Erzingen concentration camp

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The Erzingen concentration camp was a concentration camp operated in what is now the Erzingen district of Balingen . It was set up in 1944 as a satellite camp of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp for the extraction of oil from oil shale as part of the desert company and existed until 1945.

history

"Desert" Plant 4 and Erzingen Concentration Camp

The SS planned the establishment of an oil shale factory in the Gewann Bronnhaupten ( 48 ° 15 ′ 56 ″  N , 8 ° 48 ′ 49.1 ″  E ) northwest of Erzingen. Construction work should begin on March 1, 1944, and oil would be produced from November 1, 1944. The SS confiscated around 45 hectares of land northwest of the town for the construction. Initially, Soviet prisoners of war were used as labor. The SS had a smaller camp built for them on the “Hungerberg” ( 48 ° 15 ′ 32 ″  N , 8 ° 48 ′ 15.2 ″  E ) for about 100 to 300 prisoners, which the population called the “Russian camp”. It was located above the Balingen – Rottweil railway line and today's Bundesstraße 27 . It was set up as the fourth of a total of seven desert camps.

On May 2, 1944, the Deutsche Schieferöl GmbH , based in Erzingen, was founded by Oswald Pohl . Pohl was head of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (SS-WVHA, Office Group W), the Deutsche Schieferöl was a subsidiary of the SS group Deutsche Wirtschaftsbetriebe GmbH . Pohl commissioned the head of the DESt granite department in Office W1 with the implementation. It should take over all ten oil shale extraction plants after the start of operations, at the latest by mid-May 1945. On May 22, 1944, the Erzingen satellite camp with 200 prisoners was opened opposite the train station. The first prisoners came to the newly built camp in the weeks before.

The German shale oil began in May 1944 with the establishment of the oil shale plant Bronnhaupten, for whose construction the SS prisoners of the concentration camp outside the camp Erzingen made available. The top construction management had the DBHG , which, with the support of construction companies and under the direction of the Organization Todt (OT), was responsible, among other things, for the construction work, the construction of the piles and the dismantling of the oil shale. The construction management for the Bronnhaupten construction project was the responsibility of the Waffen SS and police. Ten planned plants should be completed within three months. The prisoners' deployment envisaged the construction of the oil shale works 4 and 5, work on other desert construction sites that they reached by train, or the construction of the field railway that was to connect the mining field and condensation in Erzingen. Inmates had to mine slate, were used in the construction of the tunnel and built an air raid shelter for the Erzingen community . They were also used in agriculture and for unloading railway wagons.

The "Deutsche Schieferöl GmbH" and the Erzingen concentration camp belonged only indirectly to the "Desert" company. On August 3, 1944, the “Bronnhaupten oil slate works” in Erzingen-Nord was incorporated into the “Desert” company as “Plant 4”. Prisoners of the Erzingen concentration camp were responsible for the filling of the Erzingen Meiler, which was almost 100 meters in length. It ignited in mid-March 1945. The oil was extracted through a perforated pipe that was inserted into the bottom of the pile and had no holes on the lower side. This is where the oil collected, but it could only flow after the carbonization gas had been sucked off. In March 1945, Pohl informed Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler that oil was being produced in Plant 4 in Erzingen. Contemporary witnesses report that oil was actually produced. It had run out of the kiln in the direction of the train station. The kiln smoldered for over a year and gave off a bad smell. The concentration camp survivor Charles Hausemer talked about his work at the time and the unbearable conditions - the Lias oil shale was mined by hand by the concentration camp prisoners in the open pit with a shovel and bucket. Helge Norseth , also a former concentration camp inmate, explained the pointlessness of this project - the quantities obtained were extremely small and the oil was of very poor quality.

Dissolution of the "desert" camps: deportation, closure and death march

On April 12 and 14, 1945 , around 800 incapacitated concentration camp inmates from the “desert” camps were deported by rail to the Dachau concentration camp and forwarded to the Allach subcamp . Some of the inmates of the Erzingen concentration camp were deported on April 14, 1945; the transport arrived there on April 17, 1945.

On April 15 or 16, 1945, Heinrich Himmler issued a general order to "evacuate" the concentration camps that were still in existence. In the period from April 16 to 20, 1945, the 2,000 to 3,000 remaining prisoners in the “desert” camps were sent in the direction of Upper Swabia and Upper Bavaria with the long-term destination Garmisch-Partenkirchen on the so-called “ death marches ”. The remaining inmates from Erzingen were united with inmates from the Schömberg, Dautmergen and Frommern subcamps at the assembly point in the Schömberg train station concentration camp and put together in a large death march of around 4,000 inmates.

On April 12 and 17, 1945, a total of 159 prisoners were transferred in two transports to the Dachau concentration camp . The Erzingen concentration camp was finally closed on April 17, 1945.

The plants of the "Desert" company for shale oil production were continued under the French occupation forces from April 1945, before production was discontinued because of the unsuccessfulness, last in Frommern at the end of 1949.

There are no more traces of the Erzingen concentration camp to be found.

Occupancy

The Erzingen camp was a so-called “night and fog camp”, or NN camp for short, ie mainly male NN prisoners - French, Belgians, Dutch and Norwegians - were imprisoned. "NN" stands for " Night and Fog Decree ", an order issued on December 7, 1941 by the High Command of the Wehrmacht , also known as the "Keitel Decree", which provided for the disappearance of captured members of resistance groups. Nothing should be known about the fact of the arrest and the whereabouts of the arrested person. This uncertainty should cause the family members as well as the detainees maximum psychological agony. Therefore, these so-called NN prisoners were generally forbidden to write and were segregated. The prisoners came from the Natzweiler-Struthof main camp . The maximum occupancy for the Erzingen external workstation was set to 350. An occupancy that must be regarded as extremely inhumane, because in an attachment to the protective custody camp report of September 30, 1944 at 7:00 a.m., 100% occupancy was stated with 200 inmates. For October 31, 1944, the number of inmates is stated to be 199; the fluctuation was very high in accordance with the purpose of the camp. New prisoners were constantly being added to the camp.

Number of victims

The exact number of victims in the Erzingen satellite camp is not known. Overall, the National Socialists' oil shale project cost over 3,480 lives. This is the official number that the documented exhumations of the dead prisoners from the mass graves near Bisingen, Schömberg and Schörzingen showed at the instigation of the French military government after the end of the war. Former National Socialists had to do the work. The many exhumed dead were reburied in the three concentration camp cemeteries Bisingen, Schömberg and Schörzingen. It shows what a crazy and pointless undertaking the oil shale project was. However, the number of victims must be set much higher. The SS had the first victims cremated in the crematoria in Reutlingen , Schwenningen and Tuttlingen . Many sick and weak prisoners were transported to so-called "sick camps " such as Bergen-Belsen and Vaihingen / Enz , where they were sentenced to die. In addition, there is an unknown number of deaths who died of exhaustion on the "death marches" after the concentration camps were dissolved or who were shot by the SS.

Camp management and attacks

Camp commandant of the Erzingen camp was initially SS-Oberscharführer Paul Olesch , he was replaced by SS-Oberscharführer Adolf Haas . Haas is said to have treated the inmates in a “comparatively humane” manner. He made contact with the villagers and achieved a considerable improvement in the catering situation. Things were sometimes "human" between the guards and the prisoners, for example an SS man put a radio in the window after the Allied landing in Normandy so that the prisoners could hear the Wehrmacht report every day at eight o'clock .

The “camaraderie” and “human” reported by some sites, however, had its limits. In the Rastatt trial, for example, the deputy commander of SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Friedrich Rieflin from Lahr was referred to as a “torturer” who spread “fear and horror”, as did Paul Olesch, who terrorized camp inmates with kicks and cane blows. The two SS guards Anton Geisel and Siceron Kellinger are also said to have repeatedly hit prisoners with rifle butts.

literature

Remarks

  1. ^ According to other information on May 5, 1944
  2. ↑ According to other information between April 16 and 18
  3. ↑ For example in Schönhager Loch near Schömberg
  4. ↑ In Schwenningen, the urns are in a collective grave and in 117 individual graves in the cemetery, which are reminiscent of memorial stones.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Michael Grandt: Company "Desert". The Nazi oil shale program on the Swabian Alb, Tübingen 2002.
  2. ↑ Oil shale after 1945 ( Memento of the original from May 18, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The 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.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.planet-schule.de