Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp

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Coordinates: 48 ° 27 '24 "  N , 7 ° 15' 14"  E

Map: France
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Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp​
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France
Entrance to the warehouse. Behind it the flame-shaped memorial for the deportees.
The camp commandant's villa, about 100 meters from the camp
Gas chamber, about 2 km from the camp

The concentration camp Natzweiler-Struthof was from 1 May 1941 to 23 November 1944, a so-called criminal and labor camps of Nazi Germany near the town of Natzweiler in occupied French Alsace , about 55 kilometers southwest of Strasbourg . It is eight kilometers from Rothau train station on the northern slope of a Vosges summit at an altitude of around 700 meters. As the front moved closer, the main camp and some sub-camps on the western side of the Rhine were closed by the SS at the end of 1944.

Around 52,000 prisoners from all over Europe, especially from prisons in the Lorraine cities of Épinal and Nancy and Belfort in Franche-Comté , were deported there and to the attached satellite camps . 22,000 people died from the consequences of imprisonment, illness, cold, malnutrition or were murdered.

In 1960 the “Mémorial de la Déportation” (memorial) was inaugurated there by President General de Gaulle ; later a museum was added.

From September 1944, the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp was relocated to the Neckar Valley and continued in the Neckarelz subcamp in Guttenbach (now part of Neckargerach ) and the surrounding sub-camps under the name Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp until March 1945. The Neckarelz concentration camp memorial in Mosbach has been commemorating this since 1998 .

history

The terrace construction of the warehouse

In September 1940 the geologist and SS-Obersturmbannführer Karl Blumberg (1889–1948) found an occurrence of rare red granite in the Alsatian Vosges . On behalf of Albert Speer , who wanted to use the stone material for his new Nazi building projects ( world capital Germania in Berlin and the German stadium in Nuremberg ), Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler and Oswald Pohl , head of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office , it was decided here to set up a concentration camp for 4,000 prisoners. Blumberg was employed by the Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke (DEST), an SS company founded by Himmler in 1938, which was primarily supposed to supply building material for the gigantic Nazi projects. The company specialized in quarrying stones and used concentration camp inmates for the toughest work. The prisoners also had to work in road construction and in ammunition companies.

Bunk beds for inmates
Transport elevator for corpses from the cellar below to load the crematorium
KZ whippingbuck

Construction of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp began on May 1, 1941. On May 21 and 23, the first deportees from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp arrived in two transports . In this extremely inhospitable climate, 900 prisoners had to build the camp in one year. The commandant was SS-Sturmbannführer Egon Zill , the first camp leader SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer , the first camp doctor who was ordered there from the Buchenwald concentration camp by Hans Eisele , his successor the hardly less notorious SS-Obersturmführer Max Blancke . 330 of the 900 died, and a further 300 had to be taken to Dachau concentration camp as invalids .

The most feared commando worked in the concentration camp quarry. Only about 100 of the inmates were able to work. It was the “green camp celebrities” who didn't work. Since this command had to include at least 200 men, many who could no longer walk were taken to forced labor in wheelbarrows. 60% of the inmates weighed less than 50 kilograms. The hunger was so great that the weakest were slain by fellow prisoners, who thus obtained the meager daily ration of the dead. Once, in a single night, 30 men were brought to the station dead.

Treatment in the prisoner infirmary ("Revier") was often fatal. On July 8, 1942, one of the district keepers witnessed:

“In the corridor of the station there were six boxes nailed together from raw boards, which served as coffins. Blood oozed from the seams. Suddenly there was a knock in the bottom coffin. A weak voice whimpered: 'Open up, open up, I'm still alive!' […] The Greens [(green fabric triangles on prisoner's uniform = criminals)] took out the coffin and opened it. An inmate lying together with a dead man stared at us with broken limbs and an injured head. I wanted to take action to free him from his terrible position, but was immediately pushed aside by the BVer [BV = Temporary Preventive Detention for Criminals]. A few thuds, then the coffin was nailed shut again and went into the crematorium. "

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With around 7,000 prisoners, the camp was overcrowded towards the end of 1944. Around 52,000 men from Europe and the nearby prisons in Épinal , Nancy and Belfort were admitted here and in the attached satellite camps. Most of the deportees came from occupied Poland (13,800), the USSR (7,600), France (6,800) and Norway , mostly for political (60 percent) and racist (11 percent) reasons. 22,000 people died or were murdered as a result of exhaustion, the cold, malnutrition and camp-related illnesses. About 3,000 prisoners brought in in January 1945 were no longer registered by the SS administration. Forced labor until the end of the war , her exact fate remains unclear to this day.

On November 23, 1944, shortly before the liberation of the concentration camp by the Western Allies, the administration of the main camp was relocated to Guttenbach / Binau in the Neckar Valley on the right bank of the Rhine . From September to October 1944 at least 12 subcamps of the concentration camp on the left bank of the Rhine were evacuated and at about the same time up to and including January 1945 over 20 new satellite camps were opened on the right bank of the Rhine. The main camp in Guttenbach / Binau was run under the same name until April 1945. The overall commander Natzweiler moved from the beginning of March 1945 further to Stuttgart and finally to Dürmentingen (near Ulm).

Today a museum and the European Center of the Deported Resistance Fighters , which opened in 2005, remind of the history of this and other concentration camps .

Camp commanders

Camp commandant time
Hans Hüttig April 1941 – March 1942
Egon Zill May 1942 – September 1942
Josef Kramer October 1942 – April 1944
Friedrich Hartjenstein May 1944 – January 1945
Heinrich Schwarz February 1945 – April 1945

Death toll and executions

crematorium
Incinerator, from behind ...
... and from the beginning
Room for medical experiments (dissection table)
Plaque with the names of the 86 murder victims of the medical experiments
The necropolis of the Mémorial national de la Déportation
Camp prison for level 3 prisoners

The prisoners had to do heavy labor with meager meals in the surrounding quarries for Speer's planned monumental buildings. The resulting death rate was almost 40 percent.

Compared:

camp Death rate
Stutthof concentration camp 66.5%
Auschwitz concentration camp 57%
Mauthausen concentration camp 52.5%
Neuengamme concentration camp 50%
Sachsenhausen concentration camp 42%
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp 40%
Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp 40%
Buchenwald concentration camp 25%

Number of dead in Natzweiler concentration camp by time period:

From To dead
May 1941 March 1942 61
April 1942 May 1943 750
June 1943 March 1944 700
April 1944 September 1944 2,000
October 1944 April 1945 14,000

In addition, in 1941, 87% of prisoners perished within the first six months. In 1942, 60% of the deportees died within the first six months due to the inhumane conditions. In addition, prisoners were murdered in several ways: by shooting in the neck (practiced in specially built premises ), in the gas chamber . When slopes , there were two variants: In secret execution the person was placed on a stool, which was then pushed away. The neck broke and the victim died immediately. In the case of public executions, which took place around once a month specifically as a deterrent, the death row inmates had to stand on a trap door . The rope around the neck was already tightened so that the neck did not break. The slowly opening door then caused a death from suffocation that could drag on for several minutes. Those murdered in this way were burned in the crematorium .

The murder of 86 Jewish prisoners became particularly well known. August Hirt , director of the Anatomical Institute at the University of Strasbourg , wanted to use them to create a collection of skeletons. He was supported in this by the anthropologists Bruno Beger ( SS-Hauptsturmführer ) and Hans Fleischhacker ( SS-Obersturmführer ), who at the beginning of June 1943 selected 89 women and men from eight European countries and had them brought to Natzweiler-Struthof. Three of these people did not survive the transport, the remaining 86 were murdered in the gas chamber on four evenings between August 11 and 19, 1943. With the collection, which was supposed to become part of the Ahnenerbe project but was not implemented, Hirt wanted to prove the Nazi racial theory and the “inferiority of Jews”. The preserved body parts were found during the liberation of Alsace and later buried in a grave in the Jewish cemetery in Strasbourg-Cronenbourg . The historian and journalist Hans-Joachim Lang has researched these "murders for science" and after years of research determined the names and origins of the 86 murder victims. His research results are documented in the book The Names of Numbers and a website of the same name.

The Nazi doctors Eugen Haagen and Otto Bickenbach used the concentration camp for so-called medical experiments and human experiments . They injected typhoid pathogens into prisoners and experimented with the warfare agents mustard gas ( mustard ) and phosgene. The prisoners died from it.

The camp was also a site of mass executions. On February 17, 1943, 13 men from Ballersdorf and the surrounding area were shot. They had previously been sentenced to death by a military court in Strasbourg because they had tried to avoid being drafted into the Wehrmacht or being deported to forced labor by escaping to Switzerland - three others had already been shot right at the border, only one escaped. Resistance fighters who had been captured were also executed in the concentration camp. In September 1944, shortly before the evacuation of the concentration camp, 107 women and men of the group " Réseau Alliance " and 35 members of the GMA-Groupe Mobile d'Alsace-Vosges were murdered by shooting in the neck or hanging. Four British women, members of the British secret service, were brought to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp specifically for execution. Unmasked as members of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), they were killed with phenol syringes on June 6, 1944 .

Camp prisons

The prisoners were repeatedly put under pressure in the camp's own prison, a distinction was made between three levels of detention:

  • First stage: In a bright room with daylight with water and bread, up to ten days, with up to 18 other prisoners together to about 2 m × 3 m. One bucket for relieving needs per cell.
  • Second stage: In a dark room with daylight, with water and bread as food, up to 42 days, only one large meal every four days, otherwise similar conditions to stage one.
  • Stage three: A prisoner was locked in one of five small niches (height about 1.50 m, width about 0.8 m, depth about 1 m), in which he had to remain until his execution. No prisoner of the concentration camp is known to have survived this procedure. There was no way to go to the toilet, you couldn't stand or lie down. There was probably little to no food. Like all rooms in the camp, this alcove is extremely hot in summer, and in winter you froze to death quickly. These little chambers were pitch black. Originally they were intended for heating systems, but in the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp there was never a single heating system.

Attempts to escape

Prisoner letter, here with corrections to item 5 of the postal regulations

While working in the quarry, an inmate dug a hole in the earth unnoticed and covered himself with grass so as not to be seen. After the other inmates had to go back to the camp that evening, he stayed in his hiding place all night. In fact, he was very close to fleeing because nothing had been noticed the next morning. At the morning roll call, however, which was always carried out with the greatest care, the man was missing and search dogs were used to search all possible whereabouts. When the search dogs caught the "escape", he was arrested. He was imprisoned for days with cruel bite wounds until, as an exception, he was "allowed" to work again in the camp - normally attempts to escape were punished by death by hanging. When he was later transported to another concentration camp, he tried to escape again.

One man managed to acquire the camp commandant's uniform . With his car he was initially able to escape from the camp unnoticed, because the guards saluted the perfectly dressed "commandant". Since the Resistance was very active in Alsace , the former prisoner was able to get to Algeria within a few days. There he had nothing more to fear. This was the only known successful escape from the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.

System of sub-camps

In local parlance, the satellite camps at the respective location were called concentration camps . They were if you consider the poor survival conditions for the inmates or the injustice system that inmates suffered there too. Formally, for the SS, police and local state authorities, they were institutions of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA), Berlin, which was outside the regional or military chain of command. Camp names could also contain the words external command or sub-camp, without changing anything in the basic conditions for the prisoners. The beneficiaries of the concentration camps were, to varying degrees, state, often military facilities, but also war-important industrial companies, including small businesses or farms that could be assigned workers for a minimal wage. In many cases, the request was the starting signal to open another sub-camp. In concentration camp jargon, the word external command initially meant a group of prisoners who temporarily left the concentration camp for work. Only later could it also mean a separate sub-camp.

SS headquarters for the entire satellite camp, castle in Binau

The town hall in Guttenbach and the castle in Binau , a few kilometers down the river, were the seat of the SS headquarters for the entire subcamps of the Natzweiler concentration camp in the region. After the liberation of France in 1944, the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp continued to exist on the paper of the German authorities as the main camp of the many satellite camps that had been or were still being established between southern Hesse and all of Baden and Württemberg. The SS tried to set up a new administration for the camp complex in the southwest in Guttenbach / Baden. Especially towards the end of the war, there was a diverse exchange of prisoners from the various camps. In the context of the air protection measures of war-important industry (U relocation) , however, the control was more in the hands of the Reich Security Main Office and the Armaments Ministry . The cover term evacuation ( evacuation march ) conceals attempts by the SS to prevent the Allied troops from accessing prisoners by evacuation or forced marches ( death marches ). In some cases, there were mass executions of prisoners who were no longer able to walk along the way.

Company "desert"

In ten outposts of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp between Hechingen and Rottweil in the foreland of the Swabian Alb in the “ Black Jura ” there, oil shale was to be broken in the opencast mine , layered in piles and carbonized to convert the material into fuel. This desert enterprise was initiated when the empire suffered a severe shortage of fuel towards the end of the war due to the war.

Four of these "plants" later started production:

The efficiency of the process was low; In the Bisingen concentration camp, the camp commandant poured in oil from time to time, probably to keep his post. The other six plants stood still after construction.

For the "Desert" company, the SS provided a total of over 10,000 mostly Jewish prisoners who were exploited as workers in the oil shale works, of whom at least 3,480 died. In Bisingen , crosses on the mass grave, a memorial stone, a museum and an educational trail remind of this. Some of the mass graves of these concentration camps were exhumed by NSDAP members identified during the French occupation .

Further subcamps

Outdoor camp sports field of the Haslach external command

Between September 1944 and February 1945 there was a satellite camp in Haslach in the Kinzig valley , in which up to 600 concentration camp prisoners were held. These resistance fighters , initially mainly French , who were detained after the " Night and Fog Decree ", were used to expand tunnels in a quarry, in which the production of V 1 and V 2 parts by the Mannesmann and Messerschmitt should be relocated. The Daimler-Benz plant in Gaggenau was later to be relocated to the tunnels . The French historian Robert Steegmann calls Haslach "one of the most murderous subcamps" of the Natzweiler concentration camp. With the Vulkan and Kinzigdamm camps, there were two further subcamps in Haslach , which were subordinate to the Schirmeck-Vorbruck security camp .

The camp personnel were called to account in one of the Rastatt trials in February 1947 . In the 1990s, the memorial site was launched in Haslach , researching the history of the satellite camps, setting up a memorial site and organizing meetings between former concentration camp inmates and their relatives.

Echterdingen subcamp

From November 1944, the Echterdingen concentration camp was set up on the Echterdingen “air base” . About 600 Jewish prisoners were penned in an area around a white hangar , a so-called Eskimo hall, which is still located on the "South Airfield" of the United States Army today. They had to repair damage at the airport under inhumane working conditions and work in quarries in the area (such as in the "Emerland" near Bernhausen ). The emaciated prisoners were sometimes no longer able to return to the camp on their own: two inmates had to drag them along, or they were transported on a two-wheeled cart. They were guarded by soldiers from the "air base". In January 1945 the SS began to liquidate the camp. Mass graves remained, for example in the vicinity of the “Ramsklinge” forest and at the airport - and the white hall.

Vaihingen an der Enz subcamp

The Vaihingen concentration camp was set up in August 1944 near Vaihingen an der Enz , where a forced labor camp already existed. The prisoners were in a disused quarry company Baresel an underground factory invest in the components for the jet fighter Messerschmitt Me 262 should be made. The project was discontinued at the end of October 1944 due to constant air raids on Stuttgart and the prisoners were distributed to other camps. From December 1, 1944, the camp officially functioned as an "SS sick and recovery camp".

Subcamp Hailfingen / Tailfingen

With the request for 600 Jewish prisoners from the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig, the labor camp, in which prisoners of war and forced laborers were interned, became an external command of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp (Alsace). The Hailfingen / Tailfingen subcamp existed from mid-November 1944 to mid-February 1945. There is evidence that 186 prisoners perished in these three months. After the camp was closed, those classified as “unable to work” were deported to the “sick camp” in Vaihingen / Enz, the others to the Dautmergen satellite camp.

Geislingen subcamp on the Steige

This satellite camp was located in Geislingen an der Steige . The prisoners requested by the company worked for the Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik (WMF). It was set up in February 1944 as a separate part of the existing foreign labor camp on Heidenheimer Strasse with an area of ​​10,000 square meters. The 15 planned female guards were "trained" in the Ravensbrück concentration camp . The camp itself consisted of five living quarters, a district barrack and a farm barrack. The first prisoners, around 700 Jewish women between the ages of 15 and 45, arrived here on July 28, 1944 and, after being quarantined, had to work for WMF from August 16. On November 29th another transport arrived with about 130 prisoners, on March 28th 1945 the last one with about 230 prisoners arrived. The WMF paid four Reichsmarks per prisoner a day to the concentration camp and received 0.80 Reichsmarks in return for food and clothing. The work was divided into two shifts; from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. The first camp leader was SS-Oberscharführer Christian Ahrens and was replaced by SS man Schopp ; In January 1945, René Roman finally took over . In October 1944 six “political” and ten “asocial” (classified as such) prisoners from the Ravensbrück concentration camp arrived at the camp; they were used as Kapos or block elders according to normal concentration camp practice . WMF produced, among other things, accessories for assemblies of jet aircraft.

According to the WMF personnel department, contact with prisoners was extremely limited and “protective custody” was threatened. Hunger and fatigue contributed to serious accidents at work. The sickness figures were generally high. Surviving inmates reported that the foremen and other employees of the company treated them correctly and in some cases even slipped them food and medicine. The prisoners' supply of food in the camp was very poor, partly because the little food intended for the prisoners was withheld by the guards. At least twelve of the 1000 mostly Jewish Hungarians died in the concentration camp for reasons that can no longer be precisely determined and were buried in front of the cemetery. It was then issued that

“ … The corpses of those who die in the work details… will from now on be taken to the nearest crematorium, or, if this is not possible due to the existing transport difficulties, will be buried in the local cemetery, if possible in a remote location, e.g. B. where the Russian prisoners of war or the suicides are buried. The corpses are to be dressed in such a way that one cannot recognize them as prisoners. The prisoners themselves perform the funeral. "

- WVHA, Department D, Concentration Camp : Order of September 21, 1944

WMF was forced to add cheese to its food rations and 1.5 liters of soup during the night shifts. Sick or pregnant women were transported to Auschwitz to be gassed, and then to Bergen-Belsen after it was closed. Lightly injured inmates were cared for in the camp's sickbay. In March 1945 the WMF board of directors and management tried to liquidate the camp before the US troops reached the area. From the end of March 1945 the prisoners no longer worked for the WMF; In April the inmates were "evacuated" towards Dachau. However, they did not reach their destination because the train was stopped by Allied troops. A camp barrack can still be seen at Karl-Benz-Straße 13 .

Neckarelz subcamp

The Neckarelz concentration camp was built in 1944 for the outsourced production of aircraft engines at the Daimler-Benz-Motoren GmbH plant (cover name: Goldfisch GmbH ) , in which up to 7,500 prisoners from various concentration camps were housed on and in the gypsum factory tunnels for a year from March onwards Days worked. Five classrooms in a school became dormitories for the approximately 800 prisoners who worked in two shifts and also built barracks for newcomers. The school yard became the roll call area and barbed wire barriers and watchtowers were built. The Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp was about to be dissolved, with a camp population of 2,500 people, the Neckarelz camp became the largest of the Natzweiler external commandos, the prisoners were housed in a total of seven so-called Neckar camps. The official camp strength was 3000 places. A total of around 10,000 prisoners passed through a Neckar camp belonging to the Neckarelzer camp, because they were moved between the commandos as required and selected no longer "fit for work" and then selected for example. Some were deported to Natzweiler, Dachau or Vaihingen concentration camps. By October alone, there were at least 750 people in three transports. The exact fate of most of the inmates remained unknown. Due to the inhuman conditions, numerous deaths were to be mourned, including the partial collapse of one of the tunnels in September with over 20 deaths and a typhus epidemic in autumn 1944. Air raids on the Neckar camps, such as on March 22, 1945, resulted in deaths under guards and prisoners.

The statistically recorded deaths resulted in a total of around 350 deaths. Many corpses were buried anonymously and cannot be recorded.

On March 28, 1945, because of the advance of American troops into the Neckar area, the 4,000 “walkers”, including those who had arrived from the Heppenheim and Bensheim satellite camps , were marched from here via Neuenstadt and Kupferzell to the train station in Waldenburg (Württemberg) . From there they were transported in groups to the Dachau concentration camp. The “death march” cost the lives of around 600 prisoners.

Kochendorf subcamp

At the beginning of 1944, a department of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp was established in Bad Friedrichshall- Kochendorf. Inmates of the Kochendorf concentration camp were supposed to set up an armaments factory in the Bad Friedrichshall salt mine and manufacture parts for the aircraft industry, especially the Heinkel Werke .

Grossig sub-warehouse

A railway tunnel that ran between the towns of Bruttig and Treis near Cochem on the Moselle was to be expanded into a factory hall in 1944, the completion of which was one of SS General Hans Kammler's most ambitious projects . This was entrusted by the Reich leadership with the "immediate program for bomb-proof housing of the aircraft industry". The tunnel offered a total usable area of ​​21,000 square meters. For the expansion of the 2565 meter long two-track tunnel tube, Kammler estimated the quantities of building materials: 550 tons of construction iron, 275 tons of machine iron, 145 cubic meters of round wood, 610 cubic meters of sawn timber, 1500 tons of cement and 200,000 bricks. The total construction volume was three and a half million Reichsmarks. The execution of the construction planning as well as the construction management was entrusted to the architectural office Heese in Berlin , where a Mr. Remagen was in charge. The executing construction company was Fix from Dernau . The tunnel was made available to the Bosch company in Stuttgart for the production of accessories for aircraft engines. The first Bosch workers moved into the tunnel as early as April 1944 and began producing spark plugs .

The overall management of the “A7” project was the responsibility of the SS command staff , whose office was located in a hotel in the city of Cochem. The chief was SS-Hauptsturmführer Gerrit Oldeboershuis , called Oldenburg, his deputy SS-Untersturmführer Karl-Heinz Burckhardt . In total, the management staff consisted of 18 people: civilian employees , air force engineers as well as technical officers and men of the Waffen SS . One problem was initially the lack of manpower who were supposed to implement this major project. But the SS willingly offered to “supply” enough workers. The concentration camps offered a seemingly inexhaustible source of "human material" here.

People from almost all over Europe were deported to the Moselle as concentration camp prisoners and used for forced labor: French, Belgians, Luxembourgers, Dutch, Norwegians, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Greeks, Italians, Spaniards and some Reich Germans. Most were political prisoners or prisoners of war. Many carried the designation "AZA", which played down for " foreign civil workers ". Some, especially Germans, were classified as "criminals". All were brought here for one purpose only: " annihilation through labor ". A command of members of the Air Force was sent to Cochem to guard them. The prisoners had to push ahead with the expansion of the tunnel under the most difficult conditions. In the period from the establishment of the camp in early March until it was evacuated on September 15, 1944, hundreds of prisoners lost their lives through exhaustion, malnutrition, torture and execution.

When selecting prisoners at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, the SS made a major mistake in secrecy. They had sent “NN prisoners” to Bruttig. Such prisoners were not allowed to be sent to subcamps. "NN" as an abbreviation for "Night and Fog" after the Night and Fog Decree indicates that no one should find out about their whereabouts. Their disappearance without a trace should also serve as a deterrent. This group includes, for example, resistance fighters. Immediately after their arrival they were murdered or subjected to terrible harassment. When the SS in Natzweiler-Struthof became aware of their mistake, the order was immediately issued to send all NN prisoners back to the main camp. This order reached the camp in early April 1944 and was carried out on April 8th. The transport of emaciated, soiled with excrement, partly naked and emaciated to skeletons, left the train station in Cochem . Of the 150 inmates, 40 did not survive the first month.

Offenburg satellite camp

In March and April 1945, over 600 prisoners from the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp were quartered in Artillery Barracks 41 (“La Horie”), who were deployed to defuse duds, remove bomb damage and repair damaged train tracks. Immediately before the evacuation of the camp on April 12, 1945, SS henchmen brutally murdered 41 of the prisoners after they had sorted them out as too weak for the death march. The city of Offenburg organized a commemoration to mark the 70th anniversary of this massacre.

Mannheim-Sandhofen subcamp

Former Friedrichschule, today's Gustav Wiederkehr School (2011)

The camp was set up in September 1944 in the Mannheim-Sandhofen district . From October 1944 to March 1945 it was a branch of the Natzweiler concentration camp. It was used to accommodate concentration camp prisoners who were employed as slave labor for Daimler-Benz Mannheim. This branch was a camp from the end of the “Third Reich” - it was a starvation camp. Over 1000 Polish men and young people who had been abducted from their hometown during the Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944 were housed here for forced labor. This happened in the middle of a residential area, in the former Friedrichschule, today's Gustav-Wiederkehr-Schule. They were needed in the Daimler-Benz plant to produce the Opel Blitz truck . After an Allied air strike on the Opel plant in Berlin-Charlottenburg, Daimler officials were urged to produce urgently needed military trucks. 60 to 80 people lived in one classroom at a time - crammed together in bunk beds. The ground floor was reserved for the concentration camp administration. The washrooms, which the inmates were not allowed to use, were in the basement. On the opposite side of the street there were shops, a milk delivery point and three inns - without any privacy screens. The concentration camp could not be overlooked by the residents and for many it became part of their everyday life.

The Mannheim Daimler-Benz plant management had applied for the concentration camp inmates at the SS headquarters. Around September 20, 1944, the head of personnel and the labor deployment engineer traveled to the Dachau concentration camp to choose prisoners there. A transport with Poles who had been captured during the Warsaw Uprising had arrived here shortly before. Most of them were civilian residents of the city, only a small part of ten to twenty percent of them had been underground soldiers, all of them were from Poland and almost exclusively from Warsaw. The Daimler managers had the first choice among the 3,034 men. 1060 men arrived in Mannheim on September 27th. The adjoining gymnasium served as a camp kitchen, the school yard was roll call area. The inmates initially had to walk 5 kilometers to work, almost all of them were deployed in two halls in truck production, mostly on assembly lines. The camp administration reported a total of 23 deaths in the municipality office opposite, including one prisoner who was executed. According to witnesses, there were a few more. The evacuation of the sick and the social coherence within the prisoners meant that, compared to similarly sized satellite camps, few died immediately.

The approximately sixty SS men came from different units, many of them were Air Force soldiers transferred to the Waffen SS. The first camp leader, Bernhard Waldmann, was a captain in the Wehrmacht and was transferred away before Christmas 1944. His successor Heinrich Wicker from Karlsruhe, a young SS-Untersturmführer , later became the leader of the “ Hessental Death March ” and the last camp commandant of the Dachau Wicker concentration camp was described by inmates who survived as very cruel. Cruelty, that was usually corporal punishment . A punishment register regulated exactly how many blows there were for which offense. But there were also worse things, one of the prisoners Marian Krainski was hanged in public on January 4, 1944 in front of Benz employees, SS men and spectators, including children, for alleged sabotage. His own comrades were forced to do so.

The recognition and the attempt to present this publicly by means of a memorial plaque met with massive resistance for decades, as the prisoners had to work as forced laborers for the city's most important employer, Daimler-Benz, under inhumane conditions and this is not openly admitted should, neither from parts of the city administration nor from the management of Daimler-Benz itself. In 1978, the city ​​youth council became aware of the former concentration camp and laid a wreath on the day of national mourning. The public was informed again for the first time through a report by Mannheimer Morgen . At the ceremonial handover in 1982 of a memorial plaque in memory of the prisoners of the former Sandhofen concentration camp outpost, a scandal broke out: During a speech by CDU city councilor Heinrich Kirsch, he asked the question "What's the point after such a long time?" Thereupon the CDU member of the Bundestag Josef Bugl left the celebration in the gym of the Gustav Wiederkehr School with the words “This is a scandal” together with a large part of the audience in protest. In response to many protests and objections, the Mannheim municipal council decided at the instigation of the Stadtjugendring e. V. and the DGB set up a documentation center in the basement of the Gustav Wiederkehr School on October 6, 1987. An exhibition in the basement of today's primary school commemorates the prisoners. A belt, rolled up tightly, indicates how starved the prisoners were. "People told each other that the food rations intended for the workers were being sold on the black market by the overseers," reports Hans-Joachim Hirsch from the City Archives - Institute for City History.

Subcamp Spaichingen

From the beginning of September 1944 to April 18, 1945 there was a satellite camp of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in Spaichingen in the Tuttlingen district . The Mauserwerke weapons factory from Oberndorf am Neckar , then owned by the Quandt family, relocated part of its production there under the cover name "Metallwerke Spaichingen". In various factory rooms, concentration camp prisoners were used to manufacture aircraft on-board weapons . They also had to build a hall on the outskirts of the city in the “clay pit”; this was not finished by the end of the war. To accommodate the concentration camp prisoners, the “metal works” submitted a plan to the city in the summer of 1944 for the construction of three barracks, one of which had two floors. At the end of the war, two were finished and one under construction. The kitchens of the camp were in the “Kreuz” inn. An average of 300 to 400 people were housed in the camp.

According to survivors' reports, the conditions in the Spaichingen subcamp were devastating: SS guards under camp leader Werner Halter and later Helmut Schnabel and criminals appointed as Kapos abused the prisoners. The diet was totally inadequate. The camp management and cooks are said to have moved food. Clothing was hardly available and diseases were rampant.

The Spaichingen registry office recorded two prisoners who had died or been murdered in the camp in 1944 and 93 in 1945. The causes of death are cardiac paralysis, cardiac and circulatory weakness, heartbeat, general weakness, tuberculosis, sepsis, pneumonia, "shot while trying to escape", "suicide by hanging". Of the 95 victims, the country of origin is unknown for 24; the remainder are 21 Hungarians, 20 Italians, 15 Yugoslavs, 5 Czechs, 5 Slovaks, 2 French and 1 Swiss, Austrian and Russian each. The Spaichingen doctor Ruffing, who had to officially determine ten deaths from the end of September 1944 to January 1945 without having seen the bodies, estimated the deaths in this period at around 80. According to a Polish camp doctor, 78 people are expected to be between January and April have died. As a result, at least 160 inmates died here.

The Red Cross sister Margarete Deller obtained hard labor cards for the prisoners from the economic office in Tuttlingen in order to improve their nutritional situation somewhat. Individual Spaichinger residents deposited food along the route that the work slaves had to take through the city twice a day. Two prisoners are said to have been shot by an SS man trying to reach for it. On October 11, 1944, the SS complained to the mayor's office about the owner of the “Kreuz” inn because he had slipped bread to prisoners who worked in the kitchens. The mayor's office threatened the landlord with camp detention.

The camp was closed on April 16 or 17, 1945; the 400 or so prisoners were driven on a ten-day march towards the Allgäu . There are contradicting statements about the number of dead on this march. A former prisoner said as a witness before the court in Rastatt that only about half of the men had seen the end of the march in Füssen . In Rastatt, SS men, guards and commanders, including those from the Spaichingen concentration camp, were charged with murder, aiding and abetting murder, theft and war crimes. According to the trial files, of the seven members of the concentration camp personnel who were initially held responsible, three were sentenced to death, one to life-long forced labor and another to five years in prison. The director of the “Metallwerke Spaichingen”, Jakob Hartmann, received several years in prison in 1947 because he a. a. was held responsible for the poor diet of the inmates.

After the end of the war, the French military government had a stone cross erected on a mass grave. In 1963 a concentration camp memorial - a steel sculpture by the Tuttlingen sculptor Roland Martin - was erected in Spaichingen . In 1994, the 50th anniversary of the construction of the camp was commemorated with an exhibition lasting several weeks. Since November 9, 2005, three bronze plates have been used as “ stumbling blocks ” in the city center to remind of the external camp. The site of the former concentration camp is the center of today's Spaichingen; Today the town hall, Evangelical parish hall, post office, houses and a bus station are located there.

Heppenheim subcamp

Heppenheim an der Bergstrasse had been a satellite camp since May 28, 1942. The first closure took place on December 18, 1942. The Heppenheim subcamp was reopened on June 15, 1943, and then finally closed on March 27, 1945. In the first phase, the concentration camp inmates interned in Heppenheim were in agriculture employed. They also worked as the Dachau Command in Heppenheim in the SS-owned facility, the German Research Institute for Nutrition and Meals (DVA), primarily in crop production.

The tasks of the DVA were the cultivation and research of aromatic and medicinal herbs , the supply of German and foreign markets with "German drugs", the production and mixing of new drugs, the maintenance of laboratories, the acquisition of land and the sale of the products.

The “herb garden” in the Dachau concentration camp (name of the work detail: “Plantage”) and the plantation in the Heppenheim subcamp (name of the work detail: “Dachau”) were the best-known projects.

The prisoners of the Heppenheim satellite camp were brought on a long march to Schwäbisch Hall on March 22, 1945, i.e. immediately before the occupation of Heppenheim by US troops on March 27, 1945, and from there by train to the Dachau concentration camp transported on. Many of the prisoners died there before most of them were freed at Tegernsee.

Geisenheim subcamp

“My dear sister Rachela Nirenberg, victim of the Nazi labor camp in Geisenheim” (1922–1945). Tomb at the Jewish cemetery in Rüdesheim a. Rh.

The old factory hall (Geisenheim) was the production site of the Johannisberg machine factory. At the end of 1943, part of the factory for the armaments company Friedrich Krupp AG (Essen) had to be cleared. This resulted in the Krupp-Essen war community and the Johannisberg machine factory . In order to meet the steadily increasing need for armaments despite the shortage of workers caused by the war, the satellite camp was set up in Geisenheim on September 26, 1944 by special order from the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp commanders. On December 12, 1944, 200 female concentration camp prisoners (mostly Polish Jews from the Lodz ghetto ) came here. The prisoners were selected as “fit for work” in Auschwitz concentration camp. From there they were brought to Geisenheim via the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp , where they had to manufacture closures for anti-aircraft guns. The camp consisted of three “living quarters”, one wash barrack and one for the SS guards and was located between the Rüdesheim-Wiesbaden railway line, Winkeler Strasse and the Reutershan gas station. Before the end of the war on March 18, 1945, the evacuation took place and the women were taken on an evacuation march to the Dachau subcamp Allach near Munich . In Allach women were mistreated. The women were liberated by the 7th US Army on April 30, but the camp was quarantined with them due to typhus until mid-May 1945 .

Subcamp Frankfurt

Memorial plaque for the prisoners of the Frankfurt satellite camp

The concentration camp with the code name Katzbach was set up in Plant I of the Adlerwerke in Frankfurt am Main on August 22, 1944 . This was intended to cover the workforce required by the plant for the manufacture of chassis and engines for armored personnel carriers. Most of the prisoners were abducted during the Warsaw uprising and brought to Frankfurt via the Dachau concentration camp. The highest occupancy was 1139 prisoners with a storage area of ​​1300 square meters. A total of 1,600 prisoners came to the camp, of whom 528 died in Frankfurt. On March 13, 1945, 500 dying, sick and unfit prisoners were locked in freight wagons and had to wait there for three days before being transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp . Only eight of them survived Transport and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. On March 24, 1945 an evacuation march of 400 prisoners started to the Buchenwald concentration camp and partly further to the Dachau concentration camp. Few of these prisoners survived.

Walldorf subcamp

The women's camp existed from August 23 to November 24, 1944. This concentration camp was part of the so-called final solution to the question of the Hungarian Jews after the occupation of the country on March 19, 1944 and the subsequent deportations . The 1700 or so concentration camp inmates had to do forced labor at the Rhein-Main airport and airship port, which is now Frankfurt am Main Airport . This work at the airfield had been classified as "decisive for the war". About 50 women did not survive the four-month storage period. Of the remaining women, only about 300 survived further deportation to concentration camps. Only rediscovered in the 1970s, the commemoration of the crimes in the camp was brought up to the public through the establishment of a memorial trail and plaques, a foundation financed by a survivor and a film. After rediscovering the history of the camp, becoming known and approaching the Züblin company , on whose construction site the female forced laborers were used at the time and which was at least responsible for the inhumane food, they always refused to make amends. Compensation payments, an official statement of apology or regret were always refused. Since 1991, however, Züblin has been indirectly involved in the compensation fund for Nazi forced laborers .

After the war

After the liberation by the US troops on November 25, 1944, the camp served as a prison for prisoners of war for around 2500 German civilians, men, women and children from December 1944 to 1948. It was also a prison for collaborators . The camp was initially under the Ministry of the Interior, then the Ministry of Justice.

memorial

In 1949 the camp was subordinated to the Ministry of War Victims ("des Anciens combattants et Victimes de guerre") and was converted into a memorial in the following years. Between 1957 and 1959 the "Mémorial de la Déportation" was built (based on designs by Bertrand Monnet and Lucien Fenaux). This was inaugurated in 1960 by President General de Gaulle . In 1965 the memorial was expanded to include a museum.

From May 12th to 13th, 1976, the museum was destroyed in an arson attack by a group of Loups Noirs who probably wanted to draw attention to the imprisonment of the 1,100 Alsatians in the camp after 1945.

In 2005, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of France, Jacques Chirac inaugurated the now Center européen du résistant déporté . It commemorates the story of the captured and deported resistance fighters in World War II . Almost half of the approximately 170,000 annual visitors to the memorial belong to the school age group, mainly from Alsace, Switzerland and Germany.

The Dutch War Graves Foundation ( Oorlogsgravenstichting ) has reburied compatriots who died in the Struthof concentration camp in the central Dutch memorial for southern Germany, the forest cemetery in Frankfurt am Main-Oberrad. On this field of honor, a figure, The Falling Man , commemorates her and her fellow sufferers from the Dachau and Flossenbürg concentration camps.

The German association of memorials in the former Natzweiler concentration camp complex (VGKN) was founded in November 2016 .

The former Natzweiler concentration camp and the around 50 associated satellite camps were awarded the European Heritage Seal in March 2018 .

Criminal law processing

The former Natzweiler camp commandant Josef Kramer , referred to in the British public as the "Belsen Beast", had to answer in the Bergen-Belsen trial from September 1945 before a British military tribunal for war crimes and crimes against humanity . On November 17, 1945, he who pleaded "not guilty" was sentenced to hang death. He made a petition for clemency with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery . The sentence was on 13 December 1945 in the penitentiary Hameln enforced .

"Natzweiler Trial", Wuppertal, May 29 to June 1, 1946

Several former members of the SS camp personnel stood before a British military court in Wuppertal for the legal processing of the so-called Natzweiler Trial . You were charged with the murder of four British Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents in Natzweiler concentration camp. The women Andrée Borrel , Diana Rowden , Vera Leigh and Sonia Olschanezky, who were last deported to Natzweiler after their arrests in France in 1943/1944 , were demonstrably killed by phenol injection in a room of the crematorium on July 6, 1944 by camp doctors Heinrich Plaza and Werner Rohde and then burned. Other defendants were u. a. the then protective custody camp leader Wolfgang Seuss , the member of the camp Gestapo Magnus Wochner , the commander of the guard company Emil Meier, the head of the crematorium and person responsible for camp executions Peter Straub, the camp commandant at the time Friedrich Hartjenstein and the " medical officer " (SDG) Emil Bruttel . The verdicts: Werner Rohde was sentenced to death, Fritz Hartjenstein to life imprisonment, Straub to 13 years, Wochner to 10 years and Emil Bruttel to 4 years imprisonment. The remaining defendants were acquitted.

Rastatt processes

Courtroom in Rastatt Castle during the 1946 trial

The Rastatt Trials from December 9, 1946 to November 21, 1947, four trials against those responsible and personnel from smaller concentration camps in Württemberg , mainly concerned the subcamps of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp and the Schirmeck-Vorbruck security camp (" Enterprise Desert ": KZ -Außenlager Haslach -Vulkan, Niederbühl , backup storage Gaggenau Rotenfels , concentration camp Vaihingen , KZ Kochendorf , Unterriexingen , KZ Hessental ); and from June 15 to October 28, 1948 around the SS special camp in Hinzert , and thus also against Zill.

On July 2, 1954, the former camp commandant Friedrich Hartjenstein ( Peine ) and the former members of the guards Franz Ehrmannstraut ( Worschweiler ), Albert Fuchs ( Kehl ), Robert Nitsch, Herbert Oehler ( Dieringhausen ) and Wolfgang Seuss ( Nuremberg ) were tried by a French military court Sentenced to death in Metz for murder and cruelty.

In 1961, after several legal proceedings, Zill was retried: On December 14, 1961, the Munich II district court reduced Zill's life imprisonment to 15 years. In 1963, Zill was fired.

literature

  • Comité National du Struthof: Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. Nancy 1990, p. 83. (Official brochure sold there)
  • Hans Adamo, Florence Hervé: Natzweiler Struthof. Look against forgetting. Regards au-delà de l'oubli. Klartext, Essen 2002, ISBN 3-89861-092-6 .
  • Metty Barbel: Student in Hinzert and Natzweiler, experience essays from KZ No. 2915 alias 2188. Luxembourg 1992, p. 192.
  • Anita Awosusi , Andreas Pflock, Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma (ed.): Sinti and Roma in the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. Suggestions for a memorial visit. History - tour - biographies - information. Heidelberg 2006.
  • Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (ed.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. 9 volumes. CH Beck, Munich 2005–, ISBN 978-3-406-52960-3 .
    • Vol. 6: Natzweiler and the satellite camps. In: Natzweiler, Groß-Rosen, Stutthof. ISBN 978-3-406-52966-5 , pp. 21-190.
  • Bernhard Brunner, State Center for Civic Education Baden-Württemberg / Department of Memorial Work (Ed.): On the way to a history of the Natzweiler concentration camp. State of research - sources - method. Stuttgart 2000.
  • Florence Hervé (ed.): Natzweiler-Struthof - a German concentration camp in France. Un camp nazi en France. With photos by Martin Graf. PapyRossa, Cologne 2015, ISBN 978-3-89438-597-2 .
  • Albert Hornung: Le Struthof (Camp de la Mort). Forewords by Yves Bouchard, René Stouvenel. Nouvelle Revue Critique, Paris 1945
  • François Kozlik: The mountain of horror. Side lights from the Struthof camp. With pictures attachment. SEDAL Service de Diffusion (Ed.), Strasbourg 1945. [Vmtl. the first work in German about the concentration camp after the liberation.]
  • Hans-Joachim Lang: The names of the numbers. How it was possible to identify the 86 victims of a Nazi crime. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-455-09464-3 .
  • Robert Steegmann: The Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp and its external commandos on the Rhine and Neckar 1941–1945. Metropol, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-940938-58-9 .
  • Robert Steegmann: Le Camp de Natzweiler-Struthof. Paris 2009 (French)
  • Jürgen Ziegler: Right among us. Natzweiler-Struthof: traces of a concentration camp. Hamburg 1986.
  • Patrick Wechsler: La Faculté de Médecine de la Reichsuniversität Strasbourg, 1941–1944. Diss. Med. Université Strasbourg 1991 (French)
  • Raphael Toledano: Les expériences médicales du Professeur Eugen Haagen de la Reichsuniversität Strasbourg: Faits, contexte et procès d'un médecin national-socialiste. 2 volumes. Diss. Med. University of Strasbourg, 2010 (Prix Fondation Auschwitz 2011). (French)
  • Boris Pahor : Necropolis. Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-8270-0408-X . Translated from the Slovenian by Mirella Urdih-Merkú
  • Kristian Ottosen: Natt og tåke. Histories om Natzweiler-fangene. Oslo 1989, ISBN 82-03-16108-1 (Norwegian).

To the outside commandos

  • Detlef Ernst, Klaus Riexinger: Destruction through work. The history of the Kochendorf concentration camp / external command of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. Extended edition 2003, Bad Friedrichshall 1996
  • Ulrich Haller: Forced labor and arms production in Geislingen an der Steige 1939–1945. Journal for Württemberg State History (ZWLG), 57. 1998, pp. 305–368
  • Ernst Heimes: I've only ever seen the fence. Search for the Cochem satellite camp. 4th edition Koblenz 1999
  • Ernst Heimes: Shadow people, story about the Cochem subcamp. 2nd edition Frankfurt 2005
  • Jochen Kastilan: The concentration camp in Spaichingen. In: Spaichinger Stadtchronik. Jan Thorbecke, Sigmaringen 1990.
  • Manfred Kersten, Walter Schmid: The Mauser train. Diary of an odyssey. Self-published.
  • Manfred Kersten: court minutes. ("Unofficial translation from French, partly with regard to content and extracts") from December 9, 1946 to January 1947. In the Tuttlingen district archive .
  • Hans-Joachim Lang : The names of the numbers. How it was possible to identify the 86 victims of a Nazi crime. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-455-09464-3 . (Fischer-TB, Frankfurt 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16895-8 . Awarded with: Prix ​​Fondation Auschwitz 2004)
  • Manuel Werner: Power and powerlessness of young air force helpers. An example from the Echterdingen / Filder air base and concentration camp. In: State Center for Political Education Baden-Württemberg / Educators Committee of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation Stuttgart (ed.): Through fascination for power - the fascination of power. Building blocks for the relationship between power and manipulation. Handouts for teaching. Stuttgart 2003.
  • Joanna Skibinska: The last witnesses. Conversations with survivors of the “Katzbach” satellite camp in the Adlerwerke Frankfurt am Main. Hanau 2005.
  • Christine Glauning: Delimitation and the concentration camp system: the "Desert" company and the concentration camp in Bisingen 1944/45. Metropol, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-938690-30-5 (= History of the Concentration Camps 1933–1945 , Volume 7, also a dissertation at the University of Göttingen , 2004).
  • Thomas Faltin u. a .: In the face of death: The Echterdingen subcamp 1944/45 and the suffering of the 600 prisoners. City Archives Filderstadt + Leinfelden-Echterdingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-934760-10-3 .
  • Dorothee Wein, Volker Mall, Harald Roth: Traces of Auschwitz in the Gäu - The Hailfingen / Tailfingen satellite camp. Markstein, Filderstadt 2007, ISBN 978-3-935129-31-2 .
  • Volker Mall, Harald Roth: “Everyone has a name” - memorial book for the 600 Jewish prisoners of the Hailfingen / Tailfingen satellite camp. Metropol, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-940938-39-8 .

documentary

  • The names of the 86 ( Le nom des 86 ). By Emmanuel Heyd and Raphael Toledano. Dora Films, 2014, 63 '(fr, en, de).

Web links

Commons : Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Regarding individual external units, subsidiary camps:

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Badische Zeitung , March 8, 2004.
  2. ↑ Eugen Kogon : The SS State . The system of the German concentration camps . Munich 1974, p. 242 ff.
  3. ^ A b c Editing of the Mémoire Vivante : Dossier Natzweiler. In: Mémoire Vivante - Bulletin de la Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Déportation . No. 44, Paris December 2004, p. 5, ZDB -ID 2160820-9 ( PDF file; 345 kB ( memento from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on March 19, 2016).
  4. ^ Relocation of the structures of the Natzweiler concentration camp to Guttenbach and Binau.
  5. ↑ Quoted from Markowitsch, Rautnig, 2005. p. 185.
  6. ↑ See literature and web links below.
  7. ↑ The transport lists are published in a memorial book: bddm.org and http://www.bddm.org/liv/details.php?id=I.277.#
  8. ↑ Robert Steegmann: The Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp and its external commandos on the Rhine and Neckar 1941–1945. Metropol and La Nuée Bleue, Berlin and Strasbourg 2010, ISBN 978-3-940938-58-9 , p. 308.
  9. ↑ Brief documentation on the history of forced labor and the Geislingen an der Steige subcamp (PDF), published by the Geislingen City Archives, January 27, 2001. Accessed on March 12, 2017.
  10. ↑ Memorial sites for the victims of National Socialism. A documentation. Volume I, Bonn 1995, ISBN 3-89331-208-0 , p. 38.
  11. ^ Peter Kirchesch: Air raids on Neckargerach on March 22, 1945, in "Our country. Local calendar for Neckartal , Odenwald , building land and Kraichgau . ”Verlag Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung , Heidelberg 1995, pp. 35–37.
  12. ↑ Bad Friedrichshall salt mine  ( 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. 2 pages, January 2016.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.salzwerke.de  
  13. ↑ Gedenkstaetten-bw.de ( Memento of the original from March 6, 2016 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.gedenkstaetten-bw.de
  14. ↑ Public execution in the schoolyard. Morgenweb.de , September 29, 2010.
  15. ↑ Mannheimer Morgen, March 8, 1982.
  16. ↑ Remembrance of Nazi victims in Sandhofen. Morgenweb.de , May 11, 2013.
  17. ↑ Andreas Zekorn: “Finally the moment of liberation” - The evacuation of the Spaichingen concentration camp and the camps of the “Desert” company in April 1945. In: Spaichinger Heimatbrief. Issue No. 34, Spaichingen 2016, p. 56 f. (PDF)
  18. ↑ For details see Andreas Zekorn: “Finally the moment of liberation” - The evacuation of the Spaichingen concentration camp and the camps of the “Desert” company in April 1945 . In: Stadtverwaltung Tuttlingen (ed.): Tuttlinger Heimatblätter 2016 , pp. 21–42.
  19. ↑ Daniella Seidl, 2007, p. 60.
  20. ^ "Geisenheim, Geisenheim concentration camp external command, machine factory Johannisberg GmbH". Topography of National Socialism in Hesse. (As of December 2, 2015). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).
  21. ^ Initiative against forgetting: Forced labor in the Adler works. Retrieved November 27, 2014.
  22. ↑ a b "The Züblin Company and the Compensation of the Victims". Retrieved January 23, 2017 .
  23. ↑ "Forced laborers at Züblin? Sure! Responsibility? No thanks!" Retrieved January 23, 2017 .
  24. ↑ Struthof.fr
  25. ^ Archives départementales du Bas-Rhin - archives administration pénitentiaires
  26. ^ Struthof et Schirmeck apres les nazis
  27. ^ Bärbel Nückles: War relics for tourists . In: Badische Zeitung. April 28, 2012. Retrieved May 2, 2012.
  28. ↑ Oorlogsgravenstichting, online information on the Ehrenfeld Waldfriedhof Oberrad ( memorial from December 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) in Dutch. Language, accessed May 8, 2014.
  29. ↑ Concentration camp memorials establish network of remembrance. December 22, 2018, accessed December 24, 2018 .
  30. ↑ Former Natzweiler concentration camp receives European Heritage Seal. Press release on the website of the German state of Baden-Württemberg
  31. ↑ Culture: Nine historical sites are to receive the European Heritage Label | Creative Europe. December 22, 2018, accessed December 24, 2018 .
  32. ↑ Anthony M. Webb (ed.): Trial of Wolfgang Zeuss (!), Magnus Wochner, Emil Meier, Peter Straub, Fritz Hartjenstein, Franz Berg, Werner Rohde, Emil Bruttel, Kurt from the Bruch and Harberg. (The Natzweiler Trial). William Hodge and Company, London / Edinburgh / Glasgow 1949.
  33. ↑ Pendaries: Les Procès de Rastatt (1946–1954). 1995, pp. 181-209.
  34. ↑ Pendaries: Les Procès de Rastatt (1946–1954). 1995, pp. 171-180.
  35. ↑ Archive of the Present v. July 8, 1954.
  36. ↑ DA-20429/2, documents on the judgment of December 14, 1961.
  37. ↑ Contents index ( Memento of the original from July 18, 2011 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. only for volumes 2, 4, 5, 9; each on the website of the respective volume. So not for Struthof @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.chbeck.de
  38. ↑ An early work, introduction from February 1, 1945; with photographs from the time after the liberation; Available online: Web access via the yellow box on the right, an extensive PDF file . In French.
  39. ^ "The Names of the 86" (Le nom des 86) film website. Retrieved January 26, 2018.