Müngersdorf collection camp

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Müngersdorf assembly camp was a camp set up by the National Socialists in Müngersdorf in 1941 in the former Fort V of the outer Cologne fortress ring and a barrack camp built in the immediate vicinity, in which the Jewish population from Cologne and the surrounding area was ghettoized from the end of 1941 . From 1942 onwards the deportations to the Theresienstadt ghetto and the extermination camps in the east took place.

history

Fort V was built as part of the Outer Fortress Ring from 1874 to 1876. Until 1918 the building was used as a military prison. After it had lost its function as a defensive structure and prison, the fortifications were razed in 1921/1922 except for the Kehl barracks and the flank ditch . According to the plans of the gardening director Fritz Encke and the building councilor Theodor Nussbaum , the leveled area was redesigned into a green and sports facility.

National Socialism

In the summer of 1941, the National Socialist city administration decided to set up the former military prison in Fort V as a collection camp for the Jews living in Cologne. In 1941, 6,200 of the former (in 1933) almost 15,000 Jewish fellow citizens still lived in Cologne. As early as April 30, 1939, a law on tenancy agreements with Jews was enacted in Cologne , which ordered that Jews were only allowed to live in the houses of Jewish owners. After a series of air raids on Cologne in the spring of 1941, the housing and supply situation in the city deteriorated. At the end of May 1941 it was decreed that all “ Aryan ” and a number of Jewish houses in the inner city “are to be released from their Jewish residents for a short time”.

The city of Cologne decided on August 23, 1941 that bomb victims should move into the apartments of Jewish owners and that they should be barracked in the rooms of the former military prison in Fort V. At the same time, the construction of a barracks camp 200 meters northwest of the barracks, directly on the Cologne – Aachen railway line and at a flak position , was commissioned. The cost of the barrack camp to be built, amounting to RM 800,000, had to be borne by the Jewish community. However, not all of the 36 barracks originally planned were completed.

The first Cologne Jews moved into the damp and unheated casemates in Fort V in September 1941. From October 1941, the deportation of the Cologne Jews who were still living in the city to the Litzmannstadt and Riga ghettos began . By the beginning of December 1941, 3,000 of Cologne's Jews had been deported.

Shortly before Christmas 1941, the first Jews had to move into the half-finished, unheated barracks in the camp on the railway line. The furniture had to be brought with you: one bed per person, a cupboard for four people and a dining table for eight people. In the winter of early 1942, 203 people were interned in Fort V and 1,232 in the barrack camp. Over 1000 sick and frail people were also accommodated in a very small space in the Israelite Asylum in Neuehrenfeld .

At the beginning of 1942 the deportations from Cologne were temporarily suspended. After the thousand-bomber attack on Cologne on the night of May 31, 1942, in which 45,000 residents were left homeless and, among other things, many Cologne hospitals were destroyed, the National Socialist administration closed the barely damaged Israelite asylum and the Jewish hospital in Otto- Clear the street within two hours one day later. The patients and residents of the nursing home were taken to the Müngersdorf barracks camp by trucks, where many of the sick died as a result of a lack of medical care.

Two weeks later, on June 15, 1942, the deportations from the Rhineland continued. 963 people from the Cologne Jewish and ghetto houses , the Rhineland Lodge and above all from the Müngersdorf assembly camp were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp / ghetto ; On the same day, another deportation train with over 1,000 people left Cologne, presumably to the Sobibor extermination camp . Shortly before the deportations, numerous people who feared the deportation committed suicide in the ghetto houses and in the camp . By the end of July 1942, almost all of Cologne's Jewish residents were deported to Theresienstadt or Minsk . Some of them were murdered there immediately upon arrival, like all Cologne Jews who were deported to Minsk on the Da 219 deportation train on July 20, 1942 and murdered in the Maly Trostinez death camp on the day of arrival .

The Jews from the Rhineland and Cologne who lived in so-called “ mixed marriages ” were barracked in the Müngersdorf assembly camp and after a short time deported to Auschwitz by smaller transports, some of them via Berlin . In 1943, the Rhineland district office of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany was also located in the assembly camp .

For a while, prisoners of war and forced laborers were also housed in Fort V and the surrounding barracks complexes. In an air raid on February 14, 1943, the barracks at Fort V partially burned down. 25 French slave laborers died in the barracks of Fort V.

On September 12, 1944, the spouses of so-called "mixed marriages" from Cologne and the surrounding area were asked to meet with all family members within ten days in the Eichorn barracks camp in Cologne-Müngersdorf. At the end of the month the Jewish family members were deported to Theresienstadt, the “Aryan” spouses were expelled from the Rhineland, and the children were housed with family members.

After the bombing and destruction of the building complex in the exhibition center in Cologne-Deutz , which had been converted into a labor education camp , on October 14, 1944, the prisoners were brought to Müngersdorf. A branch of the Buchenwald concentration camp was housed in the so-called “ fair camp ”. The prisoners were used in Cologne to clear rubble and defuse duds. After the failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler , numerous political opponents were arrested in the so-called action grid and imprisoned in the exhibition center. Those arrested also included the former mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, and the central politician Otto Gerig .

From November 9, 1944, the barracks camp in Müngersdorf served as a replacement for the “work education camp” in Deutz. A large kitchen of the National Socialist People's Welfare was also housed on the site . At the end of 1944 the Müngersdorf camp was also bombed and the prisoners and NSV personnel were distributed to other camps. Shortly before the American army reached the western Cologne city limits , the Müngersdorf camp was closed and the remaining prisoners had to walk to the Hundswinkel labor education camp and other concentration camps to the east . After the invasion of the American army on March 4, 1945, the NSV u. a. Open to the population with rubber boots , edible fats and alcohol that were in the fort.

present

Memorial stone on the former site of Fort V in Müngersdorf

The barracks on the railway line were leveled shortly after the end of the war and the Waldfriede allotment garden was built on the site . Fort V was demolished in 1962, the site was largely leveled and included in the design of the outer green belt. In 1981 the Cologne City Council installed a memorial plaque on a boulder near the former Fort V to commemorate the Jewish citizens from Cologne who were rounded up here from 1941 onwards.

In the recent past there are plans to erect a memorial site on the site of the former assembly camp. On November 19, 2018, the Cologne City Council decided to create a memorial for the artist Simon Ungers , which was originally designed by the artist as a competition entry for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin . The design that took 1st place has not yet been implemented. The Wall memorial is a further development of the Berlin design. After the artist's death, it was made available for the memorial site by his sister Sophia Ungers. In November 2019, the local Catholic community and the Cologne synagogue community commemorated the victims, keeping their desire for this new design of the memorial site alive.

Memorial to the deportation camp Cologne-Müngersdorf, erected posthumously in 2020 according to plans by Simon Ungers. The previous memorial stone in the foreground on the left

In January 2020, a memorial site in the form of a Corten steel wall was built by Simon Ungers. The memorial should be inaugurated on March 15, 2020, which was canceled due to Corona. Instead, a brochure was published in July. Q: Citizens' Association Cologne-Müngersdorf eV

literature

  • Kurt Schlechtriemen: Victims of National Socialism in Cologne-Müngersdorf. Cologne 2017, ISBN 978-3-00-057778-9 .
  • Kurt Schlechtriemen: Fate of Jewish people in Cologne-Müngersdorf. Cologne 2014.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Henriette Meyen (ed.): Fortress city Cologne: the bulwark in the west . Emons, Cologne 2010, ISBN 978-3-89705-780-7 , p. 502 .
  2. ↑ a b Entry on Fort V in the outer green belt in the " KuLaDig " database of the Rhineland Regional Council , accessed on December 10, 2018.
  3. ^ NS Documentation Center Cologne - Jewish Destiny. Retrieved November 18, 2018 .
  4. ^ Albert Kramer, Siegfried Bernhard: Announcement of the housing advice department . Ed .: Jüdische Kultusvereinigung, Synagogengemeinde Köln e. V. Cologne May 1941.
  5. ↑ Barbara Becker-Jákli : The Jewish hospital in Cologne: the history of the Israelite asylum for the sick and the elderly from 1869 to 1945 . Emons, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-89705-350-0 , p. 344 .
  6. ↑ Barbara Becker-Jákli: The Jewish hospital in Cologne: the history of the Israelite asylum for the sick and the elderly from 1869 to 1945 . Emons, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-89705-350-0 , p. 335 .
  7. ↑ Barbara Becker-Jákli: The Jewish hospital in Cologne: the history of the Israelite asylum for the sick and the elderly from 1869 to 1945 . Emons, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-89705-350-0 , p. 335 ff .
  8. ↑ Bernd Haunfelder : Humanity and Diplomacy: Switzerland in Cologne 1940-1949 . Aschendorff, Münster 2001, ISBN 3-402-05385-3 , pp. 160 .
  9. ^ Anne Burgmer: Exhibition: The forgotten extermination site . In: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger . ( ksta.de [accessed on November 18, 2018]).
  10. ↑ Werner Jung , Cultural Office of the City of Cologne (ed.): NS Documentation Center Annual Report 2017 . Cologne 2017, ISBN 978-3-938636-28-2 , pp. 22nd ff .
  11. ↑ a b c d Cologne NS Documentation Center - camp of forced laborers, prisoners of war and concentration camp prisoners in Cologne | Details. Retrieved November 18, 2018 .
  12. ^ A b Hans Clemens: Müngersdorf in the mirror of history . In: Heimatverein Alt-Köln (Hrsg.): Contributions to Cologne history, language and character . tape 50 . Cologne 1968, p. 182 .
  13. ↑ Citizens' Association Cologne-Müngersdorf e. V. (Ed.): 1000 years of Müngersdorf . Cologne 1980, p. 90 .
  14. ↑ Citizens' Association Cologne-Müngersdorf e. V. - "Wall" by Simon Ungers. Retrieved November 11, 2018 .
  15. ↑ Cologne receives a worthy place of remembrance. Retrieved November 21, 2018 .
  16. ↑ Citizens' Association Cologne-Müngersdorf e. V. - "Wall" by Simon Ungers. Retrieved November 21, 2018 .
  17. ↑ Memorial site: From Cologne-Müngersdorf to the extermination camps. Kölner Stadtanzeiger , November 21, 2019.
  18. ↑ Uta Winterhager: A long story, a long wall. arge koelnarchitektur.de, February 6, 2020, accessed on March 19, 2020 (German).

Coordinates: 50 ° 56 ′ 34.6 "  N , 6 ° 52 ′ 15.5"  E