Rotenfels security camp

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The Rotenfels security camp was a National Socialist compulsory camp that succeeded the Alsatian security camp Schirmeck-Vorbruck from August 1944 to April 1945 in Rotenfels , today a district of Gaggenau in the Rastatt district in Baden-Württemberg . Approximately 1,600 prisoners were held in Rotenfels, of whom it is estimated that between 200 and 700 died.

history

Memorial stele in the spa gardens (2010)

The Rotenfels and Schirmeck-Vorbruck security camps were two of the numerous compulsory camps that existed in the National Socialist area alongside the system of the actual concentration camps that were subject to the inspection of the concentration camps . In the memory of the prisoners in particular, these forced camps are often perceived as concentration camps, and the conditions there were similar to those in the concentration camps. The security camp in Schirmeck-Vorbruck had existed since August 1940. During the German occupation of Alsace, it served the German police authorities as an "education camp" in the course of the " Germanization " of Alsace under Gauleiter Robert Wagner and as a "security camp " in which to prevent and “ protective prisoners ” were held.

On August 25, 1944, the day Paris was liberated by the Allied troops that landed in Normandy , the prisoners in Schirmeck began to be transferred, partly by rail and partly by truck. An eyewitness later described the prisoners arriving in Rotenfels as “people who looked scary: ragged from head to soles, unshaven, completely shabby.” By November, around 1,600 prisoners had been moved to Rotenfels.

In Rotenfels, the prisoners were housed in three barracks that had been built before the beginning of the Second World War as a material warehouse for the Wehrmacht . During the war, the barracks were temporarily empty, and at times they were used as the "Olga" camp to accommodate forced laborers . According to documents from the International Tracing Service , women were also housed in Rotenfels from October 24th, for whom three smaller, somewhat remote barracks were built. The entire camp was fenced in with barbed wire and provided with watch towers.

The camp commandant of Rotenfels was Karl Buck , who already held this position in Schirmeck. Since Buck was seldom in Rotenfels, the security camp was in fact subordinate to Robert Wünsch. Inmates who had met Wünsch as a loyal follower of Buck in Schirmeck describe a clear change in the SS- Unterersturmführer in Rotenfels: Wünsch is said to have canceled orders from Buck to systematically discipline the prisoners; he was also more sociable in everyday life.

Especially in the early days of the camp, the prisoner barracks were completely overcrowded; At times, three inmates had to share an 80 centimeter wide bunk. The barracks, which were not created for permanent residency, were left without water. Quickly "catastrophic sanitary and hygienic conditions arose". Vermin, especially fleas, bothered the inmates as much as the chronically insufficient diet. According to one inmate, there was “moldy white bread in the morning, a water soup from the camp at lunchtime, two plates of soup in the evening,” whereby the soup consisted of water, cabbage, some vegetables and potatoes. Unfit for work, the rations were reduced. The living conditions of the prisoners led to numerous deaths, especially in the winter of 1944/1945. According to reports from surviving prisoners, the number and severity of attacks by guards in Rotenfels decreased compared to Schirmeck. This is attributed to the behavior of the actual Commander Wünsch and to the shortage of personnel in the SS: Since more SS members were posted to the front, civilians who were obliged to serve were called in to guard work details. The numerous Alsatian clergy imprisoned in the camp succeeded in celebrating Holy Mass regularly in two barracks from November 1944 . They were supported by some of the guards who smuggled hosts and mass wine into the camp or tolerated smuggling.

Most of the prisoners worked as slave labor in the Gaggenau plant of Daimler-Benz . There were already two production facilities in Schirmeck-Vorbruck where prisoners from the security camp had to manufacture spare parts for Daimler-Benz. The Daimler-Benz plant in Gaggenau was largely destroyed in Allied air raids on September 20 and October 3. As a replacement, Daimler-Benz was assigned a tunnel system near Haslach in the Kinzigtal on October 12 , which was already under construction in the course of the underground relocation . At the suggestion of the Daimler-Benz director responsible for the underground relocation, Karl Müller, around 650 Alsatian prisoners, originally held in Schirmeck, were transferred to Haslach in order to accelerate the construction work previously carried out by prisoners from the satellite camp there . In addition, prisoners were increasingly used to clean up after air raids, to work in the woods and fields, in other commercial operations and at the end of the war to build air raid tunnels . An external command of the Rotenfels security camp existed in Weisenbach ; the prisoners there worked in a Daimler-Benz relocation company that manufactured truck engines. A second external command, consisting of a few prisoners, was set up in Villingendorf in November 1944 .

At the end of November 1944, 27 prisoners from the security camp were shot in the Erlichwald near the Gaggenau forest cemetery: on November 25, ten British and American prisoners of war and four French clergy were murdered, on November 30, nine members of the French resistance organization Réseau Alliance from Bordeaux. The bodies were buried in two bomb craters.

At the end of March 1945, Albert Neumaier , parish vicar in Rotenfels, tried to persuade the actual camp commandant Wünsch to release the prisoners. Wünsch secured himself with superior offices; The majority of the prisoners were released by April 5 after a brief interrogation by Gestapo officials and found temporary accommodation in the surrounding villages. About 170 prisoners remained in custody; they were evacuated up the murg in the direction of Freudenstadt . Units of the 1st French Army reached Rotenfels on April 10th.

liberation

The murders in Erlichwald became known soon after the liberation by a sergeant of the United States Army Air Forces , Jerôme Harley. Harley had survived the crash of his plane near the Alsatian community of Benfeld in the summer of 1944 and then pretended to be a deaf and mute Frenchman before he was imprisoned in Schirmeck and Rotenfels as part of the compulsory conscription of serviceable French. At the end of April 1945, the French occupation authorities called on former NSDAP members to rescue the bodies from the bomb craters. The dead were buried on May 13, 1945. In June 1945 the bodies were exhumed again to enable a British officer to identify the murdered prisoners of war. The major managed to identify six dead. The British soldiers had also operated behind the German lines in the Vosges in August 1944 as members of the Special Air Service in support of the Resistance . In March 1946, other prisoners' bodies were recovered from other bomb craters and the cemetery garbage pit in Rotenfels and buried in the cemetery. The exact number of those who died in Rotenfels remains unknown. It is estimated that between 200 and 700 prisoners died; surviving prisoners repeatedly stated the number of 500 deaths.

After the end of the war, the camp commanders Buck and Wünsch, along with other members of the guards, were indicted before British and French military courts and both sentenced to death for war crimes . The British trial dealt with the murders of prisoners of war in Erlichwald, and five death sentences were passed; the other defendants were sentenced to between two and ten years in prison. One of the defendants in Wuppertal, Bernhard Ulrich, was executed at Sandweier on August 26, 1947 on the basis of a French death sentence . Karl Buck was later pardoned to life imprisonment and released from British custody in 1955. Robert Wünsch also escaped execution; According to a Rotenfels pastor, he is said to have worked later for the criminal police in Essen. In 1959, the Offenburg Regional Court sentenced Karl Hauger to seven and a half years in prison for manslaughter . At the end of the war, SS member Hauger shot a 17-year-old Sinto who had escaped from Rotenfels and who had previously been picked up by a Volkssturm unit. The sentence was reduced in the appeal hearing.

French military burned down the barracks of the security camp shortly after the liberation to prevent the spread of epidemics. The remaining foundation walls of the men's camp were removed when a miniature golf course was built on the site. The foundations of the women's barracks were removed in 1983, “accidentally” according to the city administration. The camp site is currently a natural part of the Bad Rotenfels spa park near the thermal baths.

Memorial in the Erlich

A memorial stone was erected on August 16, 1947 for the prisoners murdered in the Erlichwald, which was later replaced by a larger memorial. Initiatives to erect a memorial plaque on the former camp site came from Gaggenau Social Democrats and a works council of the Daimler-Benz works in the early 1980s . The French pastor Joseph Friedrich, representing the prisoners, and Gaggenau's mayor Thomas Schäuble inaugurated a memorial stele designed by the Bad Rotenfels artist Hubert Baumstark in the spa gardens on March 30, 1985. Since October 2018 the stele has been part of the site of remembrance and warning , which also includes the exposed foundation walls of a barrack and an information board.

Web links

Commons : Rotenfels security camp  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Commons : Memorial in Erlich  - collection of images, videos and audio files

literature

  • Udo Böhm: Rotenfels security camp. A concentration camp in Germany. Süddeutscher Pädagogischer Verlag, Ludwigsburg 1989, ISBN 3-922366-13-9 .
  • Udo Böhm: Rotenfels security camp. A concentration camp in Germany. (= Special publication of the Rastatt district archive, volume 11) 1st revised and expanded new edition, BadnerBuch, Rastatt 2015, ISBN 978-3-944635-12-5 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel : Foreword. In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 9: Labor education camps, ghettos, youth protection camps, police detention camps, special camps, gypsy camps, forced labor camps. CH Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-57238-8 , pp. 7-15, here p. 7.
  2. ↑ Interview with an employee of the Reichsbahn in the 1980s, quoted in Böhm (1989), security camp , p. 21.
  3. ↑ Böhm (1989), security camp, p. 30f.
  4. ↑ Böhm (1989), security camp , p. 31.
  5. ↑ Barbara Hopmann: Forced Labor at Daimler-Benz. (= Journal for Company History, Supplement 78) Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-515-06440-0 , p. 373f.
  6. ^ Böhm (1989), security camp , p. 35.
  7. ^ Böhm (1989), security camp, p. 34f.
  8. ^ Roland Peter: Armaments policy in Baden. War economy and labor in a border region during World War II. (= Contributions to Military History , Volume 44) Oldenbourg, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-486-56057-3 , pp. 187f.
  9. ^ Böhm (1989), security camp, p. 43ff.
  10. ^ Böhm (1989), security camp, p. 48ff.
  11. ^ Böhm (1989), security camp, p. 58ff.
  12. ^ Böhm (1989), security camp, p. 61ff.
  13. ↑ Böhm (1989), security camp , pp. 33, 64.
  14. ^ Trial of Karl Buck and ten others . British Military Court, Wuppertal, Germany, 6. – 10. May 1946. In: Law-Reports of Trials of War Criminals. The United Nations War Crimes Commission . Volume V, HMSO , London 1948. pp. 39ff. (Accessed July 9, 2017)
  15. ^ Eva-Maria Eberle, Tribunal Général. War Crimes Trials Rastatt 1946-1950, Ottersweier 2018, overview after p. 265.
  16. ↑ a b Böhm (1989), security camp , p. 65.
  17. ↑ Robert Ullmann: 17-year-olds sent to their deaths. 50th anniversary of the trial of SS man Hauger. In: Badische Zeitung, May 14, 2009 (accessed April 22, 2010)
  18. ^ Böhm (1989), security camp , p. 70.

Coordinates: 48 ° 48 ′ 30.9 ″  N , 8 ° 18 ′ 8.2 ″  E