Lety concentration camp

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The Lety concentration camp in Lety near Písek (at that time “Gypsy camp Lety ” , in Czech “Cikánský tábor v Letech” ) was a German concentration camp in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia from 1939 to 1945 , in which people classified as “asocial”, including many Roma were detained and subjected to forced labor . A large number of inmates did not survive the camp conditions.

Some of the prisoners were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp between 1942 and 1944 . From August 1942 Lety operated as one of two "Gypsy camps" in the Protectorate, which is why it can be considered a place of execution for the genocide of the European Roma ( Porajmos ).

Map: Czech Republic
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Lety concentration camp​
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Czech Republic

history

Even before the occupation of what is now the Czech Republic, the Czechoslovak government passed a law on “labor camps” in which “work-shy” people should be interned. With the establishment of the " Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia " from November 1939, the moving of the homeless was forbidden (government decrees of March 2 and April 28, 1939). The construction of the camps took place according to the order of the Reich Protector Konstantin von Neurath of July 15, 1940, whereby the order 72/1939 of the government of Czechoslovakia of March 2, 1939 was adopted.

Memorial plaques in the cemetery in Mirovice for the Roma children murdered in Lety

Many large Czech landowners used the “labor camp” legislation to get forced laborers for their properties. After a snowstorm in December 1939 caused severe damage to the approximately 10,000 hectares of forest belonging to the German-Czech von Schwarzenberg family, the owners sought forced labor to recycle the considerable quantities of scrap wood. The Protectorate Administration in Prague then financed the establishment of a labor camp near the Schwarzenberg estate near Orlik. From this the Lety camp developed. It was under Czech management and had only Czech security personnel.

From August 1940 Lety had the status of a labor prison. In addition to beggars and gamblers, prisoner categories were "idlers", "notorious idlers" and "wandering gypsies". From a sociographic perspective, “ gypsies ” were not only the Roma stigmatized as “black” by the Czech majority population, insofar as they “wandered around”, but also “white” ethnic Czechs who “wandered around like a gypsy”. “Volksdeutsche”, on the other hand, were not allowed to be sent to the Protectorate camps. Between September 1940 and December 1941, the proportion of those identified as “Gypsies” - Roma and non-Roma - in Lety, at 290 people, was 13.6 percent of the prisoners.

On March 9, 1942, the Protectorate Government transferred the basic decree on the preventive fight against crime of 1937 to the occupied territory. Lety became one of several camps for the preventive detention systematized there. In the years 1942 to 1944, a total of 14 transports of alleged "anti-social" first to Auschwitz I and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau were carried out from these camps (in addition to Lety, Hodonín , Prague-Ruzyne, Pardubice, Brno). The proportion of those stigmatized as "anti-social gypsies" is known from eleven transports. It was 19.9 percent for men with 140 people and 31.8 percent for women with 35 people. On December 7, 1942, 59 men and 32 women from the Lety camp were deported to Auschwitz , all of whom were categorized as “Gypsies” - Roma and non-Roma. 70 of them did not survive the first three months of the disappearance.

A total of 1,308 people were detained in Lety. “Hard physical labor, inadequate nutrition, inadequate clothing and enormous overcrowding in the residential barracks originally designed for only 300 people” resulted in the deaths of a total of 327 prisoners in the Lety camp.

Culture of remembrance

Monument on the site of the Lety concentration camp

In 1994 the American author and Rome Paul Polansky discovered the estate of the camp administration in a Bohemian state archive. The publication of the documents led to a public scandal, because it turned out that a mass pig fattening was being operated on the site of the former and by no means forgotten camp in the immediate vicinity of the camp cemetery. The request to close operations and to respect the former camp site as a Holocaust site under the Helsinki Convention on World War II Death Camps, like any other type of objection, was unsuccessful. In 1995, President Havel promised to close it, but it never happened. Instead, the Czech government had a memorial site built in a place that was neglected because it was difficult to access and suspected to be an emergency cemetery, to which a private Orthodox cross was later added.

In 1997, 20 well-known representatives of cultural life filed criminal charges for genocide against unknown persons. The police investigated the last surviving guard for a year, after whose death the case was dropped. In 1998 the Roma founded a Committee for the Compensation for the Roma Holocaust (VPORH). Since then, the committee has organized commemorative events and seminars on the history and current situation of the Roma in the Czech Republic. It supports claims for compensation and collects documents. In 2000, the VPORH placed memorial plaques with the names of the victims in the parish cemetery in the neighboring village of Mirovice , where a large number of the murdered lie. In 2001 the committee erected a memorial there for the victims of the Nazi persecution of the Roma, the first in Bohemia. Commemorative installations in Lety it declined in view of the pig fattening operation.

In the meantime, the committee took part in the permanent exhibition in Auschwitz on the genocide of the European Roma, organized an exhibition on the Lety camp in the European Parliament building , brought the English-language exhibition of the Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma to the National Gallery in Prague and developed a traveling exhibition on the “lost world” of the Czech Roma, which was shown in Czech cities.

In August 2014 there was a scandal when the Czech MP Tomio Okamura denied in an interview for the ParliamentníListy.cz portal that the camp was a concentration camp. It was only a camp for "work shy". This sparked a wave of protests, including a. also by high-ranking politicians.

After the Bohuslav Sobotka government reached an agreement with the operator in October 2017 to purchase the pig fattening, the site was handed over to the state in May 2018. An archaeological investigation is currently ongoing. The company buildings will be completely demolished by the end of the year. The planning and construction of a memorial is managed by the Museum of Roma Culture .

See also

literature

  • Erika Thurner : Anti-Gypsy Measures in the Interwar Period, Prague 1995
  • Ctibor Nečas : Sinti and Roma in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and in the Slovak Republic in the years 1939–1945, in Waclaw Dlugoborski (ed.): Sinti and Roma in KL Auschwitz-Birkenau 1943–1944 against the background of their persecution under Nazi rule , Oświęcim 1998, pp. 178-190.
  • Ctibor Nečas: The Holocaust of Czech Roma, Prague 1999.
  • Paul Polansky : Black Silence - The Lety Survivors Speak (Czech Tíživé mlčení ), Prague 1998, ISBN 80-86103-13-7 .
  • Paul Polansky: Living through it twice (Czech: Dvakrát tím samým ), Prague 1998, ISBN 80-86103-11-0 .
  • Guenter Lewy : Return not wanted - The persecution of the Gypsies in the Third Reich , Propylänen Verlag, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-549-07141-8 . (Original English: The Nazi persecution of the gypsies , Oxford University Press 2000, ISBN 0-19-512556-8 ).
  • Michael Zimmermann : Racial Utopia and Genocide. The National Socialist "Solution to the Gypsy Question", Hamburg 1996
  • Markus Pape : A nikdo vám nebude věřit - document o koncentračním táborě Lety u Písku (Eng. And nobody will believe you - document on the Lety u Písku concentration camp ), Prague 1997, ISBN 80-901896-8-7 .
  • Jana Horváthová (Ed.): Genocida Romů v době druhé světové války, Prague 2003
  • Jana Horváthová: Hodonín and Lety functioned as concentration camps. Brno 2014

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Paul Polansky, Sinti and Roma in the Czech Republic during the Second World War and today, in: Pogrom, No. 254, 3/2009, Sinti and Roma in Europe. Discriminated and marginalized for centuries, see: [1] .
  2. ↑ Michael Zimmermann, Racial Utopia and Genocide. the National Socialist "Solution to the Gypsy Question", Hamburg 1996, p. 219ff.
  3. ^ Reprint of the "Basic Decree Preventive Criminal Combat" by Wolfgang Ayaß (edit.): "Community foreigners". Sources on the persecution of "anti-social" 1933–1945 , Koblenz 1998, no. 50.
  4. ↑ Michael Zimmermann, Racial Utopia and Genocide. the National Socialist "Solution to the Gypsy Question", Hamburg 1996, p. 222.
  5. ↑ Paul Polansky, Sinti and Roma in the Czech Republic during the Second World War and today, in: Pogrom, No. 254, 3/2009, Sinti and Roma in Europe. Discriminated and marginalized for centuries, see: [2] ; PROČ JEN LETY U PÍSKU ( Memento of the original from January 15, 2010 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. ; Romani Rose in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , August 2, 2007; Lothar Martin, Opened: The Czech Republic has its first house for national minorities, Radio Prague, June 22, 2007 . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.gruntova.net
  6. ↑ Unless otherwise stated: Karl Kirschbaum, Das Lager Lety and his late consequences, in: Nevipe-Rundbrief des Rom e. V., 2008, No. 27, pp. 1–4, [Lety: http://www.romev.de/images/PDF/Rundbrief_27.pdf  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ].@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.romev.de  
  7. ↑ ParlamentníListy.cz of August 1, 2014, online at: www.parlamentnilisty.cz / ...
  8. ↑ Zdeněk Ryšavý: Cze ch MP Okamura insults Romani victims of the Holocaust, media and politicians sharply criticize him , In: Romea.cz, August 4, 2014, online at: www.romea.cz/
  9. ↑ Will the Roma memorial in Lety finally become a reality? Radio Prague May 3rd 2018
  10. ↑ Pig fattening sold to the state. It will be demolished by the end of the year. ČTK May 3, 2018 (Czech)

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