Hebertshausen shooting range
The Hebertshausen shooting range was built in 1937/38 as part of the Dachau concentration camp . In 1941 and 1942, more than 4,000 Soviet prisoners of war were murdered here by the SS . It has been a memorial for Nazi victims since the 1960s .
history
The Hebertshausen shooting range was established by the SS in 1937/38. It is located on the southwestern edge of the town of Hebertshausen and has a total area of around 85,000 m². In 1941 and 1942, as a result of the Commissar's order, more than 4,000 Soviet prisoners of war - mainly officers, communist functionaries and Jews - were murdered by the SS by execution pelotons . The area was taken over by American troops after the war and continued to be used as a target practice area. In the 1950s, the site was handed over to the Free State of Bavaria and administered by the Bavarian Ministry of Finance. The site has been in the care of the Bavarian Memorials Foundation since 1997 . On May 2, 2014, the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial opened the newly designed memorial site at the former "Hebertshausen shooting range".
backgrounds
According to Colonel General Halder, the military campaign against Russia aimed, among other things, at the "annihilation of the Bolshevik commissars and the communist intelligentsia". In order to achieve this goal, the prisoners of war from the area of competence of the Wehrmacht - contrary to international law - had to be integrated into the SS.
Heydrich's “Einsatzbefehle No. 8 and Nr. 9” - so-called commissar orders - of July 17 and 21, 1941 for the Einsatzkommandos of the Security Police and the Security Service clearly show the intentions of the Nazi leadership.
In “ Einsatzbefehl No. 8”, for example, it is stated that the aim is “the political examination of all camp inmates (ie Russian prisoners of war ) and further treatment. Among the prisoners of war there are all important functionaries of the state and the party, especially the functionaries of the Comintern, all leading party functionaries of the CPSU ..., all people's commissars ..., all former political commissars in the Red Army, ... the leading personalities of economic life, the Soviet Russian Intelligent people, all Jews, all people who are found to be agitators or fanatical communists . "
The background to the separations was the fear that the Soviet prisoners of war, who were held in camps on Reich territory , could infiltrate the German population with communist ideas.
In "Operation Order No. 9" it becomes clear what should happen after the separation. Among other things, it states that the executions of the Russians who have been singled out in POW camps on Reich territory should be carried out “inconspicuously in the next concentration camp ”.
Mass shootings in the Dachau concentration camp
Shootings in the bunker yard
The mass executions began in August - September 1941 after the "segregation" had started in the weeks before, among other things by the Regensburg Stapo . The " segregation " was based on the principle of denunciation , which was repeatedly "helped" through torture. Soviet prisoners of war from the prisoner-of-war camps in Hammelburg in the Rhön (senior officers and men), Nuremberg-Langwasser , Memmingen , Moosburg and from the Stuttgart military district were “separated” and taken to the Dachau concentration camp .
The irregular transports to Dachau were accompanied by Gestapo men. “The Russian prisoners of war”, said the head of a task force, Paul Ohlers, “were locked together with metal shackles, 2 men each, during the transport. The transports mostly took place at night in the winter of 1941/42 and lasted an average of 12-18 hours. The vehicles were not heated. "
1,100 officers were brought from the officers' camp to Dachau , and around 2,000 people from the team camps in Hammelburg and Nuremberg-Langwasser . None of those who were “singled out” in the prison camps who were brought to Dachau survived. According to the instructions of the SS leadership in the Dachau concentration camp, their names were not allowed to be included in the camp list, only the numbers of their identification tags were noted. Thus, their identification should be made impossible forever. In order to keep the shootings a secret, the prisoners working in the farm building and elsewhere in the vicinity were ordered to the barracks. The dead were cremated in the crematorium of the concentration camp, partly also in the crematorium in Munich .
Shootings at the SS shooting range near Hebertshausen
The SS did not really see the secrecy of the shootings within the concentration camp being guaranteed and therefore moved the executions to the practice shooting range near Hebertshausen , which is about one and a half kilometers from the concentration camp . The first shootings took place there on September 4, 1941. They ended at the firing range in May – June 1942. But that did not mean the end of the executions. Further shootings took place near the crematorium . A total of around 4,000 Russian prisoners of war were shot, the majority of them at the Hebertshausen firing range. The actual place of the mass shootings was the pistol shooting range. It was surrounded by a high wooden fence to prevent observations from the surrounding fields.
According to the testimony of the eyewitness Josef Thora, the prisoners were told before the shooting that they were about to be murdered. This communication led to different reactions from the prisoners. Some showed practically none at all, "stood there as if paralyzed, others resisted, began to cry and scream ... that they were opponents of Bolshevism , that they were members of the Russian Church ."
Usually, executions target the victim's chest; Here, however, the SS men aimed - at least for some of the victims - on the heads, which led to a formal "explosion" of the heads. The remains of the skull come exclusively from executions in which several shooters targeted the victims' heads at the same time. The superimposed pressure waves due to the simultaneous entry of several projectiles in the brain caused the skull to burst open. Parts of the skull with adhering tissue were torn off the head and thrown away. This brutality resembles a “beheading”. Those killed in this way lost several liters of blood in a very short time through the opening of the neck arteries. This also explains why the SS men involved were provided with special overalls, aprons and gloves. A shed had been built on the eastern edge of the firing range to keep the bodies of those who had been murdered. The shed was used to store the coffins, which were used to transport the corpses to the crematorium of the camp and from there back again. The initially simple wooden coffins were later lined with zinc sheet to prevent blood from escaping.
It is believed that three times the number of excavated human skull parts are still in the ground today. The finds shocked and surprised the archaeologists at the same time. Because "normal" executions are usually aimed at the chest. But even the head would only have been punctured with the high-speed bullets used at the time, but not splintered. An investigation in the Anthropological State Collection in Munich by Olav Röhrer-Ertl then showed "that at least some of the shootings were carried out with even greater cruelty."
Side effects of the shootings and reactions
The shootings served to educate the SS people in cruelty and basically they meant "a tremendous bloodbath". The headshots spurted blood and brain matter around meters and the people shot lost a lot of blood. The shootings were intended to “harden” the SS men and get them used to the worst. You should develop a willingness to carry out even the toughest commands without contradiction. In addition, they should be bound by complicity with the regime. This created a “community” of perpetrators.
In fact, after the shootings, quite a few SS people were very depressed and psychologically stressed. In order to increase the motivation of the SS men, the SS leadership offered “rewards” such as special rations of schnapps and cigarettes, snacks, days off, medals (war merit cross, second class with swords), for particularly committed SS men on vacation in Italy.
- According to the memories of a man whose father was an SS guard in the Dachau concentration camp , the son regards his father's membership of the SS guard as a completely normal job, like any other job. It was only many years later that he had doubts about the innocence of his father and the harmlessness of his professional activities. During a visit to the memorial of the former "SS shooting range Hebertshausen", he read on an information board that SS men who were involved in firing squads could go on vacation to Italy in the summer of 1942 as a "reward". Interestingly, he stated in an interview that he does not know that the photos are where his father went on vacation in Palermo and Naples . Nevertheless, he pushed aside the doubts. He is convinced that the father was sentenced to eight years imprisonment in the Dachau trials after the war "only" for a slap in the face that he gave a prisoner for repeatedly violating the camp rules . He sees the judgment as a great injustice.
A total of 190 members of the command staff and other men from the security guards of the Dachau camp SS were among the perpetrators. As research in the 2020 book shows, some of the SS men were proud of their role in the mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war. “Tomorrow we have another shooting festival”, so it was said for one of them. Hardly any of the perpetrators had to answer in court after 1945. Egon Zill, head of the protective custody camp in the concentration camp, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1955, but was released after eight years.
Registration of Soviet prisoners of war
With a few exceptions, all Soviet prisoners of war, at least as far as they were brought into the German Reich, are in the camps with all their personal and military data (places of work, illnesses and hospital stays, vaccinations, escapes, punishments, etc.) in the camps on so-called personal cards registered and reported to the Wehrmacht Information Center ( WASt ) in Berlin in the form of access lists . In the event of death, these ID cards were sent to Berlin together with other documents (e.g. identification tags, certificates of death, departure lists, etc.) so that the WASt always had an overview of all deceased prisoners of war, including those extradited to the SS who were in Dachau were murdered. These documents and other holdings relating to the prisoners were relocated to Meiningen in 1943 and handed over to the Soviet troops in 1945; since then they have been considered lost.
The historians Reinhard Otto and Rolf Keller succeeded in locating some fragments of these files; some of them are in the German office in Berlin, the successor to the WASt. The vast majority, however, is in the archives of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation in Podolsk (ZAMO). This was subjected to an initial inspection by the two historians on several visits.
It turned out that the personal cards of the Soviet soldiers who died in the Reich (approx. 370,000) are apparently completely in this archive. In addition, additional files, hospital stays, lists of transports to and from the prisoner of war camp (s) and of the deceased. In addition, there is a separate file of 80,000 officers. Extensive transfers to the various concentration camps can also be verified on the personal cards. In any case, the files allow precise evidence of the whereabouts of each prisoner.
After the war, these documents were torn from their original order and bound together at random to new volumes of around 100 index cards each. There is no order according to camps or the alphabet. The officers' file has been rearranged according to the Russian alphabet.
The Dachau concentration camp memorial assumes that in Hebertshausen alone 1500 to 2000 names can be researched in the long term. There are currently 816 names on the memorial plaques in Hebertshausen.
Announcement of the names in the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper
The list of the 62 Soviet prisoners of war who were shot at the Hebertshauser SS training firing range, published in the newspaper " Komsomolskaya Pravda " on January 16, 2014 , caused a considerable flow of feedback. Among the readers were some who for the first time in 72 years had learned the cruel truth about their relatives.
- With tears of joy and amazement, I read the line number 43 on this spooky list. Buschakow Leonid Nikolaevich is my father. He was born in 1914 and lived in Ivanovo city on Poletnaya Street. He had not yet finished the medical institute when he was drafted into the Soviet army and transferred to Belogorsk for military service in 1939. At this point he was married to my mother. They were waiting for my birth, but on June 22, 1942 all hopes were dashed. My mother was sent east by train. After the terrible journey under the air raid on August 10, 1942, she arrived in Ivanovo and on August 15 I was born. My mother will shortly receive terrible news telling her that my father was swollen unknown. ... All our life my mother and I looked for his traces. Thank you very much for the joy, joy that has been accompanied with tears ...
Aleksejewa (Buschkowa) Iraida Leonidovna, City of Vladimir
Memorial of the SS shooting range Hebertshausen
The 8 ha large area was taken after the war by American troops in possession and continue to be used as a shooting range. The site was given to the Free State of Bavaria in the 1950s and administered by the Ministry of Finance .
In 1964 a memorial stone by the artist Will Elfes , donated by the Dachau camp community , was erected in front of the bullet trap . It was removed from there by the Ministry of Finance after a short time and placed at the entrance gate to the firing range.
After 1997, the Ministry of Finance reacted to public pressure and the site was transferred to the Ministry of Culture , which placed it in the care of the State Center for Political Education . As a result, the 4-ton memorial stone was returned to its original location.
For many years the brutal crime at the SS shooting range in Hebertshausen was pushed out of the public eye due to the East-West conflict, the annexation of Crimea and the political tensions in relation to Putin's Russia.
On June 22, 2011, the human remains that had been found during the excavations were buried in a small wooden box in the ground in front of the large memorial in a multi-religious celebration with prayers.
On May 2, 2014, the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial opened the newly designed memorial site at the former "Hebertshausen shooting range". In the meantime, some information boards have been set up on the site to inform visitors in several languages. Assuming a minimum number of 4,000 victims, the foundations with a length of 40 meters offer space for the names of all those murdered. The Dachau concentration camp memorial assumes that 1500 to 2000 names can be researched in the long term. There are currently 816 names on the installation.
The consulates general of Russia and the Ukraine in Munich have now accepted the former Hebertshausen firing range as a memorial for their fallen soldiers. Every year a commemoration ceremony takes place on June 22nd on the day of the attack on the Soviet Union ( Operation Barbarossa ). In addition, the memorial ceremony for the day of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp takes place here every year on April 29th.
Next to the memorial installation is the former SS guardhouse, which is used today by the city of Dachau to house the homeless .
literature
- Gabriele Hammermann, Andrea Riedle (ed.): The mass murder of the Soviet prisoners of war on the SS shooting range Herbertshausen. Wallstein, Göttingen 2020, ISBN 978-3-8353-3648-3 .
Web links
- Memorial of the former "SS shooting range Hebertshausen" at kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de, accessed on November 26, 2017.
- G.-R. Penn / P. Abtmeier: shooting range Hebertshausen on gedenkstaettenpaedagogik-bayern.de, accessed on November 26, 2017.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Former "SS shooting range Herbertshausen" Förderverein Dachau, accessed on June 20, 2011
- ^ SS shooting range in Hebertshausen. In: Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial, Bavarian Memorial Foundation. Retrieved June 20, 2020 .
- ↑ Colonel General Halder: War Diary . Ed .: Percy Ernst Schramm. tape II . Bernard & Graefe Verlag für Wehrwesen, Frankfurt am Main 1942.
- ↑ a b c d e f g SS shooting range Hebertshausen. In: Memorial Education Bavaria. Retrieved June 20, 2020 .
- ↑ Otto Ambros: Affidavit . In: Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute (ed.): Nuremberg follow-up process, Case VI . April 29, 1947, p. 1-25 .
- ↑ Josef Thora: Testimony before the regional court . Nuremberg 1950.
- ^ Report on the excavations at the firing range . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . June 6, 2002.
- ↑ Thomas Schlichenmayer: Contemporary witness known by name to the author . Ed .: Archive of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site. Dachau November 3, 2016.
- ↑ Thomas Schlichenmayer: Ampermoching in the 50s. Economic miracle and changes . Herbert Utz Verlag, Dachau 2018, ISBN 978-3-8316-4702-6 .
- ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung: "Tomorrow we have another shooting festival". Retrieved July 4, 2020 .
- ↑ Инна Кумейко: "О страшной смерти отца мы узнали от его товарища, который бежал из плена learned about the death of the father from his captivity." In: Komsomolskaja Pravda (ККомсомольская правда). February 21, 2014, accessed June 20, 2020 (Russian).
- ↑ https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/zweiter-weltkrieg-morgen-haben-wir-wieder-schuetzenfest-1.4943507?fbclid=IwAR3OrOrL5cUOpkhpIppc0JRWcNKM3eT8GHTboS6tm8XUh4xfVAuoKyu39Fw
- ↑ Memorial act on June 22, 2011. July 3, 2018, accessed on July 4, 2020 (German).
Coordinates: 48 ° 17 '8.7 " N , 11 ° 27" 44.8 " E