Piaśnica massacre

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Victims before the shooting (1939)
Piaśnica massacre (1939)

The Piaśnica massacre is considered to be the first systematically carried out murder campaign by the National Socialists in German-occupied Europe.

Shortly after the start of the Second World War , between September and December 1939, members of the SS and the “ Volksdeutsche Selbstschutz ” murdered several thousand people in the forests around the village of Wielka Piaśnica . A twelve-meter-high monument on the main street between Wejherowo and Krokowa reminds of what happened.

prehistory

Directly with the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 was carried out in violation of the Versailles Treaty , the inclusion of the Free City of Danzig in German Reich . Adolf Hitler appointed Danzig's NSDAP Gauleiter Albert Forster as head of civil administration and later as Reich Governor . Forster, a banker and member of the NSDAP since 1923 , is considered to be one of the main people responsible for the massacres, which historians estimate that between 10,000 and 13,000 people fell victim to. Forster was seen as ambitious and endeavored to be able to report his Gau to Hitler as the first Gauleiter not only to be “ free of Jews ” but also “free of Poland”.

Victim

Memorial plaque for the firemen from Wejherowo who fell victim to the massacres.

The National Socialists used the chaos of the first days of the war for a series of systematically planned extermination campaigns in the Piaśnica forest . In addition to members of the Polish and Kashubian intelligentsia , the victims also included patients from German and Polish psychiatric clinics and deportees from the Reich.

The victims include:

Destruction of intelligence

See also: “Intelligence Action ” → AB Action ; Tannenberg company

Poles and Kashubians were among the first victims of the German attack. The Polish historian Piotr M. Majewski estimates that around 2,000 of those murdered in the Piaśnica forest belonged to the Kashubian ethnic minority. Fanatical Volksdeutsche who had organized themselves in a paramilitary manner in the “ Volksdeutsche Selbstschutz ” kept lists of names of their Polish and Kashubian neighbors, teachers, pastors, mayors, merchants, judges, artists, etc., which they handed over to the Gestapo and SS at the beginning of September 1939 . Immediately after the arrival of the Wehrmacht , the men and women in question were arrested in the Wejherowo district , in Gdynia and Danzig and initially collected in the Wejherowo prison , from where the SS transported them in closed trucks to the Piaśnica forest and murdered them there.

Murders

See also: " Action T4 "

In the forest of Szpęgawsk , near Starogard Gdański , south of Danzig, the SS murdered around 2,000 Polish patients from the " Konradstein Asylum ".

Other "mentally ill" from the institutions in Stralsund ( IV. Pomeranian Sanatorium and Nursing Institution ), Stettin ( Kückenmühler Anstalten ), Treptow an der Rega ( Provincial Sanatorium Treptow an der Rega ), Ueckermünde ( Provincial Sanatorium and Nursing Institution Ueckermünde ), Lauenburg in Pomerania ( Lauenburg Provincial Sanatorium ) and Meseritz ( Obrawalde Sanatorium ) were murdered in the Piaśnica forest. At the beginning of the war, the patients were brought together by the SS in the Stralsund sanatorium and deported in November and December. There is evidence that 1,285 patients from at least ten transports were shot by members of the SS guard Eimann shortly after their arrival at the Wejherowo train station in the Piaśnica forest .

Kurt Eimann , one of those primarily responsible, described the process: “The sick were loaded [at the train station] by SS men onto trucks that were available to my troops. The trucks then drove up to 50 meters from the shooting site. There I let the sick out one by one. Two SS men at a time led the insane patient to the edge of the pit, and a third SS man followed with an 08 pistol . At the edge of the pit, the third SS man shot the sick man in the neck with a pistol, so that he fell into the pit. This process was repeated one after the other for all the sick on the transport. "

Polish prisoners of war from the Stutthof concentration camp had to bury the bodies and were then also shot on Eimann's instructions.

Deported from the Reich area

The deportees from Reich territory - anti-fascists , Jews, Germans of Polish and Czech origin, as well as Poles who lived as farm workers in Germany in the interwar period - make up the largest group of victims with 8,000 to 10,000 people. They had to hand in their suitcases directly at the train station before they were loaded onto Wehrmacht trucks by the SS and transported to the Piaśnica forests to be shot. Older children have already been separated from their families in Wejherowo. “The screams of desperate mothers could be heard on the streets of the city. They were only allowed to keep the babies with them, ”said the Polish historian Barbara Bojarska .

Removal of the tracks

Overall, the number of those murdered in the Piaśnica massacres is estimated at 10,000 to 13,000, the exact number is very difficult to determine. When the Red Army approached at the end of August 1944, the Germans forced 36 concentration camp prisoners from the Stutthof concentration camp to dig up and burn the bodies. After almost seven weeks, these prisoners were killed themselves. This attempt to cover up the traces of the crime failed. A commission that investigated the site in the autumn of 1946 came across the remains of 30 mass graves, two of them with unburned bodies. To date, over 500 of the victims have been identified.

Perpetrator

The historian Piotr M. Majewski estimates that 40 to 50 people were involved in the individual murders: Danzig SS members and ethnic Germans self-protection , i.e. local Germans. At the Danzig trial of Albert Forster , eyewitnesses reported drunken Gestapo officers who shot priests whom they had previously "hung in the trees", as well as half-dead buried victims who had tried to dig themselves out. On November 11, 1939 alone, 300 people were murdered. - Forster was sentenced to death by hanging by the Supreme Polish National Court in April 1948 and executed in February 1952 after a pardon had been rejected.

Ludolf-Hermann von Alvensleben , head of the “Volksdeutsche Selbstschutz” in West Prussia from 9 September to 22 November 1939, managed to escape from British captivity. He fled to Argentina and thus escaped prosecution.

Kurt Eimann , who often shot the first victim personally in order to “be a role model for his men”, was sentenced on December 20, 1968 by the Hanover Regional Court to four years in prison for the collective murder of at least 1200 people, of which he served two years.

The Kashubian photographer and local researcher Edmund Kaminski, who meticulously documented the Piaśnica massacre, states that the names of the local perpetrators are known, “some of whom fled to Germany. But no one was tried there ”.

Historical processing

The Piaśnica massacres are relatively unknown in Germany, but, as Piotr M. Majewski emphasized at the time , even among the Polish public. Majewski attributes this to the fact that Piaśnica is a Kashubian place: “The communist regime had no interest in people talking about it. Because the majority of the victims in Piaśnica were Germans and Kashubians, it was not important for communist historiography to remember this. ”Barbara Bojarska, who did research on the subject in the 1970s, was urged by the state security not to publish her work.

literature

  • Barbara Bojarska : Piaśnica. Miejsce martyrologii i pamięci: z badań nad zbrodniami hitlerowskimi na Pomorzu [Piasnitz. Place of martyrdom and remembrance. From research on the Nazi crimes in West Prussia]. 4th expanded and revised edition. Wejherowo 2009, ISBN 978-83-927383-8-1 (German-language summary and sources in the appendix).
  • Thomas Grasberger: The Dead Forest. The Piaśnica massacre in September 1939 was the first systematic murder campaign by the National Socialists in occupied Europe. In: The time. January 20, 2011, p. 18.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Thomas Grasberger: Der Totenwald in: Die Zeit , January 20, 2011, accessed September 24, 2015.
  2. ↑ Quoted from Thomas Grasberger.