Black way camp
The Schwarzer Weg camp in Wilhelmshaven was used from the beginning of August 1941 to October 1944 as a Wehrmacht prisoner-of-war camp for Soviet prisoners of war and from late 1944 to May 1945 as a Gestapo penal camp for Dutch police prisoners who were used as slave labor .
history
The Schwarzer Weg camp was used as a prisoner of war camp from August 4, 1941 to October 25, 1944 and occupied with prisoners of war from the Soviet Union . From August 4, 1941, the prisoner-of-war work command No. 6 of the Stalag (main camp) XD (310) from Wietzendorf was housed there, from which the first prisoners came without exception. Soviet prisoners of war who had previously been registered in the Stalag XB in Sandbostel were assigned later . From December 1, 1941, the work command with the number 413 was administratively subordinate to the Stalag XC in Nienburg . The guards were provided by state rifle associations of the Wehrmacht, in this case soldiers from the 6th company of LSchB 679. The highest known occupancy of work detail 6 or 413 was 699 prisoners (number dates from early 1942).
Inadequate nutrition in the face of hard work, hunger, cold, illness and the illegal treatment by the Wehrmacht led, as in all main camps and most of the Soviet work commandos in Germany, especially in November / December 1941 in Wilhelmshaven to a mass death among Soviet prisoners .
According to the official burial list of the city of Wilhelmshaven, a total of 197 Soviet prisoners of war are buried in the two municipal cemeteries in Wilhelmshaven, 100 of them in the Ehrenfriedhof and 97 in the Aldenburg cemetery. Only in the cemetery of honor does a small note on the commemorative plaque at the cemetery entrance as well as a ground-level commemorative plaque in the rear area (field C) indicate that 100 Soviet prisoners of war are buried there. At the Aldenburg cemetery there is no reference to the Soviet prisoners of war resting there, so the total number of almost 200 Soviet prisoners of war buried in Wilhelmshaven was and is largely unknown. Most of the 197 people buried died in the Wilhelmshaven work detachment (at least 153 dead), some of them in the neighboring work detachments with Soviet prisoners of war in Sande (at least 19 dead), Breddewarden (at least 7 dead), Mariensiel (at least 3 dead) and Bockhorn (at least 4 dead, another 23 dead from this work detachment were buried in Bockhorn).
The results of the research carried out by the regional historian Holger Frerichs from Varel to correct and supplement the official list of graves are available in the Wilhelmshaven City Archives. The research was carried out with the participation of the Wilhelmshaven City Archives , the Lower Saxony Memorial Funding Department of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation in Celle and the Saxon Memorials Foundation in Dresden - using the personal documents of the Soviet prisoners of war. For this purpose, the online database OBD Memorial of all Soviet soldiers who fell or went missing during or after the Second World War and the database of the Saxon Memorials Foundation were used. By evaluating the personal documents and further archival research as part of a research project by the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation in Celle, some aspects of the history of the Soviet prisoners of war in Wilhelmshaven from 1941 to 1944 could be more intensively processed and documented.
At the end of 1944 / beginning of 1945 the camp was converted to accommodate forced laborers from the Netherlands . The approximately 1,000 Dutch came mainly from the northern provinces of Groningen, Friesland and Drenthe. They were forced to clear rubble and build bunkers and were used at the Wilhelmshaven navy shipyard .
The conditions in the barracks and the reprisals by the guards led to a high mortality rate with up to five deaths a day.
Only on May 6, 1945, the camp was liberated by Polish military units.
memorial
On October 12, 1990, at the suggestion of the Wilhelmshaven memorial initiative, a memorial with two rectangular granite slabs was inaugurated on the former camp site, which was later expanded to include a commemorative plaque.
literature
- Norbert Credé: The “Black Way” camp. A Gestapo prison camp in Wilhelmshaven between the labor education camp and the concentration camp. In: Memorial Circular 40, (1991)
- Holger Frerichs: Forgotten victims of the war of extermination: prisoners of war in the Schwarzer Weg camp. In: Wilhelmshavener Zeitung, supplement "Heimat am Meer", No. 25/2011, December 17, 2011
- Holger Frerichs: Forced Labor - Hunger - Death. Work detachments, camps and graves of Soviet prisoners of war in Wilhelmshaven and Friesland 1941-45. Volume 4 of the Wilhelmshaven Contributions to City and Cultural History, published by the City of Wilhelmshaven (City Archives, Culture Office). Wilhelmshaven 2017 , with over 200 illustrations, ISBN 978-3-941929-20-3 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Holger Frerichs: Forgotten victims of the war of extermination: prisoners of war in the camp Schwarzer Weg. In: Wilhelmshavener Zeitung, supplement "Heimat am Meer", No. 25/2011, December 17, 2011
- ↑ OBD Memorial - The online database of all Soviet soldiers who fell or went missing during or after World War II (Russian) ( Memento of the original from May 10, 2012 on WebCite ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
Coordinates: 53 ° 32 ′ 10.1 ″ N , 8 ° 8 ′ 23.7 ″ E