Fürstengrube concentration camp

The Fürstengrube concentration camp , also known as the Ostland camp, was one of the larger satellite camps of Auschwitz . It was located in Fürstengrube (Polish Wesoła ), 5 km southwest of Myslowitz in Upper Silesia , of which Wesoła is a district today.

It was built in September 1943 as a labor camp for the Fürstengrube hard coal mine . SS-Hauptscharführer Otto Moll took over the management of the camp from September 1943 to March 1944 and then, until the evacuation of the camp on January 19, 1945, Max Schmidt .

On January 19, 1945, the concentration camp was evacuated because of the approaching Red Army . Under SS-Oberscharführer Max Schmidt, the 1,283 prisoners were sent on a death march , which began with a shooting action in Fürstengrube and initially led to Ahrensbök in Schleswig-Holstein , the hometown of the camp manager. The 400 surviving prisoners were brought to Cap Arcona , which was sunk by Allied aircraft on May 3, 1945 in the Bay of Lübeck .

A well-known camp inmate was the musician Gideon Klein . In his memoir, the author Sam Pivnik gives a detailed insight into everyday life in the Fürstengrube concentration camp, the death march and the sinking of the Cap Arcona .

Web links

• Jörg Wollenberg : Homeland from Ostholstein. From Ahrensbök to Auschwitz - from Auschwitz to Ahrensbök: The memorials of a small North German town. In: Friday . January 25, 2002 . 
• Stanislawa Iwaszko: Auschwitz / Fürstengrube. In: Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume 1. Ed. From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , 2009 (English). 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Directory of the concentration camps and their external commands in accordance with Section 42 (2) BEG No. 433, Fürstengrube = Kopalnia Fürsten, community of Wesola / Silesia, September 2, 1943 to January 29, 1945.
2. ↑ Sam Pivnik's website, accessed February 27, 2013.

Coordinates: 50 ° 11 ′ 30 ″  N , 19 ° 5 ′ 50 ″  E