Westerbork transit camp

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Site plan (1944)
1943 prisoner postcard from Westerbork concentration camp

The police transit camp for Jews in Westerbork was one of the two central transit camps (concentration camp assembly camps) used by the National Socialist occupiers in the Netherlands for the deportation of Dutch Jews or German Jews staying in the Netherlands to other concentration and extermination camps . In the Netherlands the term Kamp W. or Concentratiekamp W. is common. Before it was used as a concentration camp, the Dutch interned Jews who had fled the Reich here.

prehistory

Shortly before the Second World War , the “Central Refugee Camp Westerbork” was founded by the Dutch administration in the province of Drenthe to take care of the large number of refugees, especially Jews from Germany and Austria, outside the Dutch cities and villages. The Dutch government at the time, ostensibly to preserve friendship with Germany, closed the borders to refugees on December 15, 1938, thus branding them as undesirable foreigners who should not be integrated under any circumstances. The refugees were to be collected centrally in a camp that was decided to be set up in February 1939.

Originally the camp was to be built near Elspeet , but Queen Wilhelmina considered the distance of twelve kilometers between the camp and her summer palace " Het Loo " to be too short. The ANWB was also against it, as the Veluwe should remain open to tourists. So the Amerveld op der Drentsche Heide near Hooghalen , ten kilometers north of the village of Westerbork , was chosen .

On October 9, 1939, the first 22 Jewish internees from a group of more than 900 German Jews who had tried in vain to flee from Hamburg to Cuba on the St. Louis ship arrived .

German transit camp

Commander Gemmeker and Ferdinand from the Fünten , head of the central emigration office , Christmas 1942 Westerbork concentration camp

After the invasion of the German Wehrmacht on May 10, 1940, Kamp Westerbork continued to be used as part of the occupation policy. As far as they reported or were arrested, all Jewish Germans and Austrians who fled to the Netherlands were arrested here. It was not until July 1, 1942, that the Central Refugee Camp Westerbork, which was still administered in the Netherlands, officially became the "Police Jewish transit camp Kamp Westerbork" under direct German administration. This was related to the beginning of deportations from the Netherlands on June 15 to the extermination camps . The Westerbork transit camp was the place where the SS assembled almost all transports. The transports from all over the Netherlands to the transit camp began on July 14th . In addition to the predominantly Jewish camp inmates, Sinti and Roma and resistance fighters were also held in the camp. Almost all of them were taken away by train. Initially, the prisoners got out at Hooghalen station and walked the seven-kilometer route to the camp. From October 1942, Nederlandse Spoorwegen built a siding into the warehouse, which connected it with the Meppel – Groningen railway line .

Jews being transported to Auschwitz, around 1943
Train direction sign "Westerbork – Auschwitz", Nationaal Archief

Every Tuesday a train from Westerbork drove a large group of prisoners via Assen , Groningen and the Nieuweschans border station "east", mostly to the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibór extermination camps . The trip, organized by the Deutsche Reichsbahn , took about three days. The train was operated by the Nederlandse Spoorwegen as far as Nieuweschans and taken over by the Reichsbahn.

Between 1942 and 1944, more than 107,000 Jews were deported from Westerbork by train. Only about 5,000 of them survived and were able to return. The Westerbork transit camp was the starting point for around 101,000 of the 107,000 deported from the Netherlands to the German Reich. The trains had the following destinations: Auschwitz (57,800 deportees; 65 trains), Sobibor (34,313 deportees; 19 trains), Bergen-Belsen (3,724 deportees; 8 trains) and Theresienstadt (4,466 deportees; 6 trains).

The first camp commandant was Erich Deppner in July and August 1942 . On September 1, 1942, Josef Hugo Dischner became his successor. On October 12, 1942, Dischner was replaced by SS-Obersturmführer Albert Konrad Gemmeker . In 1944 the concentration camp commandant commissioned a film about the concentration camp, but it was never completed. Filmmaker Harun Farocki put together the film Postponement - Documentary Scenes from a Jewish Transit Camp (2007) from the footage .

Kurt Schlesinger was the head of the Jewish security service with Heinz Todtmann as deputy. Her main task was the administration of the prisoner register and the creation of the deportation lists. Schlesinger took advantage of his leadership position to protect his German-Jewish prison staff from deportation and to put the Dutch-Jewish inmates on the deportation lists as a priority. He regularly took money, valuables and sexual favors in exchange for protection from deportation or for better deportation destinations such as Theresienstadt instead of Auschwitz. The heads of the corrupt German-Jewish security service in Westerbork were never called to account.

Among the victims are well-known names: Etty Hillesum was imprisoned in Westerbork before her deportation. In 1943 she was deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp and murdered there. For the philosopher Edith Stein , who was canonized by Pope John Paul II and her sister Rosa , who had worked in the Carmelite monastery in Echt-Susteren , Westerbork was one of the last stops on their way to the murder in Auschwitz.

Anne Frank had been interned in the camp's penal barracks from August 8, 1944, until she was first deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on the last train on September 3, 1944. The barrack in which Anne Frank was housed in Westerbork was probably destroyed by arson in July 2009. It was dismantled after the war and used as a barn on a farm in Veendam municipality .

The last deportation train to Auschwitz left on September 3, 1944. On April 12, 1945, Westerbork was liberated by Canadian soldiers . At that time there were still around 900 Jewish prisoners in the camp. The camp then came under Dutch administration. The former prisoners had to stay in the camp for weeks before they were allowed to return home.

After the war

After the war, the camp was used by the Dutch authorities for a number of years to detain NSB members and collaborators without trial, including former camp manager Gemmeker. Shortly afterwards it was converted into a military warehouse. In 1951, Kamp Westerbork was established as a residence for soldiers from the Dutch East Indies and the Moluccas . It was named "Schattenberg" after a prehistoric burial mound in the area. The first Moluccas arrived there on March 22, 1951. They had arrived in Rotterdam the previous day on the Kota Inten ship. In 1970 the last families left the camp. It was canceled afterwards.

At the historic end of the rail line to the warehouse, Queen Juliana unveiled the Westerbork National Monument in 1970.

Memorial center

A memorial center has been located near the former camp since 1983, where the history of the Westerbork transit camp is presented. The site of the former camp is now an open area in the middle of a forest area. Triangular stones mark the positions of the former barracks and tracks.

Today radio telescopes are located on part of the camp and in the vicinity of the camp .

The monument "De 102,000 stenen" (The 102,000 Stones), which was built on the initiative of former camp prisoners, is located on the former roll call square . The 102,000 stones stand for the 102,000 people who were deported from Westerbork and did not return. The stones are of different heights. The monument thus not only shows the large number of people who were murdered, but also emphasizes the individuality of each individual victim. On most of the stones there are stars of David , which symbolize the Jewish victims. A flame can be found on about 200 stones. These stones represent the Roma and Sinti who were deported from Westerbork. The stones, on which no symbol is attached, stand for the resistance fighters who were deported from Westerbork. The special feature of the monument is that the stones reflect a cartography of the Netherlands from a bird's eye view.

See also

Movie

In 1944 the Jewish cameraman Rudolf Breslauer, who was captured by the SS, made a film about the concentration camp for several months on behalf of the concentration camp commandant - probably as an information film for official visitors to the SS facility in the Netherlands. A model of the camp was also set up there so that visitors could get an immediate impression. Even then, a graphic showed how many prisoners were deported "to the East" and how many to "Theresienstadt". The 90 minutes of recovered film material remained uncut fragments, which, unlike the film scenes from the Theresienstadt concentration camp, lack direct propaganda intent. The soundless images are extraordinary, including what is probably the only film recording of the start of a deportation train to Auschwitz . One of the intertitles that has been preserved and which was intended for the film reads: “For two years the same picture has been repeated over and over again: TRANSPORT.” The cameraman Rudolf Breslauer was deported to Auschwitz and murdered there. The Berlin director Harun Farocki assembled a 40-minute film from this material in 2007. In 2012 the German director Adnan G. Koese shot the 30-minute documentary Fred Spiegel - Witness of Truth together with the cameraman and music producer Edgar Hellwig ; a large part of the scenes were shot on the site of the former Westerbork camp.

literature

  • AH Paape: Herinneringscentrum Kamp Westerbork . Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdokumentatie, Amsterdam 1984 (trilingual: Dutch - German - English).
  • Fred Schwarz: Trains on the wrong track . Verlag der Apfel, Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-85450-038-6 .
  • Maria Goudsblom-Oestreicher and Erhard Roy-Wiehn (eds.): Felix Hermann Oestreicher. A Jewish doctor's calendar. Through Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen to Tröbitz. Concentration camp diary 1943–1945 . Hartung-Gorre-Verlag, Konstanz 2000, ISBN 3-89649-411-2 .
  • Anna Hájková : The Westerbork Police Transit Camp . In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (Ed.): Terror in the West. National Socialist camps in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg 1940–1945 , Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 978-3-936411-53-9 , pp. 217–248.
  • Andreas Pflock: On forgotten tracks. A guide to memorials in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg . Published by the Federal Agency for Civic Education , Bonn 2006.
  • Philip Mechanicus : In the depot - diary from Westerbork . Edition Tiamat, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-923118-83-X .
  • Coenraad JF Stuldreher: German concentration camps in the Netherlands - Amersfoort, Westerbork, Herzogenbusch . In: Wolfgang Benz (Red.): Dachauer Hefte 5 - The forgotten camps , Munich 1994, ISBN 3-423-04634-1 .
  • Israel Gutman (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. The persecution and murder of the European Jews. Piper Verlag, Munich / Zurich 1998, Vol. 3: Q – Z , ISBN 3-492-22700-7 .
  • Jacob Boas: Boulevard des misères: the story of transit camp Westerbork Archon Books, Hamden, Conn. 1985, ISBN 0-208-01977-4 .
  • Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Labor education camps, ghettos, youth protection camps, police detention camps, special camps, gypsy camps, forced labor camps: history of the National Socialist concentration camps. Volume 9, Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 978-3-406-57238-8 .
  • Hans-Dieter Arntz : Experiences of a German Jew in the Dutch Westerbork Camp (1942–1944) . In: Ders .: The last Jewish elder from Bergen-Belsen. Josef Weiss - worthy in an unworthy environment . Helios Verlag, Aachen 2012, ISBN 978-3-86933-082-2 , pp. 75-190.
  • Pim Griffioen: Westerbork. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 6: Ta-Z. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2015, ISBN 978-3-476-02506-7 , pp. 379–383.

Web links

Commons : Westerbork transit camp  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Israel Gutman (ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. The persecution and murder of the European Jews . Piper, Munich 1998, Vol. 3, pp. 1577f.
  2. The memorial book at the Federal Archives (Germany) allows searches for victims with various search terms, as long as the data records have already been entered. At the end of 2019, the system reported 797 people with the deportation location Westerbork; with a time limit (i.e. if the camp administrators even noted a date) from July 15, 1942 to September 1944, there are 312 people. Online . An overview of the 797 people allows in particular to see the date of their move to the Netherlands, often 1936/1937, which means that German Jews felt safe in the country at the time. They had not expected their later internment by the country's authorities.
  3. Woodhouse, Patrick .: Etty Hillesum: a life transformed . Continuum, London 2009, ISBN 978-1-84706-426-4 .
  4. ^ Anne Frank barracks burned down - police are investigating, Spiegel-online, September 20, 2009
  5. ^ AH Paape: Herinneringscentrum Kamp Westerbork . Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdokumentatie, Amsterdam 1984, Chapter 26: Westerbork .
  6. ^ The transmitter 3sat about the film

Coordinates: 52 ° 55 ′ 0 ″  N , 6 ° 36 ′ 25 ″  E