Lieberose concentration camp

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Lieberose concentration camp in the village of Jamlitz near the town of Lieberose was a subcamp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp established in the 1930s . It was located in what is now the Brandenburg district of Dahme-Spreewald, approx. 30 km north of Cottbus in Niederlausitz . Other names: Liro, abbreviation used by the Nazis; Lieberose labor camp. It was built to exploit the prisoners' labor by building extensive military facilities. The SS headquarters had these prisoners build barracks, roads and military installations for the Waffen SS military training area in Kurmark . The military training area covered an area of ​​38,854 hectares. 17 villages were supposed to be forcibly relocated in order to establish it, but this did not happen.

The concentration camp was established in the course of 1944 the largest concentration camps of persecuted as Jews prisoners in the territory of the German Empire (apart from the 1939 Poland annexed place Oswiecim with the Auschwitz camps ). In this final phase of fascist rule, the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp served the Lieberoser camp as a labor reservoir on the one hand, and on the other hand it was used to annihilate concentration camp prisoners who were no longer able to work and who were brought there monthly in collective transports after selections or illnesses.

Of an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 prisoners persecuted as Jews from twelve European countries, mainly Poland and Hungary , fewer than 400 former prisoners survived.

1973 memorial

Conditions of detention

Stein at the camp entrance to the Lieberose subcamp in Jamlitz

From June 1944, monthly transports of Jewish prisoners from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp reached the “Lieberose labor camp” in Jamlitz either directly or via Sachsenhausen. In addition, there were always smaller groups of non-Jewish prisoners from Sachsenhausen. The concentration camp reached its highest so-called occupancy with around 4,350 prisoners in 18 concentration camp barracks in late autumn 1944.

According to the illustration on the memorial stones, there were 26 barracks within the fence; outside three.

Work details

The largest work detail was the “Ullersdorf Accommodation” command, where around 1,000 prisoners had to build a barracks complex made up of barracks and permanent buildings. At the SS building yard between the train station and the prisoner camp, around 500 prisoners were deployed in warehouses, offices, workshops, camps and groups of craftsmen. Notorious was the "Reckmann track construction" command of a private Cottbus company that had also laid track No. 3 on the ramp in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in the spring of 1944 and built roads and tracks around Jamlitz for the Waffen SS. There were also commands like “lumberjack”, “sawmill”, “train station”, “road and bunker construction”.

The political prisoners Otto Kriesche, a Sudeten German editor, and Herbert Simon from Bremen were temporarily camp elders and work assignment clerks. Other well-known inmates were Rabbi Hugo Gabriel Gryn , Rudy Herz , the doctor Hans Salomon Landshut , the later writer Gunther R. Lys and the November revolutionary Hermann Stickelmann .

Casualty numbers

After the Soviet archives in Moscow were opened, reliable figures on the concentration camp were found. Name, origin, occupation and birthday were meticulously noted by the German concentration camp bureaucracy. Accordingly, most of the prisoners were Hungarian, but also Polish and German Jews, as well as Soviet prisoners of war. They were deported here from half of Europe . Up to 10,000 prisoners went through the camp.

Every day around 30 concentration camp inmates died of the consequences of illness and malnutrition. The concentration camp was in fact a place of extermination through work . A total of 4,000 exhausted prisoners were brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau for extermination from the summer of 1944.

Leadership structure of the perpetrator

Camp manager Wilhelm Kersten on a plaque at the Jamlitz memorial

Guard unit

An ID card for the use of a company bicycle that was offered on the Internet and issued in Jamlitz on January 8, 1945 shows that the headquarters of the 2nd company of SS Guard Battalion 4 was in Jamlitz. This unit should therefore have been the guards of the camp; the name of the undersigned company commander and Obersturmführer, however, is illegible.

Death march

One of the death marches of concentration camp prisoners , notorious because of the number of victims , went from here in the direction of Oranienburg (Sachsenhausen concentration camp) in February 1945 and lasted eight days. The march was led through Goyatz , Kuschkow , Teupitz , Zossen , Ludwigsfelde , Potsdam and Falkensee , where on the way the night was spent either in the open field, in barns, stables or in abandoned camps and barracks buildings.

Exactly 1,342 sick and unfit for transport had been left on site by the SS. Probably none of them survived. It was mostly Hungarian Jews who were murdered by the SS guards between February 2 and 4, 1945. The bodies were taken to the Staakow gravel pit. The Jewish corpse detachment threw their fellow prisoners over the edge of the gravel pit, buried them and was then also murdered.

The death march reached Sachsenhausen concentration camp on February 9 , where around 400 Jewish prisoners were killed in the industrial yard over the next few days. In the course of February, the SS "evacuated" most of the approximately 1,000 Jewish prisoners who had been living up to that point from the Lieberose concentration camp to the Mauthausen concentration camp .

Commemoration

A camp stone from 1944 marks the former entrance to the concentration camp directly on the street, the area that is now housing developments.

Urn grave

When a mass grave with the bones of 577 people, probably murdered , was discovered near Staakow in 1971, a museum was built a few kilometers away in the town of Lieberose in 1982. The remains of the dead were buried in an urn grave in Lieberose, where there has been a memorial since 1973.

Museum, memorial at the Lieberose cemetery

In Jamlitz , the last evidence of the times was removed (bearing stone, gate pillar). From 1973 to the end of the GDR in 1990, nothing in Jamlitz reminded of this camp. At the beginning of the 1970s, through the work of a student group at the Lieberos School with their teacher Roland Richter, a large collection of material and initial contacts with survivors of the camp arose.

To the north of Lieberose, in the corner of federal highways 168 and 320 , is the memorial dedicated to the subcamp that existed there from 1943 to 1945, inaugurated in 1973.

Since 2003, memorial stones and steles on the former concentration camp site have been commemorating the victims who have already been found.

Taking into account the bodies that had already been found, it emerged that over 700 mostly Jewish dead must still be buried in Lieberose-Jamlitz. It is probably the largest mass grave of the Shoah that has not yet been found in the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany. After many years of legal proceedings and negotiations with the owner of the land, a possible burial site could only be examined in May 2010. On June 14, 2010, the excavations were stopped, with the realization that the previous suspected areas did not contain any grave areas, only reliable information on the location of the so-called “protection block” could be obtained. There are currently no further suspected areas or indications of this in Jamlitz.

Jürgen Brodwolf created an installation Lieberose in 1990 . It consists of sheet iron, cardboard, gauze, asphalt, wax and 75 geographical map sheets, has a size of around 2.5 × 3 × 4 m³ and is in the Märkisches Museum in Witten . Art journalist Susanne Wedewer describes it as follows:

“ On an elongated table are apparently carelessly thrown 'bodies', cardboard gauze figures, coated with wax and asphalt. Each of them has a branded number stamp. Each number: a fate. On the walls there are archive boxes with 75 index sheets on which the death march of 3500 Jews from Lieberose to Sachsenhausen is documented with dates, numbers, place names ... Curiosity tempts to take out the sheets, not each one - obeying a compulsion to surrender, not to go like so often. At the same time, death can be repressed in a tried and tested manner, the images conjured up can be carefully locked away again, because they supposedly belong to the past. "

post war period

Between 1945 and 1947, the Soviet special camp No. 6 (also called Jamlitz special camp ) with 7,600 to 10,300 prisoners who had been imprisoned as officials of the Nazi regime or suspected persons was located on the same site .

A brief account of the history of the processing of the concentration camp by the GDR Ministry for State Security over the post-war decades can be found in the magazine Horch und Guck of the citizens' committee January 15. There, the problem is pointed out that a concentration camp site had also become the location of an NKVD internment camp in Germany. The concentration camp prisoners were repeatedly portrayed as "political" prisoners (and not as racially persecuted).

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Andreas Weigelt in memorials circular 82
  2. ↑ Andreas Weigelt in memorial circular 82 : The WVHA provided the camp SS and with the “Central Construction Office of the Waffen SS and Police 'Kurmark' Lieberose” the technical staff for the construction project. Most of the prisoners did not come from Sachsenhausen concentration camp, but from Groß-Rosen concentration camp and from June 1944 from Auschwitz to Jamlitz.
  3. ↑ for all four named: Andreas Weigelt in memorials circular 82
  4. ↑ An ID issued in Jamlitz by the 2nd Company of SS Guard Battalion 4
  5. ↑ Compare the proceedings against Erich Schemel. Summarized by Andreas Weigelt in memorials circular 82
  6. ↑ In 1949, while clearing up the camp grounds, the boulder, hewn by a Hungarian Jewish prisoner and known as a "camp stone", was discovered with the inscription "Lieberose Labor Camp 1944" and in 1956, at the instigation of Mayor Werner Mocho, was erected again as a "memorial" at the former entrance to the camp. From then on, it served as the only place for wreath-laying and commemorative events, in 1965 at ministerial level. (The stone was removed in September 1971 - a few days before the foundation stone of the Lieberos memorial - by order of the council of the Frankfurt / Oder district and moved to Beeskow Castle . It did not return until 1990 at the instigation of Jamlitz residents.) Andreas Weigelt in memorial circular 82
  7. ↑ The place is only a little east of Jamlitz and belongs to Schenkendöbern (districts nearby are Pinnow / Pynow and Staakow on the edge of the Reicherskreuzer Heide ). However, the deceased's gold teeth were not buried with their ashes. Jewish funeral rites were ignored. See Weigelt, 2006
  8. ↑ Search for concentration camp mass grave ends unsuccessfully. In: Morgenpost. May 13, 2009
  9. ^ [1] Ministry of the Interior Brandenburg (MI), press release No. 061/2010 of May 31, 2010 on the search excavations for the mass grave of Jewish concentration camp victims in Jamlitz.
  10. ↑ [2] Ministry of the Interior Brandenburg (MI), press release no. 070/2010 of June 23, 2010 on the results of the search excavations after the mass grave of Jewish concentration camp victims in Jamlitz.
  11. ↑ Susanne Wedewer: The tube figure is the subject of death. In: artist. Critical lexicon of contemporary art. Edition 30, Munich 1995, p. 10 and Fig. 12 on p. 13.
  12. ↑ Andreas Weigelt: Conspiratorially guided remembrance. The example of the Lieberose subcamp. In: Listen and Look. Issue 54/2006, pp. 34-38. The key words are: … began in 1945. The communist Otto Maaß , who became a witness to the murder as a fitter for an electrical company in Cottbus, wrote a report on the mass murder and the perpetrators for the NKVD in the summer of 1945.4 However, Maass was arrested shortly afterwards by the NKVD, without any evidence of this Accused of murder of the prisoners, interned in the special camp Jamlitz, but released from Buchenwald in 1950 as wrongly arrested.5 ... In 1968, SED chronicler Richard Schulz from Beeskow was part of the commission for research into the history of the local labor movement at the Frankfurt (Oder) district management. the SED has been commissioned, u. a. to research the anti-fascist resistance in the district, and soon came across the camp.13 ... In January 1971, Department IX / 11 initiated investigations into the "alleged mass graves of Soviet citizens". It is noteworthy that the victims have been referred to as "Soviet citizens", although no mention has been made of them. ... Between May 5 and 18, 1971, the Institute for Forensic Medicine Dresden exhumed the 577 bones. ... The stone disappeared on September 10, 1971, two days before the laying of the foundation stone for the Lieberoser Memorial.30 Until 1995, nothing in Jamlitz reminded of the second largest satellite camp of Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The stone was lying between garbage trucks at Beeskow Castle for decades. ... the Antifa committee demanded the opposite in March 1973, namely “to remove the two pillars of the former camp gate” .39 They were soon “removed” with a tractor. ... The by no means easy way of dealing with the double history of a concentration camp site, as it also existed in Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, apparently began in Jamlitz as early as 1971. Until then, the Jewish victims of the Lieberose subcamp had been remembered relatively undisturbed by political considerations and fears - without a memorial and without a museum. In 1999 an article on the history of the work-up was published44, to which the media became aware in 2001.45 The focus of the partly international interest was the removal of the dental gold by the MfS.

Web links

Commons : Lieberose Labor Camp Memorial  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 51 ° 59 ′ 24.8 "  N , 14 ° 21 ′ 55"  E