Lackenbach gypsy detention camp

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The Gypsy -Anhaltelager Lackenbach in Burgenland served the imprisonment and exploitation of Roma through forced labor . It was set up in November 1940 at or on the "Schaflerhof", Lackenbach , a former Esterházy estate, 15 kilometers west of Deutschkreutz and was under the control of the criminal police control center , which also provided the camp administration officials. The highest number of inmates in the camp was over 2,300. As in all camps of this type, the treatment was extremely inhuman; There were practically no sanitary facilities for the inmates. From here, Roma were deported to concentration camps , other assembly camps (ghettos) or extermination camps. A release was not intended.

Camp management

The first camp manager in Lackenbach was SS-Untersturmführer Hans Kollross, who died of typhus in January 1942 . He was followed by SS-Obersturmführer Franz Langmüller (sentenced in 1948 to a year of heavy imprisonment for crimes of torture and mistreatment as well as the crime against humanity and human dignity, but released after two and a half months) and from September 1, 1942 SS-Obersturmführer Fritz Eckschlag, the was replaced a year later by SS-Untersturmführer Julius Brunner.

place

The camp was located on the Schaflerhof area on the east side of Lackenbach (and not in the Meierhof next to the castle). The area was built on with a settlement of barracks and is marked on maps as "Hasenbergg". The camp stretched from today's memorial to the cemetery. There is no trace of the former manor or the camp barracks, the area is now partially used as a settlement area.

"Gypsy detention camp" - "concentration camp"

Despite the term “ detention camp ” used elsewhere in Austria at the time of Austrofascism (1932–1938), which mostly marks a gradual difference to the National Socialist concentration camps , the conditions in the Lackenbach camp corresponded to those of the concentration camps. In the Lackenbach camp, the prisoners had to make their own living through forced labor, comparable to the concentration camps, and also had to support the inmates who were unable to work. Many people held prisoner here were deported to other concentration camps and murdered there. When the camp was founded, the SS intended to use it as part of the Porajmos , the systematic genocide of the National Socialists against Roma and Sinti. Nevertheless, the former prisoners were refused the compensation payments to which they were entitled by Austria until well into the 1980s, with the explanation that the camp was only a preventive police measure for the " preventive fight against crime ".

Part of the camp also served as a collection camp for Jewish Austrian prisoners .

living conditions

Soon after the “ Anschluss ”, Austrian Roma and Sinti were captured and sent to various concentration camps, and subsequently to labor camps in Austria. The Lackenbach camp was the largest of these camps and was established on November 23, 1940. The number of inmates usually ranged from 200 to 900, with a third of them children. Due to mass admissions from the spring of 1941, the number rose to around 2000; the peak was reached on November 1, 1941 with 2,335 people.

The prisoners were housed in former stables and barns on straw beds. There was too little water and no sanitary facilities. When a typhus epidemic broke out in the winter of 1941/42, the prisoners were left to their fate; there was no medical care, the camp was closed from the outside and those prisoners who had to do forced labor outside the camp were also brought back and exposed to infection. When attempting to flee, the order to shoot was given. The camp manager Kollross was one of the victims of typhus. A typhus epidemic in 1942 also claimed numerous victims. A total of 237 people died in the camp between 1940 and 1945. Housing and medical barracks as well as sanitary facilities were only built after the epidemics.

Those families who had been instructed with their caravans and were allowed to continue to live in them had somewhat better conditions.

Even minor violations of the camp regulations (such as smoking or speaking bans) resulted in draconian punishments such as flogging, standing on roll calls, heavy detention, deprivation of food, solitary confinement or being sent to a concentration camp. Only under the camp leaders Eckschlag and Brunner did the situation of the inmates improve slightly through the abolition of the caning punishment.

When the camp was liberated by the Red Army in April 1945, 300 to 400 prisoners were still living there. The camp administration had withdrawn and left the detainees behind, spared them an evacuation march with many fatalities.

Forced labor

Initially, the prisoners worked in the camp, in the camp's fields or in a sawmill. Due to the war-related labor shortage, they were increasingly used outside of the camp, for example in building the Reichsautobahn , building roads, regulating streams, building weir, in brickworks, in mills, in factories, in taverns and on farms and also when setting up the radar display " Selma "on the Sonnenberg at chert , the highest elevation of the Leithagebirges , consisting of three positioning devices of the types FuMG 401A-LZ" Freya "and four to five" Y-direction finders "(over 20 meters high towers for viewing of aircraft). Children and young people were “given” to farms and forest companies. The prisoners had to work eight to eleven hours a day and received 10% of their wages (around 5 to 10 Reichsmarks ) as pocket money; the rest went to the warehouse. Since labor was important, the elderly and children were particularly at risk of deportation .

Fatalities, commemoration

Memorial for the victims of the camp in Lackenbach

At the end of 1941, 2,000 camp inmates (mainly those unable to work) were deported to the Litzmannstadt ghetto and, from 1943, also to the " Auschwitz Gypsy Camp " in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. 35 to 40 children were murdered in the camp itself with poisoned milk.

A boulder, for example at the former entrance to the camp, serves as a memorial.

The six survivors included Rudolf Sarközi , later chairman of the Cultural Association of Austrian Roma , Karl Stojka and Ceija Stojka .

See also

literature

  • Rudolf Sarközi : Roma. Austrian ethnic group: From persecution to recognition . Drava, 2008 ISBN 978-3-85435-555-7 .
  • Erika Thurner : Short story of the National Socialist gypsy camp in Lackenbach (1940 to 1945) . Eisenstadt 1984
  • Susanne Uslu-Pauer: “Displaced injustice”: a discussion of the people's court proceedings (1945–1955) in connection with Nazi crimes against Roma and Sinti with special consideration of the Lackenbach camp in Burgenland (description - analysis - effects after 1945) . Diploma thesis, University of Vienna 2002
  • Gerda Wagner: The situation of the “Gypsies” in Burgenland from 1938 to 1945, with special consideration of the Lackenbach camp . Diploma thesis, University of Vienna 1999
  • Florian Freund, Gerhard Baumgartner & Harald Greifeneder: Asset deprivation, restitution and compensation for the Roma and Sinti. Edited by the Austrian Commission of Historians. (The book deals specifically with Burgenland) Oldenbourg, Munich 2004 ISBN 3486567942 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Cornelia Sulzbacher: The "gypsy camp" Lackenbach in the Austrian Burgenland
  2. ↑ a b Gerhard Baumgartner, Florian Freund: Roma Politics in Austria, p. 30 ( Memento from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 876 kB) - accessed on December 16, 2008.
  3. ↑ Baumgartner, Freund: Roma Politics in Austria, p. 31; Sulzbacher even speaks of 250 to 300 typhus victims.

Coordinates: 47 ° 35 ′ 33 ″  N , 16 ° 28 ′ 0 ″  E