Kochendorf concentration camp
The Kochendorf concentration camp was a satellite camp of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp with the code name Eisbär . It was set up in September 1944 in the Kochendorf district of the Bad Friedrichshall community . The concentration camp was one of the so-called Neckar camps and occupied up to 1,800 concentration camp prisoners . At the end of March 1945, in front of the approaching Allied troops, the SS drove the camp inmates to the Dachau concentration camp on a death march . At least 447 prisoners were killed during the operation of the camp and on this death march.
history
Planning and construction
In August 1944, the built SS-WVHA imputed Inspectorate of Concentration Camps , a subcamp of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in bad friedrichshall district Kochendorf. Like others in south-west Germany, it was built up after the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp and its satellite camps were evacuated from the summer of 1944 as a result of the approaching front. The Kochendorfer camp was supposed to replace the Natzweiler external commandos in Thil- Longwy and Deutsch-Oth . The new location in Kochendorf was selected by the Jägerstab in the spring of 1944 after examining the possibilities of moving armaments production underground . The Bad Friedrichshall salt mine contained several empty roofs and, from the armaments inspection's point of view, seemed suitable to accommodate the production of the Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen plant Hirth-Motoren of Ernst Heinkel AG .
In order to establish a good transport connection, Hochtief AG began in May 1944 with the construction of a sloping tunnel to the future production halls at a depth of 180 meters, through which trains should enter the salt chambers of the Heilbronn salt works . The camp was built near the mouth of the tunnel. The whole project was given the code name polar bear . Elsewhere in the area, as part of the underground relocation of armaments factories, tunnels were built or new ones were built, and animal names were also used as camouflage names: the Neckargartach camp was called the ibex , the Neckarelz concentration camp with its Obrigheimer tunnels goldfish and bream .
Commissioning of the warehouse
In August 1944, a guards team made up of three SS subordinates and 27 guards arrived in Kochendorf to build the camp's structures, and they set up the guard barracks, shelters and accommodation. The prisoner barracks were built by the Todt Organization . On September 3, 1944, the first 653 prisoners came to the camp located around two kilometers south-east of the village, in the valley floor next to the Attichsbach, north of today's district hospital. SS-Oberscharführer Eugen Walter Büttner , previously in command of the external command in Longwy, commanded the Kochendorfer camp from September 1944.
The camp was still under construction when the first prisoners arrived, and construction continued in the weeks that followed. Most recently, in March 1945, it encompassed eleven prisoner barracks behind an electrically secured barbed wire fence, including a special barrack for Jewish prisoners and three or four transit barracks for prisoners who only stayed in Kochendorf for a short time until they were moved to other camps. Outside the fence there were nine more buildings for the administration and the security team: food storage, troop barracks, block driver's house, bathing and toilet facilities, etc.
At the beginning of October 1944 the camp was occupied by around 1,350 prisoners. The guards, part of the 6th Waffen SS guard company, initially consisted of around 140 people, of whom, however, around 60 were transferred to the camps under construction in Wasseralfingen and Haslach in mid-September, so that the number of crews was only 77 at the beginning of October 1944 People, 55 of whom were assigned as camp posts.
Initially, the inmates of the Kochendorfer camp were mainly deployed to Hochtief AG to expand the inclined tunnel and the track system. In September 1944, the Hochtief employed 400 prisoners, in October it had 660. From October 1944, additional prisoners were also employed by the United Underground and Shaft Expansion ( Veruschacht ) GmbH, which drove another tunnel under the nearby Lindenberg towards the salt chambers. The Todt organization operated an OT construction management in Kochendorf , based in Weinsberg , which was in charge of the construction management and also set up a field railway with prisoners that connected the two new shafts.
Underground, the prisoners were mainly busy leveling the salt chambers intended for production for the Heilbronn company Koch & Mayer GmbH and providing them with concrete floors. A total of around 40 salt chambers were planned, each with a base area of 180–200 × 10–15 meters and a height of 10 to 20 meters. The 220 prisoners assigned for this purpose had completed around a dozen of the underground halls by the end of the war.
Arms production
It is unclear exactly when the underground armaments production began in Kochendorf. When the first prisoners arrived at the beginning of September 1944, two of the underground halls had already been completed, but prisoners were initially only used for construction work, and only at the beginning of 1945 in the then already ongoing production. In addition to Heinkel AG, other companies also produced in the salt chambers, including the tool factories Eugen Weisser & Co. and Ferdinand C. Weipert from Heilbronn, the Drauz bodyworks , Kolbenschmidt AG from Neckarsulm, Mannheimer Motorenwerke AG and Siemens-Schuckertwerke .
The prisoners of the Kochendorf concentration camp also did forced labor outside the salt tunnels, for example for two months during clearing work after the bombing raids on Heilbronn , in agriculture and for the community of Bad Friedrichshall.
The operation of the camp and the underground armaments production continued until the end of March 1945 and were then given up because the front was drawing closer. At that time there were around 1,800 prisoners in Kochendorf.
Evacuation and death march
On March 28, 1945, around 400 prisoners unable to walk were deported in freight cars to the Dachau concentration camp . The remaining prisoners were sent on foot on a death march to Dachau, around 270 km away , on March 30th . On the way to Mainhardt-Hütten , 200 prisoners who were no longer able to walk were transported by trucks to Hessental, from where they reached Dachau during the Hessental death march via Ellwangen and Nördlingen, while the Kochendorfer prisoners walked to the Goldshöfe train station and then on with the The railway ran through Aalen and Ulm.
From the time the concentration camp was established to the end of the death march, at least 447 prisoners were killed, 213 of them on the death march. The prisoners who died in Kochendorf, after being reburied in various ways, are now buried in the Kochendorf concentration camp cemetery in Amorbach, located in the Plattenwald . It was enclosed with a wall in 1953. There are no longer any traces of the camp itself; a memorial was erected on the site of the camp in the 1990s. Remnants of the tunnels, however, are still visible. The manhole , which was filled in in 2003, is now in the middle of a playground in the residential area on the Lindenberg. In the salt mine Bad Friedrichshall an exhibition is set up to KZ Kochendorf.
literature
- Klaus Riexinger, Detlef Ernst: Destruction through work - armaments in the mine. The history of the Kochendorf concentration camp - external command of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. Silberburg-Verlag , Tübingen 2003, ISBN 3-87407-556-7 .
- Volker Baum, Detlef Ernst, Klaus Riexinger: The "Eisbär" concentration camp in Kochendorf . In: Bad Friedrichshall . Volume 2. City of Bad Friedrichshall, Bad Friedrichshall 1996. pp. 339–358.
- Heinz Risel: concentration camp in Heilbronn. The SS Steinbock labor camp in Neckargartach. Eyewitness reports - documents - facts with material about Kochendorf and Bad Rappenau . self-published, Nordheim 1987, ISBN 3-9801585-0-0 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ to http://www.alemannia-judaica.de
- ↑ Impressions from the concentration camp exhibition in the Bad Friedrichshall visitor mine. PDF download . Information on the mine website (www.salzwerke.de) via tourism .
Coordinates: 49 ° 12 ′ 53 " N , 9 ° 14 ′ 18" E