Nazi murders in Burgholz

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Memorial plaque for the 30 victims of the executions in Burgholz
Honorary grave with memorial stone in the Schorfer Strasse cemetery

The Nazi murders in Burgholz (also known as the Burgholz massacre ) were a final phase crime in March 1945 in which 30 people - women and men - were killed by members of the Gestapo and the Wuppertal criminal police in the Wuppertal state forest of Burgholz . This crime is the only known mass murder in the Wuppertal city area during the Nazi era .

background

In the course of 1944, an increasing number of forced laborers , including numerous so-called " Eastern workers ", fled the camps in which they were housed and went into hiding, for example by hiding in partially destroyed buildings. "Mostly it was members of a bombed camp who had become homeless after an air raid and had to watch how they could feed themselves." They often procured essential items through break-ins, robberies and looting, which is why the Nazi authorities called them " foreign gangs ”. These groups consisted of people of different nationalities - mainly "Eastern workers" and Soviet prisoners of war , but also Germans - who were considered "illegal" for various reasons. The members of these groups usually had no political motives, but acted out of “a simple will to survive”, out of “need, anger and wild determination”. There was seldom contact with political resistance.

The center of the "gangs" in West Germany was in Cologne from autumn 1944 , as there were many companies there where foreigners had to work. In the summer of 1944, around 30,000 foreign civilian workers, half of them “Eastern workers”, were registered in the city and its surroundings, plus an unknown number of prisoners of war; there were around 120 camps. The "Inspector of the Security Police and SD in Wehrkreis VI " ( military substitute district Düsseldorf ) Walter Albath stated in a later testimony that as the front approached, especially in Cologne, the "formation of gangs" of foreign workers, German deserters and "other dark elements" had increased with which there had been real battles. By the end of 1944 the Cologne Gestapo crushed several of these groups. Because of that and because of the increasing destruction of Cologne, members of the groups split up and reappeared in Wuppertal and Essen , among other places . The Gestapo also suspected political motives and feared that the partisan-style “gangs” would develop into centrally controlled and militarily organized units.

After the Allies had crossed the Reich borders in autumn 1944, the Reichsführer SS and Reich Minister of the Interior Heinrich Himmler wrote to the Higher SS and Police Leader West Karl Gutenberger in Düsseldorf : “I hold you personally responsible for maintaining public security and order in your military district give them all the necessary power of attorney. "On January 24, 1945 Walter Albath gave the instruction:" The current overall situation will cause elements among the foreign workers and also former German communists to be subversive. Great attention is therefore required. That the enemy has made preparations emerges from a report from OB West [Commander-in-Chief West]. In all cases that arise, strike immediately and brutally. The persons concerned are to be destroyed [...] without having formally applied for special treatment to the RSHA beforehand. ”On January 26, 1945, he decreed that“ special treatment of foreign workers in the special situation in military district VI was to be carried out without the prior approval of the Reich Main Security Office ” . After that, orders to kill could be issued by the superiors of the Wuppertal Gestapo and Kripo , the Higher SS and Police Leader West Gutenberger, from Albath himself or from the head of the Gestapo control center in Düsseldorf, Hans Henschke, directly to the Wuppertal Police Headquarters , without going through Berlin .

The events in Wuppertal

Assault and arrests

In the night from 21 to 22 January 1945 was railroad car of the imperial post at Bahnhof Wuppertal-Wichlinghausen attacked by a group of "Eastern workers". A railway employee was injured so badly that he died. On the same night a Ukrainian slave laborer who worked for the Reichsbahn was found shot dead. Two days later, in search of the perpetrators, the criminal police surrounded a house in Wuppertal-Heckinghausen that was inhabited by forced laborers. In a subsequent firefight, a police officer and two "unknown Russians" were killed and others were injured. A group of people were arrested in connection with this.

On February 10, 1945 , the welder Karl Igstaedter from Wuppertal hanged himself, who was accused in this connection of having "relationships with foreigner intruders". Igstaedter was a member of the KPD and from 1943 had contacts with a group of Soviet forced laborers who worked at the Wichlinghausen freight station. After his death, his wife Hedwig was arrested, where she also hanged herself. Three other allegedly involved Germans were brought before a special court and executed.

The women and men captured were severely ill-treated and tortured; so they put scraps of paper between their toes and set them on fire. They were charged with more than 70 robberies, in other statements of 400 break-ins and 34 homicides. Weapons were found during the arrest as well as a warehouse with stolen property. According to the later testimony of a criminal investigation officer, 80 people were initially arrested, but only 38 of them were involved in the acts. A “commission” had been formed which, after two days of meetings, “sentenced” 30 of these people - including six women - to death, and some of the remaining eight were deported to Buchenwald . The " death sentences " were subsequently confirmed "by Berlin" (the Reich Security Main Office ). It has not been established whether all of the later murder victims were really guilty of something or whether they included foreign workers who were merely in hiding.

A German prisoner who was sentenced to death for “ decomposing military strength ” later reported about the burns of the Soviet women and that they were not treated. She was able to organize bandages and powder, which is why the abused women put their trust in her and tearfully reported the cruel interrogations. Among them was the Kiev teacher Helena Matrosowa, who was described by the contemporary witness “as a fine person in the circumstances, still clean and good clothes”. The witness later reported that she went with the "Russian women" to bathe once a week and saw that their bodies were covered in bruises, apparently from bats with rubber truncheons . The witness was with them until the women were transported to the execution site. She survived until the American liberation of Wuppertal on April 16, 1945.

The executions in Burgholz

The place of the event (2019)

Around the beginning of February, the Wuppertal Gestapo chief Josef Hufenstuhl gave the order to dig a hole in the castle wood with the help of prisoners. The exact date of the executions is unknown. It is believed that they took place on March 21, 1945 in the early morning hours near the police shooting range on Burggrafenberg in Burgholz in a clearing and lasted 45 minutes. According to Henschke, who was not there himself, Gestapo chief Hufenstuhl was responsible for the implementation on site. But he also left the killing to his subordinates with the declaration that he would “come later”. A police officer who had been asked to cooperate in advance refused and said he stayed away from duty that day. (Location of the shooting range)

According to witness statements, twelve to 15 Gestapo members and ten detectives were involved in the shootings : "The Russians had to kneel in front of the grave and they were shot in the back of the neck ." The people who were killed were placed in the prepared mass grave in the forest Buried near the room place on Küllenhahn .

On April 12 or 13, 1945, Lieutenant Peter Schäfer, commander of the Bonn Police , was also executed in Burgholz ; one of the perpetrators had already been involved in the execution of the "Eastern workers". This execution was initiated by the Higher SS and Police Leader West Gutenberger after disciplinary proceedings against Schäfer for " defeatist statements, cowardice in air strikes and neglect of the preparation of the defense of the city of Bonn". The location of Schäfer's grave is not known.

The find of the mass grave

Less than four weeks after the executions, on April 16, 1945, Wuppertal was liberated by American troops .

Around three months later, on August 8, 1945, the then President of the Reichsbahndirektion decreed that the survivors of the detectives killed in the raids and the injured officers should receive a reward, as it was thanks to their "complete commitment" that a “whole gang of sack truck robbers” had been rendered harmless.

On August 27, 1945, following information from resistance circles, three Wuppertal police officers were arrested and interrogated by the French War Crimes Investigation Team , apparently giving the exact location of the mass grave in Burgholz. Only a few hours later, one of the three men committed suicide . The bodies of the victims were found on August 28, 1945, and the two detained police officers had to take part in the rescue.

“On the orders of the military government, the mayor of Wuppertal […], leading figures in the German police force and the heads of Deutsche Bank and the employment office were present. All members of the German criminal police had to be present on orders and pass the row of murder victims. None of them spoke a word. "

- NRZ , September 12, 1945.

The bodies were autopsied by the War Crimes Group's Field Investigation Section . Then 30 victims were counted, six women and 24 men. 20 of them have been identified as Soviet citizens. According to later research, there were 20 Russian and 10 Ukrainian victims. In the autopsy report archived in the British National Archives in Kew, contradicting this, 20 men and 10 women are mentioned. With the exception of the name of the Kiev teacher Helena Matrosowa, which was handed down from the testimony, none of the victims could be identified. They are still unknown today.

On August 31, 1945, the remains of the murdered people were brought to Cronenberg in a funeral procession, to which the residents had to stand along the street at the behest of the occupation troops , where they were taken to the cemetery on Schorfer Strasse in the presence of German police officers, British, French and Soviet soldiers were buried in individual coffins. Based on research in the British National Archives, there are suspicions that there are other graves in Burgholz that have not yet been found. Further investigations were rejected by the responsible public prosecutor in Dortmund in 2015.

After the end of the war

The trial and the judgments

SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Gutenberger (1905–1961) belonged to the Nazi leadership that gave the orders for the execution.

As a result of the investigation by the War Crimes Group of the British Army on the Rhine after the end of the war, the names of a total of 26 participants in the execution and lockdown squad were found. Three of these men, Josef Hufenstuhl and two other officers, had committed suicide shortly after the end of the war , and some of the perpetrators had gone into hiding. 19 people were charged who had stood before a British military tribunal in the Hamburg Curiohaus from December 1947 . The process was split into two procedures.

In Burgholz Case I , which was heard from December 1947 to January 1948, 14 men - members of the Gestapo and Kripo - were charged. Six of them were sentenced to death and the rest to long prison terms. Against the background of a British decree (Royal Warrant of June 18, 1945), individual guilt did not have to be established: proof of having been part of a group that had committed a war crime was sufficient .

Some of the police officers involved incriminated each other and denied having shot themselves or claimed not to know the names of the shooters. They said they simply locked the lock or released the prisoners' handcuffs. Some said they believed the order had come from Berlin, which is why the executions were considered lawful, others said that there had been a "meeting" in Wuppertal.

In Burgholz Case II , which took place from August 1948 to October 1948, Gutenberger, Henschke and Albath, the actual Nazi leadership who had issued the orders, were on trial. In addition, they were charged with the executions in Essen's Monday hole in Grugapark . Walter Albath was sentenced to 15 years and Hans Henschke and Karl Gutenberger were each sentenced to twelve years.

Henschke and his co-defendants testified that there had been some kind of provisional trial. Henschke cited the fact that he had passed the second state examination in law with qualification for the office of judge and that there was therefore a “legal framework”. He took “full responsibility” for the “measures” in Wuppertal and Essen and declared that he was also responsible for the actions of his subordinates. He himself was not present at the executions, the Wuppertal Gestapo chief Hufenstuhl was responsible for the execution.

These judgments were issued in ignorance of further acts of some of the defendants, since the investigative authorities in 1947 did not yet have a comprehensive view of the necessary documents. This enabled some of them to conceal their NSDAP membership or their membership in the Gestapo. As it later turned out, six of the perpetrators alone - including Gutenberger, Henschke and Hufenstuhl - were involved in the Wenzelnberg crime in Langenfeld on April 13, 1945 , another final phase crime in which 71 people were murdered. As of May 1941, three police officers were involved in the mass murder of Jews , Roma , Red Army soldiers and civilians as members of task forces in the Soviet Union .

Pardons and dismissals

The judgments passed could only become final after confirmation by the military governor of the British zone , Brian Robertson . After six perpetrators had been sentenced to death, the Wuppertal Caritas director Hans Carls , who had himself been imprisoned in the concentration camp , turned to the Cologne Cardinal Joseph Frings for support for a pardon and life imprisonment . Frings justified his concern addressed to Robertson by saying that the victims had committed "acts threatened by the death penalty under the laws of war". The perpetrators did not act out of "their own decision based on a raw disposition or arbitrariness, but on the basis of an official order [...]". Robertson had since confirmed five of the death sentences and found that "leniency is inappropriate". Frings replied that in his opinion the death sentences were “a continuation of the war in a different way”. In insubordination the perpetrators even harsh punishments or the death penalty had threatened. General Robertson replied that the " emergency of command " was "a form of defense that every war criminal, including Goring and other party leaders, used." Frings continued to intervene, as did the Protestant general superintendent of the Rhine Province , Ernst Stoltenhoff , so that on May 7, 1947, five of the death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment; in the case of a death sentence that had already happened before.

The perpetrators of the lower ranks of the Kripo and Gestapo were released from custody by the German judicial authorities between 1950 and 1952; the three main culprits from the leadership ranks were released between 1953 and 1956. Hans Henschke was released from prison in 1956 and then worked for an insurance company. Another preliminary investigation against him was closed and he died in the course of a second. Gutenberger worked as a sales representative, and he was also investigated several times without result. Some police officers were taken into the public service after their release from custody, some even returned to the police - exactly how many is unknown. None of the perpetrators showed remorse, but one of them complained about the "path of suffering" he had to go. This position was supported by the statements of senior police officers and local politicians who questioned the legality of the judgments by the British military justice system.

Commemoration

Text of the plaque from 2004

In October 1945 an obelisk was erected in the cemetery on Schorfer Strasse by order of the British military administration and according to a design by Soviet officers . The executing stone sculptor was Hugo Wesselmann from Barmer . (Location of the honorary graves with obelisk)

The obelisk bears the Cyrillic inscriptions on the back and front :

ВЕЧНАЯ ПАМЯТЬ БОРЦАМ ПРОТИВ ФАШИЗМА. ЗДЕСЬ ПОКОИТСЯ ПРАХ 30 СОВЕТСКИХ ГРАЖДАН РАССТРЕЛЯННЫХ НЕМЕЦКО-ФАШИСТКИМИ ПАЛАЧАМИ

“Eternal memory of the fighters against fascism. Here lie the corpses of 30 Soviet patriots, shot by German fascist executioners. "

- Bathia / Stracke, Forgotten victims , p. 346.

On May 9, 2004, the Association for Searching for Traces - Nazi History in Wuppertal in Burgholz placed a small memorial plaque on the former shooting range of the Wuppertal police. The initiator of the association is Lieselotte Bhatia, the daughter of the criminal investigation officer Wilhelm Ober, who was co-accused as a perpetrator and who researched the history of the murder in Burgholz in detail and presented several publications on this. (Location of the plaque)

In 2018 a memorial stone made of dark basalt from Sweden was erected by the stone sculptor Timothy Vincent . There was a public discussion about the engraved text, especially about the passage that there had been a "hastily called ' stand trial '". Lieselotte Bhatia and Stephan Stracke from the Spurensuche association objected to the use of the term “court martial”: there was no such thing, but a protective claim by the perpetrators in the process. This wording belittles the murder: "There is no reason to give the act any legal legitimation 73 years after the massacre ." (Location of the memorial stone)

Annually commemorative events have been held in Burgholz since 2000. Efforts are being made to name a path or a place in the castle wood after Helena Matrosowa.

literature

  • Lieselotte Bhatia: My Burgholz Case . In: U. Albel, D. Nelles u. St. Stracke (Ed.): We spent our best years there. Aspects of forced labor in Wuppertal (=  persecution and resistance in Wuppertal . Volume 4 ). Achterland, Bocholt 2001, ISBN 3-933377-53-6 .
  • Lieselotte Bhatia / Stephan Stracke: In the last minute - National Socialist final phase crimes in the Bergisches Land (=  educational material on the Wuppertal police and resistance history . Volume 1 ). De Noantri, 2015, ISBN 978-3-943643-03-9 .
  • Lieselotte Bhatia / Stephan Stracke: Forgotten victims. The Nazi past of the Wuppertal criminal police (=  educational material on the Wuppertal police and resistance history . Volume 2 ). De Noantri, 2018, ISBN 978-3-943643-10-7 .
  • Ulrich Herbert : Foreign workers: Politics and practice of the "deployment of foreigners" in the war economy of the Third Reich . Ed .: Special edition for the state centers for political education. Dietz, Bonn 1999, ISBN 3-8012-5028-8 .
  • Florian Speer : Foreigners on 'work assignment' in Wuppertal. Civilian workers, forced laborers and prisoners of war in World War II . Wuppertal 2003, ISBN 3-87707-609-2 .

Web links

Commons : Nazi murders in Burgholz  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

References and comments

  1. a b c Herbert, Fremdarbeiter , p. 385.
  2. Speer, Zivile Arbeitskraft , p. 465.
  3. a b c d Speer, Civilian Workers , p. 476.
  4. Herbert, Fremdarbeiter , p. 384.
  5. Speer, Zivile Arbeitsforce , p. 471.
  6. a b c Karl Igstaedter. In: Wuppertal Memorial Book. Retrieved April 9, 2019 .
  7. ^ Opinion on the memorial design for the victims in Burgholz. Wuppertal Resistance, accessed on March 23, 2019 .
  8. ^ Bhatia / Stracke, Forgotten victims , p. 356.
  9. a b c d Speer, Civil Workers , p. 479.
  10. Speer, Zivile Arbeitsforce , p. 477.
  11. a b c d Burgholz shooting range. In: gedenkbuch-wuppertal.de. January 24, 1945, Retrieved April 7, 2019 .
  12. a b 70 years later: New book on the Burgholz massacre. In: cronenberger-woche.de. June 27, 2012, accessed April 8, 2019 .
  13. The contemporary witness Edith Enz was present at the presentation of the book Forgotten Victims . She died in 2016 at the age of 101.
  14. Speer, Zivile Arbeitsforce , p. 478.
  15. ^ A b Josef Hufenstuhl - Gestapo chief and opportunistic desk perpetrator. In: gewerkschaftsprozesse.de. Retrieved March 23, 2019 .
  16. ^ Bhatia / Stracke, Forgotten victims , p. 361.
  17. Bhatia / Stracke, Forgotten Sacrifice , p. 390.
  18. Speer writes "Reichsbahndirektion Düsseldorf", but there was no such thing. Presumably it was the Reichsbahndirektion Wuppertal .
  19. ^ Bhatia / Stracke, Forgotten victims , p. 352.
  20. Bhatia / Stracke, Forgotten victims , p. 360 f.
  21. ^ Wuppertal memorial book: memorial hike to the Burgholz massacre. In: njuuz.de. March 12, 2018, accessed April 7, 2019 .
  22. ^ Commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Burgholz massacre. In: cronenberger-woche.de. June 27, 2012, accessed March 23, 2019 .
  23. Bhatia / Stracke, Forgotten victims , p. 346.
  24. Jan Niko Kirschbaum: Memorial for murdered Russian forced laborers on the ev.-ref. Cronenberg cemetery. In: denkmal-wuppertal.de. June 2, 2010, accessed April 12, 2019 .
  25. Additional information on killings in Burgholz. In: njuuz.de. April 10, 2019, accessed April 10, 2019 .
  26. Bhatia / Stracke, Forgotten victims , p. 350.
  27. a b Bhatia / Stracke, Forgotten victims , p. 365.
  28. a b c Bhatia / Stracke, Forgotten victims , p. 367.
  29. ^ Bhatia / Stracke, Forgotten victims , p. 362 f.
  30. Bhatia / Stracke, Forgotten victims , p. 364 f.
  31. Bhatia / Stracke, Forgotten victims , p. 368.
  32. a b Bhatia / Stracke, Forgotten victims , p. 369.
  33. ^ Bhatia / Stracke, Forgotten victims , p. 373.
  34. Memory of the Burgholz massacre. In: Westdeutsche Zeitung. January 10, 2018, accessed April 13, 2019 .
  35. ^ Wuppertaler Rundschau: Cronenberg: Burgholz: Dispute over memorial plaque. In: wuppertaler-rundschau.de. March 3, 2017, accessed April 10, 2019 .
  36. After 73 years: the memorial stone for the “Burgholz massacre” stands. In: cronenberger-woche.de. June 27, 2012, accessed April 10, 2019 .
  37. Digging Deeper: Walk in Burgholz is named for Nazi victims. In: Westdeutsche Zeitung. December 19, 2014, accessed April 7, 2019 .