Singen escape route
The Singen escape route in the narrower sense of the way several captured officers of Colditz in Saxony when they fled at the time of National Socialism to Schaffhausen . In a broader sense, it refers to every escape from the German border area of Hegau to the canton of Schaffhausen during this period .
Course of the escape route
The expression "Singen escape route" is imprecise, as Singen only generally indicates the border region from which the escapes took place, but many refugees arrived there by train at the train station and then fled on various routes to the canton of Schaffhausen .
Escape from Jews
The Swiss border region on the Rhine was therefore a destination for many Jews from Germany threatened with deportation , since from 1942 onwards a relatively humane practice developed towards Jewish refugees on the part of the Canton of Schaffhausen. It was more open than the guidelines from Bern , which usually provided for expulsion . The confusing course of the green border in zigzag lines also made it easier for them to flee, but without the local knowledge of German (and Swiss) escape assistance , many Jews would hardly have been able to escape. The following three escape helpers should apply to many others as an example.
Some escape helpers for the Jews
Joseph Höfler
Josef Höfler was born in Bietingen near the Swiss border. He married his wife Elise Höfler (née Brütsch) in 1935 and his daughter Gertrud was born in 1938. He lived with his family in Gottmadingen at the time of National Socialism and was a locksmith by trade and released from military service because he was employed in the armaments industry . Joseph Höfler helped Jewish refugees on the Singen escape route across the Swiss border. With the help of Willi Vorwalder and Hugo Wetzstein, he saved the lives of 28 Jewish refugees. He was caught and arrested before court asked. However, the trial did not take place because of the end of the war.
Luise Meier
Luise Meier was born as Luise Bemm in Vorhalle near Hagen in the southeastern Ruhr area . She was married to Karl Meier, who died of stomach cancer in 1942. The two had four sons, two of whom died in the war. Luise lived in Berlin-Grunewald in a Wilhelminian style villa. In the same house, the Jewish woman Fedora Curth ran a boarding house in which Jews were accommodated who were waiting to leave. Friends of Luise and her husband lived there, among other things, which prompted her to help the Jews when the pension was forcibly closed in 1941 and its residents had to move into Jewish apartments. She helped a total of 28 Jews to flee by taking them to Josef Höfler in Gottmadingen , near Switzerland . For these services, both were posthumously honored as Righteous Among the Nations .
August Ruf and Eugen Weiler
In 1943 the Singen pastor August Ruf helped Käthe Lasker, a Jewish woman from Berlin , to escape the Holocaust . He asked his colleague Pastor Eugen Weiler from Wiechs am Randen to help her flee to Switzerland, which then happened, but the help of the two clergy became known. In October 1943 August Ruf was sentenced to six months in prison by the Singen District Court . He was hastily released on March 29, 1944, as it was clear that he would not survive imprisonment due to the poor conditions. August Ruf died on April 8, 1944 in Freiburg im Breisgau . Eugen Weiler was also arrested in 1942 and transferred to Dachau in the same year. In February 2005, August Ruf and Eugen Weiler received an honor from the Israeli Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem for their selfless deeds by awarding them the title “Righteous Among the Nations”.
Officers flee from German captivity
One of the first attempts by officers to escape to the Swiss border was that of the Dutchman Hans Larive from the German officer prison camp Soest in October 1940. He was arrested in the Singen border area on the way to Switzerland. In order to mock him, a German Gestapo officer told him how he could have escaped successfully and which escape route he should have used in the border area. Larive did not forget this information and in the following years contributed to the successful escape of several Dutch and British prisoners from Colditz Castle to Switzerland.
Usually the escape was by train to Singen, then the escape was continued on foot across the border past the Spiesshof to Ramsen . This Swiss village near the German border was the place that was the goal of the fleeing prisoners of the Nazis during World War II and meant freedom. Officers who fled included Airey Middleton Sheffield Neave , Francis Steinmetz, Tony Luteyn, Patrick Robert ("Pat") Reid and Howard Douglas Wardle.
Later, the Stockach and Tuttlingen train stations were chosen as the starting point for the escape on foot. By October 1943, 19 captured officers from the Netherlands, Great Britain and Canada had managed to escape via the Singen Route. The guarding of the border was incomplete because customs officers had been transferred to the new external borders of the German Reich and drafted into the Wehrmacht. In Switzerland, interrogation protocols about the escape were drawn up, which are kept in the Federal Archives in Bern (Dossiers E4264 and E4320B). The further escape via Geneva in Switzerland to southern France was no longer possible from November 1942 because the Vichy zone had been occupied by German troops.
The forced laborers employed in the economy flee
During the Second World War, some forced laborers tried to flee across the Schaffhausen border. Most of them had been employed in agriculture and in factories in Singen, such as Maggi , Georg Fischer AG or the aluminum rolling mills in Singen . However, at least the civilian prisoners from Poland or the Soviet Union were usually turned away by the Swiss border guards until the summer of 1944, which meant a certain death sentence for them. Only then were they accepted in Switzerland. B. two forced laborers from the Goldbacher tunnel in March 1945 successfully in the direction of Schaffhausen.
literature
- Franco Battel: Where there is light, there is Switzerland . Chronos Verlag, Zurich 2000, ISBN 3-905314-05-3 .
- EH Larive: The man who came in from Colditz . CR. Hale, 1975.
- Reiner Ruft: “The Singen Route” - escape routes for Allied officers via Singen to Switzerland . In: Hegau-Geschichtsverein eV (Hrsg.): Yearbook . tape 73/2016 . Singing Hohentwiel, S. 263-278 .
- Reiner Ruft: Spectacular escape of French officers from German captivity via singing to Switzerland in 1941. In: Hegau-Geschichtsverein eV (Hrsg.): Yearbook. Volume 76/2019. Singen (Hohentwiel), ISBN 978-3-933356-97-0 , pp. 249-258.
Web links
Coordinates: 47 ° 44 ′ 16.8 ″ N , 8 ° 48 ′ 19.9 ″ E
Individual evidence
- ^ Franco Battel: Where there is light, there is Switzerland . Chronos Verlag, Zurich 2000, ISBN 3-905314-05-3 .
- ↑ http://www.gedenkstaette-stille-helden.de/biografien/bio/hoefler-josef/
- ↑ http://www.gedenkstaette-stille-helden.de/biografien/bio/meier-luise/
- ↑ Biography August Ruf ( memento from July 26, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF), stolpersteine-singen.de
- ^ Ramsen, end of "The Singen Route" , Steiner Anzeiger, October 18, 2016.
- ↑ Reiner Ruft: "The Singen Route" - Allied officers' escape routes via Singen to Switzerland . In: Hegau-Geschichtsverein eV (Hrsg.): Yearbook . tape 73/2016 . Singing Hohentwiel, S. 263-278 .
- ↑ Film about the escape of concentration camp forced laborers. In: St. Galler Tagblatt . April 3, 2009, accessed February 13, 2020 .