Memorial in the Tiergarten
The memorial in the zoo near the Lüneburg train station is reminiscent of a mass grave of 256 concentration camp prisoners , whose transport from a satellite camp of Neuengamme concentration camp in Wilhelmshaven was bombed on April 7, 1945. Up to 80 of the mostly injured and weakened prisoners who could not be transported any further were shot by their guards on April 11, 1945 and are buried here together with the victims of the bombing.
Evacuation transport
The Neuengamme subcamp " Alter Banter Weg " in Wilhelmshaven , which had existed since September 1944, was closed in April 1945. While a group of concentration camp prisoners had to march towards Hamburg on foot, around 390 sick and weakened men were brought to Mariensiel station by truck on April 3rd . This group was squeezed into four covered wagons. The guards consisted of 17 marines and the SS man Gustav Alfred Jepsen as the transport leader.
The train was moving slowly. The Weser bridge near Bremen-Huchting was destroyed. The prisoners were ferried across and loaded into five wagons; in the fifth car there were seriously ill people and several people who had already died. The wagons were coupled to a Wehrmacht supply train and, after a four-day journey, reached the Lüneburg freight yard on the morning of April 7, 1945.
bombing
At 1 p.m. there was an air alarm. At around 3 p.m., US bombers attacked the station in four waves. Four guards stayed with the train while the others took cover in the nearby forest, known as the zoo. One of the five wagons was hit directly, others were damaged and burned. Other trains that were on the sidings were also hit; including tank cars with fuel and troop trains. Slightly injured prisoners tried to escape from the danger zone. Some fled to fields, others came as far as the inner city area of Lüneburg.
After the attack, the guards rounded up the surviving inmates in a field. In doing so, they ruthlessly made use of firearms and prevented the assistance of outsiders. The inmates had to stay there for two days without any care. Only twenty-five people were taken to the court prison and received medical help there.
Two military trucks carried up to 140 survivors to Bergen-Belsen on April 9 and 10 . A smaller group - mostly the weakest prisoners - could no longer be evacuated due to a lack of transport and stayed behind on the premises.
The Gestapo instructed the commander of the Lüneburg Police to have the prisoners' bodies removed from the railway site. On April 10th and 11th, the victims' bodies were makeshift buried in the "Tiergarten", a piece of forest next to the railway tracks.
April 11th massacre
Allegedly on April 11, 1945, an SS-Unterscharführer whose name was unknown brought the order to transport leader Jepsen to kill the surviving prisoners. There is no safe accommodation and there is a risk of epidemics. It is unclear whether this was an ex-post protective claim: Jepsen himself had an interest in eliminating the witnesses who remained behind in this death march .
The 50 to 80 survivors remaining in the field, including those who had since been captured and those who had fled from prison and those who had been returned from the court prison, were shot dead by Jepsen and the marines on the evening of April 11th. The bodies were again buried in the forest the next day.
In the Lüneburger Zeitung , the official organ of the Gau Osthannover, a call appeared on April 11, 1945, in which the population was asked to participate in the search for the escaped concentration camp prisoners, to arrest them and to “render them harmless” in the event of resistance do."
After the war
Gustav Alfred Jepsen was later arrested in Denmark and in August 1946 charged with the Lüneburg Police Chief Müller and the Gestapo officer Friday before a British military court in Lüneburg. The co-defendants were acquitted and Jepsen was sentenced to life imprisonment for shooting six victims by hand. In another trial in Wilhelmshaven, Jepsen was sentenced to death for other crimes and executed on June 26, 1947 in Hameln prison. The marines involved were never on trial.
The victims, of whom only a third could be identified, were exhumed and solemnly buried in October 1945 in the "Tiergarten" area. The well-tended mass grave in the "Tiergarten" has a memorial stone that wrongly summarizes the victims under a single date of death. Even an added inscription on the board does not adequately explain the process.
Since 1990, the local VVN has been holding commemorative events at the memorial in the Tiergarten, the so-called "KZ-Friedhof", in parallel to the annual memorial events organized by the VDK on the day of the memorial in the Lüneburg Central Cemetery , to commemorate those who resisted and victims of the Nazi tyranny.
literature
- Daniel Blatman: The Death Marches 1944/45. The last chapter of the National Socialist mass murder . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-498-02127-6 , pp. 255-263
- Immo de Vries: April 11, 1945: The mass murder in Lüneburg of prisoners in the Wilhelmshaven satellite camp by SS and Wehrmacht soldiers. In: Detlef Garbe: Prisoners Between Annihilation and Liberation. The dissolution of the Neuengamme concentration camp and its satellite camps by the SS in the spring of 1945 . Bremen 2005, ISBN 3-86108-799-5 , pp. 145–153
- Immo de Vries: War crimes in Lüneburg: the mass grave in the zoo . History workshop Lüneburg, Lüneburg 2000, ISBN 3-9804521-3-1
- Hans-Erwin Zabel: The mass grave in the Lüneburg zoo . In: The Heidewanderer. Local supplement of the Allgemeine Zeitung, Uelzen . Vol. 70 (1994) No. 47-49, pp. 189-200.
- VVN Lüneburg: From the concentration camp cemetery to the rhododendron park . Lüneburg 2016.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Doc. VEJ 16/230 in: Andrea Rudorff (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (collection of sources) Volume 16 Auschwitz concentration camp 1942–1945 and the time of the death marches 1944/45 . Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-11-036503-0 , p. 717.
- ^ VVN Lüneburg: From the concentration camp cemetery to the rhododendron park , p. 56.
Coordinates: 53 ° 13 ′ 46.6 ″ N , 10 ° 25 ′ 41 ″ E