Kislau concentration camp

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The Kislau concentration camp was a concentration camp in National Socialist Germany .

Kislau Castle, view of the interior

The camp was located in the Kislau hunting and pleasure palace near Mingolsheim (Baden) and existed from April 21, 1933 to April 1, 1939. The concentration camp remained under the Baden Ministry of the Interior for the entire duration of its existence and, unlike most of the others, was subordinated to it early concentration camps were not dissolved or placed under the inspection of the concentration camps in the early 1930s .

There was a penal institution in Kislau Castle itself from 1819. Until 1854 the castle served as a branch of the Rastatt fortress as a state prison for Baden, then as a police custody facility for women. From the 1880s, a workhouse for men was also housed on the site, which existed parallel to the concentration camp during the entire period of National Socialism until 1945. During the First World War , Kislau was initially a military hospital and later a prisoner of war camp . From 1930 to the end of 1933 the castle also had a branch office for “mentally weak women” of the Wiesloch sanatorium .

history

time of the nationalsocialism

Kislau Castle

On April 21, 1933, the Baden State Ministry announced the opening of the concentration camp. The occasion was the Nussbaum affair , which served as a pretext for the arrest of communists , social democrats and members of the center . The victims of the wave of persecution, euphemistically referred to as “ protective prisoners ”, were housed in an outbuilding of Kislau Castle, while the occupants of the workhouse (around 200 men on average) stayed in the actual castle building. The director of the workhouse - Theodor Zahn - took over the management of the concentration camp on a temporary basis. To distinguish between affiliations, the men in the workhouse wore light-colored clothes, the concentration camp inmates dark blue. However, the labor services were often carried out jointly by members of both groups. A total capacity of 70 men was planned for the concentration camp, but this was clearly exceeded at the end of the 1930s. From May to June 1933 another 65 prisoners were admitted, all of them counted among the "political", i. In other words, like the first group, it was also unpopular opposition members . The concentration camp had its highest occupancy level in 1937/1938 with 173 prisoners.

Inmates' day started at 6 a.m. With ten-hour working days, the camp inmates were employed in agriculture, kitchen work or renovations on the castle building. The work was interrupted by a one-hour lunch break, otherwise the prisoners were only allowed 1.5 hours of so-called "free time". Bed rest was ordered at 8 p.m.
Notwithstanding the hard labor and the adverse conditions of detention, which were less inhuman than in other concentration camps, the Nazi propaganda cynically portrayed Kislau as a "model concentration camp".

In Kislau, as in the Ankenbuck concentration camp , so-called auxiliary policemen from the SA , SS and Stahlhelm-Bund initially provided the guards. However, in contrast to most of the early camps, the concentration camp remained under the state administration throughout. From June 7, 1933, the camp manager was the retired police captain and colonial officer Franz Konstantin Mohr . His relationship with the auxiliary police station, which consisted of only four men in April 1933 and increased from 15 to 24 men at the end of October 1933, had been tense. The former colonial officer despised SA members as a mob. These in turn felt that they were being taken advantage of, among other things because of the poor pay.

One death of a prisoner has so far been documented in Kislau: on the night of March 28-29, 1934, in the absence of camp manager Mohr, the Jewish social democrat Ludwig Marum was strangled by three SS and SA men and hung up on the cross window of his cell by one Fake suicide. Gauleiter Robert Wagner had given the murder order .

Since the dissolution of the Ankenbuck concentration camp in the spring of 1934, Kislau functioned as the only concentration camp in all of Baden. In addition, since the end of 1934, Kislau was also used as an interim camp for returning German Foreign Legionnaires , ostensibly due to health risks, but in fact they were considered politically unreliable and should be “trained” in the interests of the new rulers during a usually 12-week imprisonment. Although word of the treatment got around among the returnees, around 1,800 former legionnaires passed through what has been known as the “preservation camp” since 1936 until the outbreak of World War II . At the beginning of 1939 the concentration camp was finally dissolved and the remaining prisoners were deported to Dachau . Around 700 "protective prisoners" in Kislau had feared for their lives up to the dissolution. From April 1, 1939, Kislau served as a prison, later mainly as an alternative solution to cope with capacity bottlenecks in the war-damaged prisons in Mannheim and Saarbrücken . On February 15, 1940, two representatives from Himmler inspected the area to check whether a concentration camp could be set up again. However, the plans did not materialize. A wide variety of groups were found in the prison - for example the so-called “ Red Spaniards ”, Poles and “ those who refused to work ”. Since the end of 1942, French and Belgians who had been convicted of theft or similar offenses were also brought in.

"Protective prisoners" of the Kislau concentration camp (selection)

  • Fritz Apelt (1893–1972), German KPD, later SED politician, deputy minister for culture in the GDR, trade union functionary and editor-in-chief of the trade union newspaper Tribüne, imprisoned in Kislau until May 1934
  • Max Bock (1881–1946), German KPD politician and trade unionist, member of the state parliament of the Republic of Baden, later Minister of Labor of Württemberg-Baden, imprisoned in Kislau for a few months from March 1933
  • Willy Boepple (1911–1992), hotel manager, communist and socialist politician, imprisoned in Kislau from November to December 1933
  • Walter Chemnitz (1901–1947), German KPD politician, member of the Reichstag, imprisoned in Kislau in April 1933
  • Fritz Eiche (1902–1967), German KPD politician
  • Max Faulhaber (1904–1996), German KPD politician and trade union functionary, arrested on March 30, 1933, he managed to escape while on leave
  • Gustav Heller (1900–1977), German SPD politician and resistance fighter, imprisoned on March 16, 1933 for nine months in Kislau
  • Kurt Heiss (1909-1976), German party functionary (KPD, later SED) and journalist, later chairman of the State Broadcasting Committee of the GDR, imprisoned in Kislau from April to October 1933, fled the Kislau concentration camp in October 1933 with Robert Klausmann
  • Eugen Herbst (1903–1934), German KPD politician, member of the Reichstag, imprisoned in Kislau from July 30 to December 19, 1933
  • Stefan Heymann (1896–1967), German KPD and later SED politician, editor and university professor
  • Robert Klausmann (1896–1972), German KPD politician, fled the Kislau concentration camp together with Kurt Heiss in October 1933 and later led the KPD resistance from Alsace
  • Georg Lechleiter (1885–1942), chairman of the communist parliamentary group in the state parliament of the Republic of Baden and head of a resistance group, imprisoned in Kislau from 1933 to 1935
  • Hanns Maaßen (1908–1983), German journalist, writer and communist, imprisoned in Kislau from 1933 to 1934
  • Ludwig Marum (1882–1934), German lawyer and SPD politician, imprisoned with Adam Remmele on May 16, 1933, murdered in Kislau concentration camp on March 29, 1934
  • Otto Reize (1886–1939), police sergeant, member of the SPD, chairman of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold Durlach, in April 1933 one of the first prisoners in Kislau
  • Adam Remmele (1877–1951), German SPD politician, including interior minister and state president in the state of Baden, imprisoned on May 16, 1933 together with Ludwig Marum
  • Adolf Rosenberger (1900–1967), German-American racing driver and businessman, imprisoned for four days in Kislau on September 23, 1935 for alleged "racial disgrace"
  • Paul Schreck (1892–1948), German KPD politician, imprisoned in Kislau from 1933 to 1935
  • Christian Stock (1884–1967), German SPD politician, later the first elected Prime Minister of Hesse, imprisoned in Kislau from 1933 to 1934
  • Jakob Treffeisen (1894–1962), German KPD politician, later member of the Advisory State Assembly of the State of Baden, imprisoned in the Ankenbuck concentration camp from March to November 1933
  • Oskar Trinks (1873–1952), German SPD politician, imprisoned in Kislau from 1933 to 1934

For more prisoners see: Prisoners in Kislau Castle

After 1945: JVA Kislau

Kislau Castle near Bad Schönborn, today a prison

On April 2, 1945 the prison was occupied by French soldiers and dissolved on May 18. The tradition of the prison continued, however: Kislau was a branch of the Bruchsal State Penitentiary until 1970 , and it belonged to the Karlsruhe JVA until 1991 . Since then, the former concentration camp and prison has been subordinate to the Bruchsal JVA again . Since 1985, the Marum stele erected by the Social Democratic Party , a memorial stone in the courtyard made by the sculptor Gerhard Karl Huber , has been a reminder of the actual concentration camp and the Nazi terror .

Project Lernort Kislau

On the site of the former Kislau concentration camp, the non-profit association Lernort Civil Courage & Resistance, founded in 2012, would like to build a contemporary, extracurricular learning location as part of the Kislau Learning Location project , where the teaching of Baden's democratic and dictatorship history from 1918 to 1945 is linked with a future-oriented dialogue of values . The founding initiative came largely from the North Baden Working Group on Against Forgetting - For Democracy e. V. The more than 30 founding members of the association include Harald Biederbick (today Chairman of the RKW Group ), Harald Denecken (former First Mayor of Karlsruhe), Catherine Devaux (District Spokeswoman for Amnesty International Karlsruhe), Andrea Hoffend , Manfred Kern , Frank Mentrup , Alexander Salomon , Johannes Stober , Hans Werner von Wedemeyer (businessman, brother of Maria von Wedemeyer ), Brigitte Wimmer , the Forum Ludwig Marum e. V., the Karlsruhe City Media Center and the Civil Courage Foundation.

In addition to the history of the Kislau concentration camp, it will be possible to discuss in Kislau as a place of learning why anti-democratic tendencies must be countered at an early stage. In addition to the learning location at the historical location, the project team is developing the multimedia history portal Baden 1918 to 1945, which provides young people with information on Baden's regional history from 1918 to 1945, on Nazi opponents and resistance fighters in and from Baden, on their organizations, the locations of theirs Acting as well as for striking events in Baden and in the Reich. In animated picture stories, the so-called motion comics, of around four minutes in length, regional events from the years 1918 to 1945 are presented from the historically documented or fictional first-person perspective of protagonists of the Baden resistance. The motion comics published to date can be found on the history portal and the project's YouTube channel.

Between 2015 and 2017, the association received start-up funding totaling 600,000 euros from the state of Baden-Württemberg for the Kislau project . Subsequently - in 2018 - the project was included in the state's institutional funding. Since then, the project has been financially supported with annual state funds of 140,000 euros. In addition, the city ​​of Karlsruhe , the district of Karlsruhe and the Rhein-Neckar district add a total of 60,000 euros annually.

Since the spring of 2015, a full-time project team under the scientific direction of Andrea Hoffend has been preparing the learning location in terms of content, methodology, organization and advertising. A Scientific Advisory Board was set up in September 2017. The members of the expert group headed by Frank Engehausen, Professor of Modern History at Heidelberg University, include Rolf-Ulrich Kunze , Bettina Limperg , Thomas Lutz , Sybille Steinbacher and Wolfgang Zimmermann .

literature

  • Angela Borgstedt : Kislau in northern Baden: concentration camp, workhouse and transit camp for Foreign Legionnaires . In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (ed.): Dominion and violence. Early concentration camps 1933–1939 . Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-932482-82-4 , pp. 217-229.
  • Angela Borgstedt: Kislau. In: Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror. History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Vol. 2: Early Camp. Dachau. Emsland camp. Munich ²2014 (first edition 2005), ISBN 978-3-406-52962-7 , pp. 134-136.
  • Angela Borgstedt: Kislau. In: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (ed.): Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945. Vol. 1, Part A: Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration Camps and Subcamps under the SS Business Administration Main Office [WVHA]. Bloomington 2009, ISBN 978-0-253-35328-3 , pp. 100-102.
  • Max Faulhaber : We never gave up ... memories from a life in the labor movement. Marburg 1988, ISBN 3-921630-76-2 .
  • Laura Hankeln: Interned in Kislau. Exclusion and persecution of beggars and vagabonds in the North Baden workhouse (1930–1938) . In: Journal for the History of the Upper Rhine, Vol. 167, 2019, pp. 337–389.
  • Julia Hörath: The state workhouse and the Kislau concentration camp (Baden). In: “Asocial” and “Professional Criminals” in the Concentration Camps 1933 to 1938 [Critical Studies in History, Vol. 222]. Göttingen 2017, ISBN 978-3-525-37042-1 , pp. 228–242.
  • Andrea Hoffend : More than just a victim and perpetrator story. An interjection to the importance of resistance and exile of the labor movement in democratic educational work. In: Gerd-Bodo von Carlsburg et al. (Ed.): "If I hadn't looked the other way !" Civil courage then and now. Augsburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-9566003-5-7 , pp. 61-67.
  • Andrea Hoffend: A place to learn about democracy on the site of an early concentration camp? The project Lernort Kislau. In: State Center for Civic Education Baden-Württemberg (ed. In): Split memory? Dictatorship and democracy at memorial sites and museums in Baden-Württemberg. Stuttgart 2019, ISBN 978-3-945414-57-6 , pp. 55-59. Available online at https://www.lpb-bw.de/fileadmin/-lpb_hauptportal/pdf/publikationen/doku_gespaltene_erinnerung_2018.pdf
  • Andrea Hoffend and Andreas Schulz: History work in the service of preserving democracy? The project Lernort Kislau. In: Memorials Circular No. 186 (June 2017), pp. 12–22. Available online at https://www.gedenkstaettenforum.de/uploads/media/GedRund18612-22.pdf
  • Luisa Lehnen: The Kislau Concentration and Preservation Camp (1933–1939). A workshop report . In: Journal for the History of the Upper Rhine, vol. 167. 2019, pp. 299–336.
  • Elisabeth Marum-Lunau, Jörg Schadt (ed.): Ludwig Marum. Letters from the Kislau concentration camp . Karlsruhe 1988, ISBN 3-7880-9759-0 .
  • Julius Schätzle: Stations to Hell. Concentration camps in Baden and Württemberg 1933-1945 . Frankfurt / Main 1980, ISBN 3-87682-035-9 .
  • Ulrich Wiedmann: The Kislau trial. Ludwig Marum and his executioners. Neckarsteinach 2007, ISBN 978-3-937467-40-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Meinrad Schaab , Hansmartin Schwarzmaier (ed.) U. a .: Handbook of Baden-Württemberg History . Volume 4: Die Länder since 1918. Edited on behalf of the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-608-91468-4 , p. 166.
  2. ↑ Monika Pohl: Ludwig Marum - opponents of National Socialism. The fate of persecution of a social democrat of Jewish origin. Info Verlag, Karlsruhe 2013, ISBN 978-3-88190-724-8 .
  3. ↑ https://www.swr.de/swr2/leben-und-gesellschaft/otto-reize-karlsruhel,article-swr-11874.html
  4. ↑ Memorial sites for the victims of National Socialism. A documentation . Volume I. Bonn 1995, ISBN 3-89331-208-0 , p. 23.
  5. ^ Founding members: Lernort civil courage. April 12, 2013, accessed April 4, 2019 .
  6. ^ Founding meeting - a place of learning for civil courage. April 19, 2012, Retrieved April 4, 2019 .
  7. ^ History portal "Civil Courage & Resistance" - Verein Lernort Civil Courage & Resistance. December 18, 2018, accessed December 18, 2018 .
  8. ↑ Motion Comics on the Baden Resistance - Association of Learning Place of Civil Courage & Resistance. December 18, 2018, accessed December 18, 2018 .
  9. ↑ A place of learning for civil courage & resistance e. V. - project team . Andrea Hoffend: Historical learning for civil resistance. The Kislau concentration camp in Baden and the association “LernOrt Zivilcourage”. In: Messages from the Documentation Center Oberer Kuhberg Ulm e. V. - Concentration Camp Memorial , issue 59, November 2013, p. 10.
  10. ↑ Anti-Semitism report recommends learning location. December 18, 2018, accessed December 18, 2018 .
  11. ↑ Lernort Kislau with documentation center - Verein Lernort civil courage & resistance. April 4, 2019, accessed April 4, 2019 .
  12. ↑ About us - Verein Lernort civil courage & resistance. April 7, 2019, accessed April 7, 2019 .


Coordinates: 49 ° 12 '59 "  N , 8 ° 38' 41"  E