Celle massacre

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The Celle massacre , euphemistically called "Celle Hare Hunt" , was an end- stage crime . At least 170 concentration camp prisoners fell victim to him on April 8, 1945 near Celle . An evacuation transport had been bombed, after which the surviving prisoners were initially released, then pursued and finally murdered indiscriminately.

Evacuation transport

When the Allies approached on April 7, 1945, the SS assembled an evacuation transport in the Salzgitter-Drütte subcamp with the destination of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp . There were also forced laborers a bearing of Salzgitter-Bad contracted, and there were more prisoners from the concentration camp Holzen (works with Eschershausen). On the night of April 8th, 3800 to 4500 men, women and young people were transported away by train. The train reached the Celle freight yard in the afternoon.

Before the journey could continue as planned in the evening, a heavy air raid on Celle began. The train was hit too. According to some information, more than half of the prisoners were killed in this air raid; others think a number between 400 and 1000 is more likely.

Hunt the prisoners

Surviving prisoners fled to a nearby wooded area, the Neustädter Holz , or turned up in the city area. In search of protection, food and civilian clothes, some of the refugees broke into shops and private houses, the residents of which were in the air raid shelter. While some initially remained undisturbed or were allowed to go, others were immediately driven away by the locals.

The survivors of the SS escort unit guarded captured prisoners and presumably did not take part in the subsequent combing operation. A Wehrmacht company and an SS unit stationed nearby reinforced the local police. The assembled forces received orders to arrest the inmates. Anyone who plundered, resisted or fled should be shot immediately. The immediate shooting was justified with the instruction on duty to post . Shots and screams could be heard until late at night. By midnight, most of the surviving inmates were rounded up on a sports field. Civilians and Volkssturm men took part in the search in houses and gardens that followed on April 9 ; they killed or killed some inmates. They executed 30 prisoners as looters.

In Neustädter Holz, where many prisoners had fled, the search lasted until April 10; firearms were used. Some prisoners managed to stay hidden until the Allied liberators arrived . Others held the population and handed them over to German armed forces units.

The action led to the re-arrest of around 1,100 prisoners. According to older information, 200 to 300 prisoners were probably shot; A minimum of 170 massacre victims is considered certain.

Further process

For unexplained reasons, the decimated SS guard left some of the prisoners to the Wehrmacht and drove about 500 (according to other information about 2000) on to Bergen-Belsen. On this death march , the SS shot exhausted prisoners who could no longer march along the road.

The other group stayed in a vacated barracks in Celle. The responsibility for this “improvised concentration camp” was given to a captain responsible for prisoner-of-war affairs and the city administration, who were supposed to provide food and medical care for the prisoners. This was not done or only inadequately done. When the city was surrendered without a fight on April 12, 1945, the British troops found hundreds of unserved people, including many dying and dead. They immediately sent 162 of the liberated to an auxiliary hospital.

According to Daniel Blatman, only 1,500 of the prisoners on the transport lived to see the Liberation Day.

reaction

In Celle, British soldiers met for the first time a large number of concentration camp prisoners of various nationalities, who were half-starved and held captive between the dying and the dead in a completely neglected state. This put a serious strain on the relationship between the occupiers and the civilian population.

Investigations led from December 2, 1947 to the "Celle Massacre Trial" before a British "High Court of the Control Commission" in the Kaiserin-Auguste-Viktoria-Gymnasium in Celle, which was continued in April and May 1948 in Hanover and again in Celle. Three defendants were sentenced to death, four received prison terms of between four and ten years, and seven were acquitted. The death sentences were later overturned or converted to prison terms; all those found guilty were released early by the end of 1952. The last case was closed in 2007.

Displacement and processing

Monument in the Celler Park on the Trift
Inscription at the foot of the tree

The victims of the air attack on the freight yard were buried in bomb craters. Only 33 of them had previously been identified by their warehouse number. In 1946 they began to look for graves in Neustädter Holz and on the road to Bergen-Belsen. Of the 324 shot or slain victims who were buried in the forest cemetery, only 65 could be identified.

In 1949, a “resting place for victims of the Second World War” was set up in the forest cemetery, which did not provide any further information about the murder of hundreds of concentration camp prisoners. Up until 1978, local historical publications gave accounts that mentioned “a large number of civilians and countless prisoners in a concentration camp” as victims of the bomb attack, but omitted further incidents.

In the early 1980s there was a growing interest in investigating what was going on. In 1989 this led to the expertise of a specialist historian and in 1992 the erection of a monument between the train station and the city center with an inscription that is not limited to depicting the air raid. This monument created by Johnny Lucius , an iron frame with a writing tablet, which encompasses a gravel bed with a beech tree , is a little off the beaten path. Due to the way it was built, the site is only recognizable as a monument on closer inspection, especially the plaque.

"The steel square symbolizes the endless path of suffering, the beech the hope for a more humane future."

- Interpretation on the website www.celle.de / Denkmäler

The work is the result of a competition announced by the Celle city council, as a memorial plaque originally planned for the Celle train station was not approved by the German Federal Railroad .

Musical history culture

The German punk band Alarmsignal from Celle has musically processed the Celle massacre on their album "Attaque".

Similar events

literature

  • Reinhard Rohde / Tim Wegener, brochure "Celle under National Socialism", Celle 2007, 80 pages, pdf edition
  • Mijndert Bertram: April 8, 1945. Celle - an air raid, a mass murder and the memory of it. In: Detlef Garbe, Carmen Lange: Inmates between extermination and liberation: The dissolution of the Neuengamme concentration camp and its satellite camps by the SS in spring 1945. Bremen 2005, ISBN 3-86108-799-5 , pp. 127–144.
  • Bernhard Strebel : Celle April 1945 revisited: An American bomb attack, German massacre of concentration camp prisoners and a British court case. Celler's contributions to regional and cultural history 38. Bielefeld 2008, ISBN 978-3-89534-768-9 .
  • Daniel Blatman: The Death Marches 1944/45. The last chapter of the National Socialist mass murder. From the Hebrew v. Markus Lemke . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2011, ISBN 3-498-02127-3 - pp. 435–445: The massacre in Celle
  • Wilfried Köppen: "Administrative assistance". Until Celle was without Jews , in: Werner Holtfort, Norbert Kandel, Wilfried Köppen, Ulrich Vultejus: Behind the Facades. Stories from a German City , Göttingen 1982, pp. 97-102.
  • Tim Wegener, The Celle "Hasenjagd". Representation, memory, memory and processing, online text, 2003

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tim Wegener (University of Hanover): The Celler "Hasenjagd". Representation, memory, memory and processing. In: www.celle-im-nationalsozialismus.de. 2003, accessed March 24, 2009 .
  2. ↑ Hölty students present exhibition on the Celle hunt . In: Cellesche Zeitung . April 8, 2008.
  3. ↑ Lukas Sander: A city remembers. In: www.taz.de. March 24, 2009. Retrieved March 24, 2009 .
  4. ↑ so Daniel Blatman: The death marches 1944/45. The last chapter of the National Socialist mass murder . Reinbek / Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-498-02127-6 , p. 437.
  5. ^ Bernhard Strebel: Celle April 1945 revisited. Bielefeld 2008, ISBN 978-3-89534-768-9 , p. 115 considers a number between 400 and 1,000 to be more likely.
  6. ^ Bernhard Strebel: Celle April 1945 revisited. P. 64.
  7. ^ Mijndert Bertram: April 8, 1945. Celle - an air raid, a mass murder and the memory of it. In: Detlef Garbe, Carmen Lange: Prisoners between annihilation and liberation. Bremen 2005, ISBN 978-3-86108-799-1 , p. 133.
  8. ^ Bernhard Strebel: Celle April 1945 revisited. , P. 115.
  9. ^ Bernhard Strebel: Celle April 1945 revisited. P. 119.
  10. ^ Daniel Blatman: The Death Marches 1944/45. The last chapter of the National Socialist mass murder . Reinbek / Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-498-02127-6 , p. 443.
  11. ^ Bernhard Strebel: Massacre of concentration camp inmates in Celle in April 1945 and their aftermath. S. 146. In: Oliver Wrochem (Ed.): The Neuengamme concentration camp and its satellite camps. Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-940938-87-9 , pp. 136-150.
  12. ↑ "In the opinion of Chief Public Prosecutor Jens Rommel, head of the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, there are various reasons for the incomplete prosecution of Nazi crimes. Unlike the Allies, the Germans applied general criminal law, which means that crimes that can only be specifically attributed to the individual Mass crimes, ..., were difficult to prosecute. Later, the statute of limitations for many acts was added. " Michael Evers in "The manhunt remained largely unpunished", Nordsee-Zeitung from December 2, 2017
  13. ↑ It says on the stone:

    “ ON APRIL 8, 1945 - FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE OCCUPATION
    BY ALLIED TROOPS,
    CELLE WAS THE TARGET OF A LARGE-SCALE
    AIR ATTACK.
    A TRAIN WAS TAKEN ON A SHOULDER TRACK OF THE FREIGHT
    RAILWAY HOUSE THAT WAS TO BRING ABOUT
    4,000 MEN, WOMEN AND YOUNG PEOPLE
    FROM SEVERAL OUTDOOR CAMPS OF
    NEWENGAMME TO BERGEN-
    BELSEN. THAN THOSE HÄFTLIN
    GE TO THE BOMBS ESCAPED GOODS
    IN SECURITY TO BRING ADDICTION
    EN, MADE MEMBERS OF THE NSDAP
    AND ITS FORMATIONS, THE MILITARY
    POWER, POLICE AND THE PEOPLE'S STORM
    IN THE METROPOLITAN AREA AND NEAR Egg-
    NEN NEUSTÄDTER WOOD HUNT FOR YOU
    AND LINED UP ON MASSACRE IN IH
    NEN AN. ABOUT 500 OF THE SURVIVORS
    WERE FINALLY DRIVEN ON
    FOOT TO BERGEN-BELSEN BY THE SS     "

    - Inscription on the plaque
  14. ^ Mijndert Bertram: April 8, 1945. Celle. P. 143.
  15. ↑ Reinhard Rohde, "Displacing - Forgetting - Verifying", Remembrance Politics - What shaped (s) the confrontation with National Socialism in Celle ?, Celle 2006, text on "Celle-im-Nationalsozialismus.de"
  16. ^ Mijndert Bertram: April 8, 1945. Celle. Note 54 on p. 404.
  17. ↑ Étienne François, Hagen Schulze: German places of memory , CH Beck 2003, ISBN 3-406-50987-8 , p. 633f.
  18. ↑ Alarmsignal - Attaque (Aggressive Punk Productions, 14.09.2018) - HandwrittenMag . In: HandwrittenMag . September 13, 2018 ( handwritten-mag.de [accessed September 15, 2018]).