Black Wall (Auschwitz Concentration Camp)

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Replica of the original Black Wall in the former main camp of Auschwitz (2006).
Replica of the original Black Wall in the former main camp of Auschwitz - view from the gate side to the inner courtyard (2004).

As a black wall (also Wall of Death ) was in Auschwitz main camp in the camp language a backstop called "of black insulation" which is located at the stone wall in the courtyard between block 10 and 11 Block (camp prison) was located. The first execution on the Black Wall took place on November 11, 1941, when 151 prisoners were shot there by members of the camp SS . Thousands of death sentences were carried out in front of the Black Wall - especially against Polish civilians for anti- occupation activities, resistance fighters and concentration camp prisoners . Some of the death sentences were pronounced by a tribunal of the Katowice police tribunal in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Starting in January 1943, this court met every four to six weeks for one day and often passed over a hundred judgments; mostly death sentences. There were also minors and the elderly among those convicted. The death sentences were carried out immediately after their announcement by shooting in the neck in front of the black wall . Under the concentration camp commandant Arthur Liebehenschel , the Black Wall was removed in December 1943, and the executions then continued in Crematorium IV . Before the Black Wall was erected, the first executions were carried out in gravel pits near the Auschwitz concentration camp. In total, around 20,000 people were executed by shooting at the Black Wall in Auschwitz . The largest execution in front of the Black Wall was carried out on October 28, 1942, when around 200 prisoners were shot in " retaliation " for Polish resistance actions near Lublin .

Course of the executions

Pery Broad , a former employee of the Political Department at Auschwitz , goes into detail on the executions on the Black Wall in his Broad report , which he wrote after the end of the war . According to Broad, before prisoner numbers were tattooed on inmates in Auschwitz, the death row inmates were marked with a copier on their torsos to identify them in the crematorium shortly before the execution . The hands of the death row inmates were handcuffed with wire until the end of 1942. Women were executed first. Through the bunker capo , the death row inmates were brought naked and barefoot from Block 11 to the Black Wall , where they had to stand facing the wall. According to Broad, in the presence of the head of the political department, Maximilian Grabner and the protective custody camp leader Hans Aumeier, the execution victims were barely audibly murdered by a shot in the neck by the report leader Gerhard Palitzsch or the arrest warden with a small- bore rifle . Any patriotic calls were stopped by beating. After the execution, the executioner declared death or gave the victim who was still alive a safety catch . The dead were brought to the other end of the courtyard by corpse carriers and lined up there. The pools of blood were covered with sand. The dead were taken to the crematorium after the end of the executions. Broad describes this gruesome process very vividly, especially when the load jammed during the executions and the executioner whistled a song. However, he himself did not mention that members of the Political Department carried out executions on the Black Wall. You could not see the courtyard through the windows of Block 11 because they were barred and walled up. From the windows of Block 10, prisoners could watch some executions at risk of death through the cracks in the boarding of the windows facing the courtyard.

meaning

Today in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum there is a true-to-original replica of the Black Wall at the original installation site . The Black Wall symbolized according to former Auschwitz inmate Hermann Langbein Polish martyrdom in the main camp of Auschwitz. In 1995 he criticized the fact that the Polish government had the memorial set up in the former main camp and not in the former Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp , where the sites of mass extermination for Jews and “Gypsies” were located. To this day, the Poles perceive the Black Wall as a very important place of remembrance, where flowers are deposited to commemorate the victims. Even heads of state sometimes look for this memorial site during their visits to Poland and the like. a. in the course of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp .

During the first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt , the executions on the Black Wall were also the subject of negotiations. On December 14, 1964, a German delegation made up of members of the Frankfurt jury court came to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp for several days, where they visited the Black Wall accompanied by the press .

In the visual arts, literature and theater, the black wall stands as a symbol for "threats and calamities". The Polish writer Tadeusz Różewicz used a. a. the black wall as a scenic element in a play. Peter Weiss dealt with the subject in his documentary The Investigation , in which testimonies from Auschwitz survivors about the executions are reported during the “Singing from the Black Wall” (7th picture). The Auschwitz survivor Józef Szajna , who survived in death block 11, made a pencil drawing after his transfer to the Buchenwald concentration camp in early 1945 with the title "Block 11 - Started for Execution". This drawing shows a prisoner standing with his face turned away from the black wall; those who have already been executed are lined up behind him.

Web links

Commons : Black Wall  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Andreas Lawaty , Marek Zybura (Ed.): Tadeusz Różewicz and the Germans , Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2003, p. 206.
  2. ^ Sybille Steinbacher : Auschwitz: History and Post-History. Verlag CH Beck , Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-50833-2 , p. 89.
  3. ↑ a b c Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung : http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/netzquelle/a03-03780/02-teil1.pdf
  4. ↑ a b State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau (ed.): Auschwitz in the eyes of the SS. Oswiecim 1998, p. 99 ff.
  5. ↑ State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau (ed.): Auschwitz in the eyes of the SS , Oswiecim 1998, p. 99.
  6. ↑ Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (ed.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 5: Hinzert, Auschwitz, Neuengamme. CH Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-52965-8 , p. 159.
  7. ↑ Gerhard Mauz : Where is our defendant? . In: Der Spiegel 52/1964 of December 23, 1964, pp. 88ff.
  8. ↑ Andreas Lawaty, Marek Zybura (ed.): Tadeusz Różewicz and the Germans , Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2003, p. 205.
  9. ↑ Ewa Kobylińska, Andreas Lawaty (ed.): Remembering, forgetting, suppressing: Polish and German experiences , Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1998, p. 267f.

Coordinates: 50 ° 1 ′ 30.4 ″  N , 19 ° 12 ′ 13.9 ″  E