Special camp No. 1 Mühlberg

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Memorial (2010)

The special camp No. 1 Mühlberg was one of the ten special camps of the NKVD / MWD in the Soviet occupation zone . It existed from the beginning of September 1945 to the middle / end of September 1948 and had an average of around 12,000 inmates. A little over 21,800 people passed through the camp, of whom 6,765 died there, according to Soviet files. It was located about 4 km northeast of the city of Mühlberg / Elbe in the area of ​​the Bad Liebenwerda district of Neuburxdorf .

During the Second World War , around 300,000 prisoners of war were housed here in the main camp IV B (Stalag IV B). Today there is a memorial for the victims of both camps on the site.

prehistory

During the Second World War, the POW camp “Stalag IV B” of the German Wehrmacht was located on site, through which a total of around 300,000 prisoners from over 40 nations passed through. Around 3,000 prisoners of war, including 2,350 Soviet citizens, were killed there.

At the end of April 1945 the Stalag IV B was occupied by Soviet troops and shortly afterwards disbanded. After that, the Red Army began imprisoning former Eastern workers, prisoners of war and members of the Vlasov Army on the site before they were transported to the Soviet Union.

At the end of August / beginning of September 1945, special camp No. 1 was set up on the site.

Detainees of the special camp

Allegations of arrest for admission to a Soviet special camp

  • active membership in the NSDAP, e.g. B. as a local group leader (about 62%)
  • lower and middle elite functionaries of the National Socialist system of rule: Hitler Youth leaders, employees of the Gestapo , SD and other German criminal organs (around 22%)
  • Assumed threat to the occupation regime : spies , divers , editors , disintegration work (around 16%)
  • In addition, some former generals and officers of the Wehrmacht and 39 judges were arrested, 38 of the latter died in this camp.
  • Employment of forced laborers or prisoners of war in one's own company or on one's own farm

The interrogations carried out after the arrest of NKVD / MWD officers were generally carried out using torture . Those arrested had no means of defense. If the interrogators suspected that their allegations had been confirmed, those affected came before a Soviet tribunal. Most of the rest were forced to sign an interrogation protocol in Russian and were taken to one of the special camps without trial or judgment.

The purpose of the arrest was also to isolate alleged "class enemies" in order to implement the radical transformation in the Soviet occupation zone . The claim that the Soviets imprisoned alleged war criminals in large numbers in the special camps cannot be substantiated. Rather, this reason for detention was only very rarely put forward.

Plan of the women's camp

More than 21,800 prisoners passed through the camp, including women. The camp was occupied by an average of 12,000 people.

Some inmates were interrogated again while they were in detention. Around 150 prisoners were then transported away for sentencing by Soviet military tribunals . The interrogations and convictions were not subject to international control.

Conditions of detention

The conditions in the camp were so bad that just over 30 percent of the inmates died. The detainees were completely isolated from the outside world without any correspondence. The relatives were not notified of the detainees' whereabouts, nor were they informed in the event of death.

Detainees' clothes that fell apart during detention were not replaced. There were no straw sacks or blankets, no soap and no dental hygiene products, and no dishes, drinking vessels or cutlery, so that stove pipe capsules or stove tiles were also used as eating and drinking vessels.

The prisoners' diet was completely inadequate, with dystrophy , dysentery , tuberculosis and typhus rife . Lice and fleas favor the spread of typhus and aggravate the deficiency diseases. The German camp doctors, even prisoners, had hardly any medication or medical equipment.

The Mühlberg camp was not a labor camp. The prisoners were, with the exception of a few camp commands, left to their own devices. There were no books or writing facilities. The barracks were massively overcrowded and the prisoners had no privacy at night either.

deportation

In 1946 around 3,000 prisoners were deported to the Soviet Union, where they were treated like prisoners of war according to Soviet standards.

On February 8, 1947, around 1000 still fit for work, mostly young prisoners, were loaded into redesigned freight wagons at the Neuburxdorf train station and brought to Siberia. Because of the extreme cold, they had been provided with Wehrmacht cotton suits and fur hats. Hence the term fur hat transport was created . In the wagons there were no straw sacks or sanitary items except for a bucket for urine and a small stove. Due to a completely inadequate fuel supply, the inmates burned the wooden beds during the transport to Siberia.

After 33 days, the prisoners were on 14 March 1947 Siberian anzhero-sudzhensk unloaded and the NKVD / MVD camp 7503/11 anzhero-sudzhensk brought. There they had to work in mines and on construction sites, and 122 of them died. The survivors only returned to Germany between 1950 and 1955.

resolution

In July 1948, the camp administration released almost two thirds of the inmates without following any recognizable rules or guidelines.

Most of the approximately 3,000 remaining prisoners were loaded into wagons at the Neuburxdorf train station on September 17, 1948 and transported to the NKVD / MWD camp No. 2 Buchenwald , and the Mühlberg camp was closed a little later, in 1948.

Many of the prisoners who were brought to Buchenwald were transferred to Waldheim on February 9 and 13, 1950 , where they were sentenced to long prison terms and, in some cases, to death in the Waldheim trials (express proceedings ). The show trials took place without a legal basis and the judgments were already fixed in advance according to the Stalinist procedure. The rest of the prisoners were released in 1950.

Victim

Grave field next to the former camp
Row with name boards, behind them crosses placed by relatives

For the period from 1945 to 1948, 6,765 deaths are recorded in the Soviet files of the Mühlberg special camp. All of the dead were thrown into mass graves outside the camp and buried in a makeshift way, the relatives were never notified.

Wreaths that were placed on the premises by relatives after the camp was closed were immediately removed on the instructions of the responsible GDR authorities . After bones were repeatedly found during agricultural work, the area was reforested.

After the political change in 1989, relatives of the dead set up crosses and memorial stones. The Camp Mühlberg initiative group was founded in 1990 , which has since devoted itself to the design of the memorial and to dealing with the history of the camp. Since 1992, with the support of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. and the state of Brandenburg a memorial for all dead of the special camp was created. Skeletons were recovered from individual mass graves and reburied with dignity.

Several memorial meetings take place on the former camp site every year. On September 6, 2008, nameplates with the names of the deceased were solemnly unveiled.

In mid-2016, the federally owned Bodenverwertungs- und -verwaltungs GmbH was looking for buyers for the mine property on the site of the memorial in order to use the area for gravel extraction. This met with diverse opposition. In February 2017, it was therefore decided in a consultation with the State Office for Mining, Geology and Raw Materials Brandenburg to exclude the area of ​​the special camp Mühlberg from gravel mining.

Known inmates

See also

Literature and Sources

  • Udo Baumbach : Rochlitz Castle and the Soviet Secret Police , Sax-Verlag, Beucha, 2014, ISBN 978-3-86729-133-0 .
  • Sigrid Drechsler: In the shadow of Mühlberg. Kunstverlag Paris, Rudolstadt 1995, ISBN 3-98-055782-0 .
  • Ursula Fischer: Condemned to be silent. Denounced, arrested, interned. (1945-1948). Dietz, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-320-01769-1 .
  • Jan von Flocken , Michael Klonovsky : Stalin's camp in Germany. 1945-1950. Documentation, witness reports. Ullstein, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-550-07488-3 .
  • Herbert Hecht: Siberian bells. Self-published, Gernrode 2006.
  • Martina Hofmann: An exhibition about the NKVD special camp No. 1 Mühlberg / Elbe from 1945 to 1948. A contribution to contemporary history. 1994.
  • Initiative group Mühlberg e. V. POW camp Stalag IV B, special camp No. 11 of the Soviet NKVD. (Flyer).
  • Initiative group Lager Mühlberg e. V. (Ed.): Book of the Dead - Special Camp No. 1 of the Soviet NKVD, Mühlberg / Elbe. Initiative group Lager Mühlberg e. V., Mühlberg / Elbe 2008, ISBN 978-3-00-026999-8 .
  • Achim Kilian : To be instructed for complete isolation. NKVD special camp Mühlberg / Elbe 1945–1948. 2nd expanded edition. Forum Verlag, Leipzig 1993, ISBN 3-86151-028-6 .
  • Achim Kilian: Mühlberg 1938–1948: A prison camp in the middle of Germany. Böhlau, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-412-10201-6 ( History and Politics in Saxony 17).
  • Erhard Krätzschmar: ... from Wurzen via Mühlberg to Siberia ... those affected remember. (Bitter youth 1945–1950). Swing, Colditz 1995. ( online ; PDF; 13.01 MB).
  • Helmut Leppert: Odyssey of a Youth. 8th edition. Initiative group Lager Mühlberg e. V., Mühlberg / Elbe 2010.
  • Helma von Nerée: Remember, never forget. NKVD camp Mühlberg / Elbe. Self-published, Marsberg 2006.
  • Peter Reif-Spirek, Bodo Ritscher (ed.): Special camp in the SBZ. Memorials with a “double past” . Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-86153-193-3 , pp. 278-281: Mühlberg special camp .
  • Siegfried Rulc: Incomplete Chronicle 1945–1950. A diary about the werewolf legend. 2nd Edition. S. Rulc, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-00-002235-X
  • Rolf Schneider: At seventeen behind barbed wire - from Mühlberg to Siberia. Wegberg 2005.
  • Elisabeth Schuster: Ride step, reaper death! Life and death in special camp No. 1 of the NKVD Mühlberg, Elbe. With a foreword by Joachim Gauck . Scribeo-Verlag, Kassel 2004, ISBN 3-936592-02-0 ( Telling is remembering 34).
  • Paul Weisshuhn: I'll be back! Memories of a survivor. NKVD special camp Mühlberg 1945–1948. Edited by Markolf Weisshuhn. Edition Noëma, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-89821-312-9 .

Web links

Commons : Stammlager IV B / Special Camp No. 1  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bettina Greiner : Repressed Terror. History and Perception of Soviet Special Camps in Germany. , Hamburger Edition, 2010, p. 74 ff.
  2. ↑ Sergej Mironenko, Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato (ed.): Soviet Special Camps in Germany 1945 to 1950 , Volume 2: Soviet documents on camp policy . Introduced and edited by Ralf Possekel. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-05-003244-8 , p. 247.
  3. ^ Klaus-Dieter Müller: Bureaucratic terror. Judicial and extra-judicial persecution of the Soviet occupying power 1945–1956 . In: Roger Engelmann, Clemens Vollnhals: Justice in the service of party rule: legal practice and state security in the GDR . Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-86153-184-4 , pp. 59–92, here p. 76.
  4. ↑ Achim Kilian: Mühlberg 1938–1948: A prison camp in the middle of Germany. Böhlau, Cologne 2001, p. 249.
  5. ↑ Achim Kilian: Mühlberg 1938–1948: A prison camp in the middle of Germany. Böhlau, Cologne 2001, p. 316.
  6. ^ Andreas Weigelt: Chronicle of the Initiativgruppe Lager Mühlberg eV. With an introductory consideration of the perception of the special camps in the period between the end of World War II in 1945 and the founding of the initiative group in 1991. Initiativgruppe Lager Mühlberg, Mühlberg / Elbe, 2010.
  7. ^ Frank Claus: Indignation about the gravel tender . In: Lausitzer Rundschau from December 28, 2016
  8. ↑ Frank Claus: Messages ( Memento of the original dated February 11, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lr-online.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: Lausitzer Rundschau from February 3, 2017

Coordinates: 51 ° 27 '  N , 13 ° 17'  E