpke conducted the interrogations of the prisoners and was probably also the concentration camp commandant . Police Commissioner Wagner was appointed as the administrator, and two sergeants and a hundred SA men from SA Standard 139 as well as some notorious SS thugs, including several convicts, ruled over the prisoners.

The first prisoners were admitted on March 21, 1933. In mid-April the ledger recorded 305 prisoners, at the beginning of August it had already around 700 prisoners. The general ledger contains a total of 2311 entries. These were mostly communists and social democrats. At the end of 1933, however, at least 20 Jehovah's Witnesses were also imprisoned. Some members of the NSDAP, who had criticized the extravagance of Gauleiter Mutschmann and other abuses within the party, were among the prisoners.

The prisoners were housed in the workhouse and slept on straw beds with two blankets. There were no tables or benches. The urgency had to be done in buckets, two prisoners each had a towel. Former inmate Bruno Siegel reports that the medieval lavatory was also used to humiliate and abuse prisoners who had to empty the manure holes in groups of five. Twice a month, the prisoners in Colditz could spend ten minutes with their relatives, but only in the presence of guards. After taking their personal data, newcomers were chased up the spiral staircase in the front castle, with a beater beating the prisoners with a rubber stick on each step. Often the rolling command picked out prisoners who were then beaten half to death in the large basement rooms of the palace complex and whose cries of pain could be heard from afar. Some prisoners were also used to build roads at the stoneware factory in Colditz, to set up the district leadership of the NSDAP and to do office work there. After several suicide attempts by inmates, the camp administration ordered that the lights should not be turned off even at night so that the rooms could be checked at any time.

By order of the Ministry of the Interior , the Colditz concentration camp was to be dissolved in mid-January 1934, but it was not until May 31, 1934 that it ended as an independent camp. A work detail should remain on site. Colditz, at the time occupied with 66 prisoners, now became a satellite camp of the Sachsenburg concentration camp . How long Colditz was still used as a concentration camp has not been definitively established. The ledger records entry and exit dates up to and including August 15, 1934. It remains to be seen whether prisoners were still imprisoned in Colditz after that.

In November 1949, the Chemnitz Regional Court sentenced eight former security guards to prison and prison terms of several years for crimes against humanity against former inmates of the Colditz concentration camp.

Known prisoners

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Carina Baganz: Education for the "Volksgemeinschaft ?. The early concentration camps in Saxony 1933-34 / 37 , 2005, p. 117
  2. ↑ Council of the City of Colditz (ed.), 700 Years City of Colditz, Colditz 1965, p. 129 ff.
  3. ^ Klaus Drobisch , Günther Wieland : System of the Nazi concentration camps. 1933-1945 . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-05-000823-7 , p. 109, ( online ), accessed on August 2, 2018.

Coordinates: 51 ° 7 ′ 50.8 "  N , 12 ° 48 ′ 26.9"  E