Cologne exhibition center
The exhibition Warehouse Cologne was one from 1939 to 1945 existing warehouse complex on the site of the Cologne fair in rechtsrheinischen Cologne district of Deutz . This included a satellite camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp , which was housed there as SS Building Brigade III from September 1942 to May 1944. The inmates were forced to clean up, remove debris and recover corpses after bombing attacks, and to clear duds in bomb detonators. There were also prisoner-of-war camps on the site, a police auxiliary prison ( labor education camp ) run by the Gestapo and camps for civilian slave laborers. The fair also served as a collection point for the deportation of the Jewish population and the " gypsies ".
prehistory
Immediately after the beginning of the Second World War , the Wehrmacht confiscated large areas of the Cologne exhibition center. Shortly after the start of the war, the first prisoners of war - around 1,000 Poles - were interned in the east hall; French prisoners followed in the summer of 1940 and later others, for example from the Soviet Union . All prisoners were used as slave labor in agriculture, construction and other areas.
In 1940, the exhibition grounds served as a regional assembly camp for around 1,000 Sinti and Roma from Cologne , Herne , Wuppertal , Wanne-Eickel , Aachen , Koblenz , Gelsenkirchen , Krefeld , as part of the so-called May deportation . Düsseldorf and Duisburg . In the fair, they were divided into cities and distributed in square cattle boxes filled with straw. The food distributed by the Red Cross was sparse and the infants were given no milk. The Racial Hygiene Research Center checked the appraisals of the arrested again, and as a result a small number of those arrested were excluded from deportation. The selections led Josef Ochs of the criminal investigation . The deportation then went to the Generalgouvernement of Poland with the Reichsbahn under SS guard . There they were sent to various camps or forced labor columns, and later also to ghettos . It is estimated that more than half of them perished there.
The exhibition halls were also used for the deportation of Cologne Jews from 1941 (see: Article Jewish history in Cologne ).
In 1942, trade fair operations on the site, which had already been severely restricted, were completely stopped.
Buchenwald subcamp
After English bombers flew the heaviest attack to date on Cologne in the night of May 30th to May 31st, 1942 , the Nazi authorities felt that prisoners had to be more involved in clean-up and restoration work, as well as to clear the bombs. Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler ordered that concentration camp prisoners should be used for this purpose , who until then had primarily worked in factories near their camps. Cologne was the first city to which such an SS construction brigade was sent after the city had strongly advocated it; she had to pay wages to the SS for the workers . This SS construction brigade III consisted of around 1000 prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp , of whom 300 were sent to prepare the congress hall for housing the workers; the number of prisoners housed fluctuated in the years to come due to illness or death. In total, it is assumed that there were 6,000 people who passed through SS Building Brigade III in Cologne.
In March 1944, 500 prisoners were transferred from Cologne to northern France to the newly established Building Brigade V to build positions for the A4 rocket on the western front . The men who remained in Cologne were transported to Wieda in the Harz Mountains in May of the same year in order to lay railways there for the planned underground rocket production in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp . In April 1945 the prisoners were driven on a death march by the SS . Among the victims of the massacre in Gardelegen were prisoners of SS Construction Brigade III.
After SS Building Brigade III withdrew, three more satellite camps from Buchenwald came to Cologne: the Cologne-Stadt satellite camp, the Cologne-Westwaggon satellite camp and the Cologne-Ford satellite camp.
Concentration camp inmates
Around 20 nationalities were represented among the prisoners, 80 percent of whom were foreigners, mainly Soviet citizens or Poles. The prisoners were from the Nazis in various categories of prisoners divided as " political ", " professional criminals " or "homosexual" , "Jews" or "Gypsy" .
Prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp tried to be transferred to a satellite camp like the one in Cologne. “With the transfer, however, I hoped that there would be less brutality, better food and contact opportunities with the outside world and perhaps be able to organize his escape.” In fact, some men managed to escape, for example a total of 157 prisoners in 1944. In contrast, prisoners who could no longer perform their duties in Cologne due to poor health were sent back to Buchenwald. The threat of being sent back to the main camp was also used as a discipline.
But the prisoners were not ready to submit to their fate without resistance. There was an illegal camp management who exchanged news with prisoners in the main camp in Buchenwald and obtained information about the general war situation from leaflets or newspapers found. For threatened prisoners, escape was organized through external contacts. The inmates also formed comradeship groups to support one another.
At least 33 prisoners died in the demolition squads, at least 16 were shot while trying to escape and at least 122 died because of the catastrophic living conditions or fell victim to crimes in the camp. Around 460 people were sent back to Buchenwald, where many of them perished.
Gestapo prisoners
Since September 1942 there has been a barrack camp in the area of today's “ Tanzbrunnen ”, which was used by the police and Gestapo as a “police auxiliary prison” (labor education camp). Here women and men were held captive in barracks to be brought to the EL-DE house for interrogation, to be brought before the judiciary, to be deported to a concentration camp or to be released back to their place of work after a period of imprisonment of a few weeks. From April 1943, Gestapo prisoners were also housed in SS Building Brigade III. On average, the barracks were occupied by around 400 people, the majority of whom were foreign forced labor.
After the unsuccessful assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944 , arrests were carried out throughout the Reich, which are known as the " Aktion grid ". Well-known politicians of democratic parties who were arrested in the course of this action and taken to the Gestapo area of the Cologne exhibition center were, among others, the former Cologne mayor Konrad Adenauer , who initiated the construction of the exhibition center in the 1920s, the former central politician Josef Baumhoff , Thomas Eßer , Otto Gerig , Joseph Roth , Peter Schlack and the KPD politician Peter Paffenholz .
SS camp management and guards
Until May 1944, the commandant of the satellite camp was Karl-Wilhelm Völkner from Quedlinburg , who had previously belonged to the SS guard battalion in Buchenwald. According to later statements by prisoners, he was an “extremely correct person” who forbade the SS men to beat the prisoners, but who on the other hand was extremely greedy. It was in Völkner's economic interest that the prisoners were well nourished and did not make a battered impression. He also had the prisoners stolen for himself and enriched himself with Jewish property.
The SS guards consisted of comparatively few men, between 30 and 40, which was possible because the exhibition grounds were cordoned off and had only one entrance. The SS men were supported by police reservists and Wehrmacht posts. Some of them brutally mistreated the inmates, beat and kicked them for no reason. Some of the kapos who had to supervise their fellow inmates were notorious for their brutality; one of them, who, according to witness statements, killed several fellow prisoners, was called Blut-Müller . He was hanged in the cellar at night on December 2, 1942; it is unknown by whom. In 1943 the illegal camp administration succeeded in exchanging the most brutal Kapos for their own people; afterwards the conditions in the camp improved considerably.
The relatively small guards at the camp, however, were numerically unable to guard the inmates at their work - in small groups of up to eight men. Police auxiliaries who were unfit for military service were used for this purpose. The prisoners reported that "the brutality of the guards decreased in parallel with the deteriorating course of the war for the German Reich and the increasing destruction of the city of Cologne by bombing".
Role of the city of Cologne and the population
After 1945 the thesis was tried that the SS had "literally forced" the city of Cologne to use concentration camp prisoners, which turned out to be inaccurate: "Rather, the city of Cologne played an active role in the establishment of Building Brigade III." the efforts of the city to find this sought-after cheap labor through the good networking of Gauleiter Josef Grohé and Lord Mayor Robert Brandes in the Nazi state.
The Cologne population knew about the existence of the camp, as the concentration camp prisoners in their recognizable concentration camp prison clothing were part of their daily appearance, as they worked in the streets and in many companies. The camp itself was located opposite the city center on the other side of the Rhine, and many a Cologne resident was there, as Jewish property that the deportees had to leave behind in their apartments or that was looted from the occupied Netherlands was auctioned on the site Ships were brought up and unloaded in the mess. And there were Cologne residents who owed their lives to the prisoners because they had found and saved them after bombing under the rubble of houses. On the other hand, there were people who secretly slipped the inmates food. Former prisoners later reported that residents of houses they worked on did not dare to speak to them but put food on their doorstep almost every day. Without this additional food they would not have survived the time in the exhibition warehouse.
After the end of the war
In December 1947, the former camp manager Karl Völkner was sentenced to a fine of 9,000 marks for membership of the SS, and the camp doctor Erich Möllenhoff in February 1948 to a fine of 4,000 marks. Until the mid-1960s, the Cologne exhibition center was not the subject of further investigations by the public prosecutor. It was not until 1966 that the Central Office of the State Judicial Administrations for the investigation of National Socialist crimes in Ludwigsburg began systematic investigations against Völkner, including murder , which however proved extremely difficult as there were only a few statements from former prisoners that could be used in court. In January 1975 the proceedings against Völkner were dropped.
memory
For many years, the fact that the trade fair warehouse next to the EL-DE building was a central place of oppression by the Nazi dictatorship in Cologne was almost forgotten in the city. In a commemorative publication for the 25th anniversary of the fair in 1949, this chapter was kept silent. From 1981, a small memorial plaque on the exhibition tower first reminded of the existence of the camp. In the years that followed, initiatives were formed in Cologne that made research into the processes surrounding the camp and publicizing them their task. The project group Messelager made the exhibition warehouse known to a wider Cologne public with a symposium in 1989, to which survivors from the various camps from the Soviet Union, Poland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands were invited for the first time. The fact that the city of Cologne itself operated a Buchenwald subcamp from 1942 to 1944 was a decisive argument in favor of the visit program for former concentration camp inmates, prisoners of war and forced laborers, which has been carried out by the city of Cologne from 1990 to the present day and supported by the exhibition camps project group and slave labor. In 1993, Mayor Norbert Burger inaugurated a memorial on the banks of the Rhine in Deutz for the people who were held captive in the exhibition center or who were deported via the exhibition center. In 1996 the book Messelager Köln was published , which describes the history of the camp in detail.
This inscription recalls on a plaque on the side of the Rheinhallen facing the Rhine:
- During the Second World War, the exhibition building, exhibition grounds and the adjoining area up to the Tanzbrunnen were a central location of the National Socialist tyranny in Cologne.
- A number of camps were located here: a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp, a camp for prisoners of war and forced laborers, a special Gestapo camp for German and foreign prisoners. The transports to the concentration camps departed from here and in 1940 Sinti and Roma and between 1941 and 1944 Jews were deported.
- Hundreds were killed in the camps and during work assignments.
- Thousands - men, women and children - were sent to their death from here.
In 1990, 50 years after the deportation of the Sinti and Roma from Cologne, the artist Gunter Demnig drew a 16-kilometer-long colored line - the trace of memory - from their former home to the Deutz train station. The original line is no longer preserved, but short sections of bronze have been set into the ground at prominent points along the route. A memorial plaque was placed on a railway underpass on Venloer Straße , near the Schwarz-Weiß-Platz in Cologne-Bickendorf .
literature
- Karola Fings : Cologne Exhibition Center. A satellite concentration camp in the center of the city . Emons Verlag , Cologne 1996, ISBN 392449178X .
Web links
- Jochen Arntz, Florian Hassel: The warehouse in the middle of the city . In: Die Zeit , No. 23/1989, June 2, 1989.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Karola Fings, Frank Sparing : The gypsy camp in Cologne-Bickendorf 1935-1958 . In: 1999. Journal for Social History of the 20th and 21st Century , Issue 3/1991.
- ↑ a b Karola Fings, Frank Sparing: “Z.Zt. Gypsy camp ”. The persecution of the Düsseldorf Sinti and Roma under National Socialism . Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Düsseldorf , Volksblatt Verlag, Cologne 1992, ISBN 3-923243-97-9 , p. 66.
- ↑ a b Karola Fings, Frank Sparing: “Z.Zt. Gypsy camp ”. The persecution of the Düsseldorf Sinti and Roma under National Socialism . Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Düsseldorf, Volksblatt Verlag, Cologne 1992, ISBN 3-923243-97-9 , p. 67.
- ↑ Memorial sites for Sinti and Roma
- ↑ Karola Fings: Cologne Exhibition Center . P. 143.
- ↑ Karola Fings: Cologne Exhibition Center . P. 57.
- ↑ Karola Fings: Cologne Exhibition Center . P. 59.
- ↑ Karola Fings: Cologne Exhibition Center . P. 62.
- ↑ Karola Fings: Cologne Exhibition Center . P. 174.
- ↑ Karola Fings: Cologne Exhibition Center . P. 75 f.
- ↑ Karola Fings: Cologne Exhibition Center . Pp. 164-165.
- ^ Marcus Schüller: Reconstruction and rise of the Cologne fair 1948-1956 . Stuttgart 1999, p. 62f.
- ↑ museenkoeln.de