Salaspils (lager)

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View of the camp, photo taken by an SS propaganda company , 1941
Prisoner roll call, recording of an SS propaganda company on December 22, 1941

The Salaspils Extended Police Prison and Labor Education Camp was built 18 km southeast of Riga at the end of 1941 . It was also run as the Kurtenhof camp after an estate north of Salaspils . It was part of the German concentration camp complex in which the prisoners had to do forced labor under inhumane conditions . Although formally not subject to the inspection of the concentration camps , the term Salaspils concentration camp is often used . At the end of September 1944 the camp was closed; the prisoners were taken to the Stutthof concentration camp by ship .

Planning and warehouse construction

SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Lange , initially assigned to Einsatzgruppe A , from December 1941 commander of the Security Police and SD for the General District of Latvia and shortly afterwards participant in the Wannsee Conference , planned in October 1941 to set up a police detention center and a camp for German Jews in Salaspils . On behalf of Rudolf Lange, SS-Obersturmführer Gerhard Maywald set up the Salaspils labor camp from October 1941, twenty kilometers southeast of Riga near the Daugava . The place was easily accessible by the railway connection Riga - Daugavpils; the prisoners were to be used in peat extraction. All “Jews who remained in Riga and Latvia” should also be concentrated here, men and women separated to “prevent further increase”.

Jewish prisoners building a wooden barrack, photo taken by an SS propaganda company on December 22, 1941

After surprisingly arriving first transports with German Jews , which had been diverted from the original destination Minsk to Riga in October 1941 , could not yet be picked up in Salaspils, the inmates of the first transport, 1053 Berlin Jews, were immediately in the forest of Rumbula after arrival shot. The following four transports were housed in the Jungfernhof concentration camp or a little later in the “vacated” Riga ghetto .

The camp site was leveled in October 1941 by Soviet prisoners of war from the Salaspils branch camp Stalag 350 / Z1 of the Riga main camp 350 and by deported Czech and a few German Jews from the Jungfernhof concentration camp. In mid-January 1942, at least 1,000 Jews, most of whom had been brought from the Riga ghetto, helped to expand the camp. Inadequate housing and sanitation, malnutrition, and the severe cold caused extremely high mortality rates.

A new plan from February 1942 envisaged the expansion of the camp for 15,000 people in order to initially take in the German Jews from the Reich, who would then be "further deported" at the end of the summer. Part of it could be used beforehand as an “extended police prison”, later the camp could serve entirely as a “police detention camp for the commander of the security police and SD in Riga” and also as a “labor education camp”. This plan was not implemented in this way either. In 1943, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler briefly considered converting the camp into a concentration camp and subordinating it to the Reich Security Main Office , but that never happened.

Description and camp management

The fenced area had the shape of a roughly 500 * 375 m rectangle. There were 6 watchtowers on the sides and a larger tower in the center. About half of the storage area was used as an "economic area". In the other part there were about 15 of 45 planned standard barracks in autumn 1942 , in which 1,800 political prisoners were housed.

The "extended police prison and labor education camp" was subordinate to the "commander of the security police and SD in Latvia" Rudolf Lange. According to his own admission, it was comparable to a German concentration camp "both in terms of the way in which the work was done and the treatment of the prisoners, as well as in terms of the type of prisoner." In practice, the camp commandant reported personally to Lange every day, who usually carries out death sentences was present in the camp. SS-Oberscharführer R. Nickel, later SS-Obersturmführer Kurt Krause , acted as commanders of the camp . The executing authority in the camp was the gang leader Otto Heinrich Tekemeier, called "Stukass" by the inmates because of his cruelty . In addition, several other Germans held positions in the camp. However, the actual administration had to be done by the prisoners themselves, supervised by members of the Latvian SD. The external guarding and manning of the watchtowers was carried out until the end of 1943 by two companies of the so-called Arājs Command, then by the Latvian Police Battalion 320-W ( protection teams ) and, after a larger prisoner escape, with the participation of the guards by members of the Lithuanian SD.

Those trapped were forced to do heavy labor. In addition to work in the camp's own workshops, prisoners were deployed in the gypsum quarries in Saurieši, the nearby peat cuttings and in the construction of the Spilve airfield. Individual work details were also sent to various locations in Riga and the surrounding area.

Prisoners

At the end of 1942, there were mainly political prisoners who had previously been sent to the Riga Central Prison without a court judgment by protective custody warrant . In addition, interned foreigners and Latvian returnees from old Russian territory, who should be politically checked. In addition, “refusals to work” and members of the security teams who had committed criminal offenses were held there.

There were only a few Jewish people in the camp who had to work as specialists (dentists, mechanics, etc.); many were dead or exhausted and returned to Riga. Documents show that at the end of 1942, on a special order from Lange, 12 Jews were transferred from the Riga ghetto to the Salaspils camp, possibly because they were British citizens.

Because of the approach of the Red Army , the majority of the political prisoners were taken to other concentration camps, especially the Stutthof concentration camp , by autumn 1944 . Members of the Latvian Legion who were incarcerated mainly because of desertion, removal from the troops or attempting to evade recruitment became the largest group among the prisoners. The Lithuanian general Povilas Plechavičius was interned here with his staff from May 1944. Construction and 2 punitive battalions were later formed from inmates. Because of the closure of the neighboring prisoner-of-war camp Stalag 350 , around 500 Red Army soldiers unable to march were brought into the camp in August 1944 and later shot in violation of international law.

Children in the Salaspils camp

As a result of the "anti-gang campaign" ( Operation Winterzauber ) carried out between January and March 1943 in the Latvian-Russian border area, 2,288 people were deported to Salaspils, which at that time was occupied by 1,990 prisoners. Among the newly admitted persons were around 1,100 so-called “gang children”, most of whom had been apprehended without their adult relatives. The children should be transferred to homes and orphanages; Young people capable of working should be placed on farms. According to other plans, children were to be placed in a separate section of the Majdanek camp ; in fact, they were later committed to the " Litzmannstadt youth detention center ".

Because of a typhus infection and a camp closure, however, these children remained for a long time in a completely neglected state in a separate barrack in the Salaspils camp, where "several hundred died a miserable death." According to a Soviet "Extraordinary State Commission to Investigate German Fascist Crimes" from In 1946, however, around 12,000 children are said to have been imprisoned in the “children's camp” of Salaspils, of which at least 7,000 Jewish children were used to use their blood as canned goods in German hospitals.

These claims have not been taken over from the most recent German publications and do not agree with their presentation. The materials of the “Extraordinary State Commission” are rather criticized because of their “relatively general estimates of the number of victims” and their “rigidly prescribed investigation scheme”. 

Casualty numbers

According to recent research, around 23,000 prisoners passed through the camp during its existence. About half of the number are short-term "transit prisoners" from anti-partisan operations (especially Operation Winterzauber in Belarus and Operation Summer Travel in Latgale). In addition to the German-Jewish victims during the construction phase, another 2,000 to 3,000 people perished here, with the proportion of children and young people from the “gang areas” supposed to be particularly high. As part of the German concentration camp complex, many of them were transferred to other camps after their stay in Salaspils, where they then died.

One reason for the different information on the number of victims may be that there were two camps in Salaspils:

  • the "Salaspils Labor and Education Camp"
  • the branch camp Stalag 350 / Z

A few kilometers from the Salaspils camp, 25,000 Jews were shot in the forest of Rumbula in 1941 . In 2002 a memorial was also set up at this point.

Post-history

Entrance to today's memorial
Memorial Square

At the end of September 1944 the camp ceased to exist. When the Red Army arrived on October 11th, most of the buildings had been burned down. A Soviet Extraordinary State Commission dealt with what was happening in the camp. From 1949, responsible perpetrators in Germany were investigated in the Riga ghetto, in the Jungfernhof concentration camp and in Salaspils. Some of the defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment.

The area lay fallow until the 1960s and was part of a military training area. Around this time it was decided to erect central memorials for the victims of the National Socialist reign of terror at three locations of the former Reichskommissariat Ostland . These were Trostinez near Minsk, Fort IX near Kaunas and Salaspils.

The monumental memorial from 1967 includes an exhibition room, several sculptures and a marble block in which a metronome commemorates the heartbeat of the dead and carved lines count the days of suffering.

At the same time as the monument was built, Soviet historiography was adapted to the needs of propaganda. Statements of up to 100,000 deaths, gas chambers and the like have not been confirmed by recent research.

During the Soviet Union , the Russian group Singing Guitars ( Russian Поющие гитары ) dedicated the song Salaspils (Russian Саласпилс ) to the children's camp .

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Lager Salaspils  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Franziska Jahn: Salaspils . In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel: The Place of Terror. Volume 9. Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-57238-8 , p. 548 and p. 553.
  2. ^ Andrej Angrick, Peter Klein: Riga 1941–1944. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär : Places of horror. Crimes in World War II. Primus, Darmstadt 2003, ISBN 3-89678-232-0 , p. 197.
  3. ↑ Alfred Gottwald, Diana Schulle: The "Deportations of Jews" from the German Reich 1941–1945 . Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-86539-059-5 , p. 121.
  4. ↑ Andrej Angrick, Peter Klein: The "Final Solution" in Riga. Darmstadt 2006, ISBN 3-534-19149-8 , p. 246f.
  5. ↑ Andrej Angrick, Peter Klein: The "Final Solution" in Riga. Darmstadt 2006, ISBN 3-534-19149-8 , pp. 256f.
  6. ↑ Peter Klein: Dr. Rudolf Lange as commander of the security police and the SD in Latvia. In: Wolf Kaiser (ed.): Perpetrators in the war of extermination. Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-549-07161-2 , p. 129.
  7. ↑ Aiz šiem vārtiem vaid zeme. Salaspils nometne 1941-1944. Riga 2016, p. 113 f.
  8. ↑ Aiz šiem vārtiem vaid zeme. Salaspils nometne 1941-1944. Riga 2016, p. 114.
  9. ↑ Aiz šiem vārtiem vaid zeme. Salaspils nometne 1941-1944. Riga 2016, p. 120.
  10. ↑ Aiz šiem vārtiem vaid zeme. Salaspils nometne 1941-1944. Riga 2016, pp. 184–192.
  11. ↑ Aiz šiem vārtiem vaid zeme. Salaspils nometne 1941-1944. Riga 2016, p. 127.
  12. ↑ Aiz šiem vārtiem vaid zeme. Salaspils nometne 1941-1944. Riga 2016, p. 273.
  13. ↑ Aiz šiem vārtiem vaid zeme. Salaspils nometne 1941-1944. Riga 2016, p. 277.
  14. ↑ Aiz šiem vārtiem vaid zeme. Salaspils nometne 1941-1944. Riga 2016, p. 285.
  15. ^ Andrej Angrick, Peter Klein: The "Final Solution" ... ISBN 3-534-19149-8 , p. 254f.
  16. ^ Marģers Vestermanis : The National Socialist Prison and Death Camps in Occupied Latvia 1941-1945. In: Ulrich Herbert u. a. (Ed.): The National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 1. Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-596-15516-9 , pp. 478f.
  17. ↑ Latvia Under the Nazi Yoke : Document No. 16, p. 64.
  18. ↑ Document No. 17 Forensic Examinations of the State Special Commission on Crimes in the Salaspils Camp of April 28, 1945 ( Memento of the original of October 23, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The 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. (russ .: Акт судебно-медицинской экспертизы Государственной чрезвычайной комиссии о злодеяниях, совершенных в Саласпилском лагере 28 апреля 1945 г. ) in: Latvia under the yoke of Nazi regime (russ .: Латвия под игом нацизма ) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.chekist.ru
  19. ↑ Salaspils, Historical background ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.salaspils.lv
  20. ↑ Salaspils ( Memento of the original from May 21, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The 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. (Russian) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / skola.ogreland.lv
  21. ↑ Dieter Pohl: The local research and the murder of Jews in the occupied territories. In: Wolf Kaiser: perpetrators in the war of extermination. Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-549-07161-2 , p. 206. See also Marģers Vestermanis: Die Nationalozialistische Haftstätten… ISBN 3-596-15516-9 , p. 476.
  22. ↑ Kārlis Kangeris, Uldis Neiburgs, Rudīte Vīksne: Aiz šiem vārtiem vaid zeme. Salaspils nometne, 1941 - 1944 Riga, 2016 ISBN 978-9934-15-128-6 Set-off on p. 391/392.
  23. ↑ Andrej Angrick, Peter Klein: The “Final Solution”… ISBN 3-534-19149-8 , p. 269. The claim that this was a death camp with 53,000 victims is expressly rejected.
  24. ↑ Aiz šiem vārtiem vaid zeme. Salaspils nometne 1941-1944. Riga 2016, p. 301.
  25. ^ Andrej Angrick, Peter Klein: Riga 1941-1944… ISBN 3-89678-232-0 , p. 201.
  26. ↑ la.lv (accessed on January 31, 2018)
  27. ↑ Karlis Kangaris: la.lv (accessed on January 31, 2018)

Coordinates: 56 ° 52 ′ 12 ″  N , 24 ° 18 ′ 17 ″  E