Protective custody camp Welzheim

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The Welzheim protective custody camp (police prison, Gestapo prison, colloquially also Welzheim concentration camp ) was a Gestapo camp in the Württemberg city ​​of Welzheim east of Stuttgart.

camp

In 1935, the Stuttgart Gestapo took over the former Welzheim District Court prison . The three-storey square building, which was built around 1820, was located directly behind the former old district court, which was used as the commandant's office and the camp manager's apartment, on the upper market square. The associated 1500 m² site was located between today's Schillerstrasse and Murrhardter Strasse in the middle of the city and was fenced off with a five-meter high wall.

Release card of a prisoner from the Welzheim protective custody camp . January 27, 1937

Karl Bergmann was the first prisoner and was given the number 1.

The camp had various functions, especially since foreign prisoners did not join until the beginning of the war. Among other things, many of the roughly 2,000 Jewish men who had been arrested all over Baden, Württemberg and Hohenzollern after the Night of the Reichspogrom of November 9, 1938, were brought to the Welzheim concentration camp. Many of the prisoners waited in Welzheim until it was clarified what should happen to them next. For many it was a transit camp to the Dachau concentration camp or to other concentration camps (Buchenwald, prisoner Willi Bleicher) or to the labor education camps. Others stayed only a short time for "disciplining" in Welzheim and were released again, and still others came there to "finish them off". There were also Polish prisoners who were held to have “forbidden” contacts with German women and who were hanged in their places of origin in the Württemberg region or in the Welzheim quarry; others, including six Russian prisoners, came there specifically to be shot. The prisoners worked in columns in factories, in the field, in forestry or with farmers. The two prisoner tailors also worked for the private cloakroom of the Stuttgart management staff, the security guards or their wives / households. A small number of prisoners, namely a few carpenters, were kept in Welzheim the whole time, where they made furniture (desks) in the camp carpentry, among other things, or carpentry work for the women's labor education camp established in 1942 in neighboring Rudersberg. In the camp joinery, a special fall staircase for hanging was made according to a drawing supplied from Stuttgart, while a transportable gallows was built in the prison yard, which was also used to drive overland to hangings.

resolution

The Welzheim camp was evacuated on April 25, 1945. The prisoners were driven in forced marches under strong guard towards Lake Constance with the goal of the Ötztal Alps . No prisoner should fall alive into the hands of the advancing Allied troops . At the beginning of May 1945 the last camp guards fled after they had burned all the files. Since this also happened in the Gestapo Stuttgart, there are hardly any documents left today.

When a prisoner was asked after 1945 whether there was a torture chamber in Welzheim , he said that the whole camp was one torture chamber.

Legacy of an Unknown Inmate

When the former concentration camp building was demolished, a wooden board was found on which the following slogan was carved:

The castle will soon jump / no matter how barred it may be / go your way / upright and unshaken

Commanders

The founder and commander from 1935 to 1940 was Karl Buck , SS number 490187, Oberleutnant a. D. He never laid hands on an inmate himself and was therefore considered a so-called desk perpetrator . His outward appearance was similar to that of Hitler . By loudly verbally abusing inmates, he gave the signal for the guards to beat the inmates. In 1945 he was imprisoned, sentenced to prison and several times to death, but released in 1955; until the end of his life in 1977 he was a chicken farmer.

The commandant from 1940 to 1945 was Hermann Eberle , an SS member since 1934 . He came to Welzheim in 1935 and took over the management when Buck was transferred. Imprisoned in 1945 and sentenced to 13 years' imprisonment in 1947, he committed suicide in 1949 during a trial that lasted several days.

Known inmates

literature

  • Roland Maier, Sigrid Brüggemann: The role of the Welzheim Police Prison in the Third Reich , in: Historischer Verein Welzheimer Wald (ed.), Annual Issue 2015, No. 15, pp. 65–82.
  • Friedrich Schlotterbeck : The darker the night. Memories of a German Worker 1933–1945 . Europa Verlag, Zurich 1948 (new edition: Stuttgart 1986, with an afterword by Christa Wolf ).
  • Fritz Kaspar (i.e. Hans Gasparitsch u. A.): The fates of group G. According to notes and letters . New Life Publishing House, Berlin 1960, 1985.
  • Julius Schätzle: Stations to Hell . Röderbergverlag, Frankfurt am Main 1974.
  • Gerd Keller, Graham Wilson: Welzheim concentration camp. 2 documentations . Publisher City of Welzheim undated (after 1980).
  • Hermann Wenz: "I shoot you like a dog!" Hermann Eberle , in: Wolfgang Proske (Ed.): Perpetrators, helpers, free riders. Nazi victims from the Ostalb , Münster and Ulm, 2010.
  • Ingrid Bauz, Sigrid Brüggemann, Roland Maier (eds.): The Secret State Police in Württemberg and Hohenzollern , Stuttgart 2013, p. 134 ff. ISBN 3-89657-138-9 .
  • Paul Sauer, Sonja Hosseinzadeh: Jewish life through the ages . 170 years of the Israelite religious community - 50 years of the new synagogue in Stuttgart. Bleicher Verlag, Gerlingen 2002.
  • LG Stuttgart, September 25, 1950 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German convictions for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966 , Vol. VII, edited by Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs and CF Rüter . University Press, Amsterdam 1971, No. 245, pp. 521-533 End-Stage Crimes, War Crimes

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Welzheimer Zeitung of April 9, 2015, page B1
  2. ↑ Warning against right: And lead us straight to the Third Reich ( Memento from February 11, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) About the work and methods of Bucks.
  3. ↑ Cf. u. a. Schätzle, there without proof of this old age employment; see. on this the relativizing comments.
  4. ↑ See Proske et al. a.

Coordinates: 48 ° 52 ′ 39 "  N , 9 ° 38 ′ 4"  E