Hohenbruch concentration camp

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The Hohenbruch concentration camp near Hohenbruch (until 1938 Lauknen , since 1946 Gromowo / Гро́мово ) in East Prussia was a concentration camp that existed from August 1939 to January 1945 and was subordinate to the Gestapo in Königsberg .

history

In the early days, just before the start of the Second World War, mainly members of the Polish minority in Germany were imprisoned here: members and activists of the Union of Poles in Germany ( Związek Polaków w Niemczech ), representatives of the Polish intelligentsia from Warmia , Masuria , Powiśle and Kujawien , including teachers, priests, customs officers and students of the Königsberg University. On August 25, 1939, the director of the Polish school in Marienwerder, Władysław Gębik , the teachers and the students were arrested by the police and the SS. While the students were being released at the end of September, the director and teachers came to Hohenbruch. Seweryn Pieniężny, owner and editor-in-chief of Gazeta Olsztyńska [Allensteiner Zeitung] - the mouthpiece of the Polish minority in East Prussia - and a leading member of the ›Bund der Poles in Deutschland‹, was arrested by the Gestapo in September 1939 and taken to the camp. On February 24, 1940, he was shot with three other prisoners. The imprisonment and murder of Poles living in Germany took place until May 1940 in connection with the so-called intelligentsia , in which members of the Polish upper class and leading activists of the Polish minority were "turned off" at the beginning of the war. The Gestapo had previously registered members of the Polish minority in Germany in order to be able to immediately take them into protective custody as enemies of the state in the event of war.

The prisoners also included Germans, Jews, Russians, Lithuanians, Czechs, Belgians, Italians, French and members of other nationalities. By 1943 at the latest, East Prussian Sinti who had been transferred from the Contiener Weg Gypsy camp in Königsberg were also imprisoned in Hohenbruch. Many prisoners were shot here.

In April 2006 a memorial for the victims of the Hohenbruch concentration camp was erected in what is now Kaliningrad Oblast in the forest near the Curonian Lagoon between the villages of Polessk and Slavsk . The text on the memorial plaque was written by the Polish memorial institution - Council for the Preservation of Remembrance of Struggle and Martyrdom ( Rada Ochrony Pamięci Walk i Męczeństwa ).

source

  • Gazeta Wyborcza, Olsztyn Local Edition, April 21, 2006, p. 5.

literature

Web links

Coordinates: 54 ° 58 ′ 34.1 ″  N , 21 ° 24 ′ 47.2 ″  E