Special camp Ketschendorf
The special camp Ketschendorf , located on the southern outskirts of Ketschendorf near Fürstenwalde / Spree , was as special camp No. 5 one of ten such camps of the Soviet occupation forces in the Soviet occupation zone . It existed from April 1945 to February 1947.
history
The camp was set up by the Soviet secret service NKVD at the end of April 1945 on the site of a former workers' settlement of the Deutsche Kabelwerke (see Pneumant ). In the course of the Stalinization of the Soviet occupation zone, up to 18,000 German civilians and prisoners of war of the Russian Liberation Army (ROA) were interned there without a judicial decision. Among the civilians were, in addition to former NSDAP members, bourgeois opposition to the Soviet occupation policy, and more than 1,600 young people between the ages of 12 and 18 who were subordinated to as partisans of the former Hitler Youth, so-called werewolves , to want to fight against the occupying power.
Before the Ketschendorf camp was closed on February 17, 1947, the internees were transported to other special camps, such as Buchenwald , Jamlitz , Mühlberg and Fünfeichen .
Victim
More than 4,600 internees died under inhumane conditions, such as malnutrition and tuberculosis ; they were buried in mass graves between the camp and the highway. In 1952, several thousand bodies were found during excavation work for residential buildings.
They were reburied at the Halbe forest cemetery on the initiative of the Protestant pastor Ernst Teichmann . Under the escort of the Ministry for State Security , the remains were transported from Ketschendorf to Halbe on 30 trucks and buried there. The pastor was forbidden to name or number of the deceased on tombstones. They were considered "unknown" during the times of the GDR . The German War Graves Commission presented in 2004 in block 9 of the Forest cemetery Half 49 name plates with the 4620 known victims of the camp Ketschendorf on.
After 1990 a memorial for the victims of the Stalinist terror was built in Ketschendorf. In 2013–2014, a death register was drawn up for the internment camp with surname, first name, date of birth, place of birth, last place of residence and date of death. It contains the names of 4,722 victims of the camp, 100 more than was previously known. Pastor Eckhard Fichtmüller, chairman of the Ketschendorf internment camp initiative group since 2010, was awarded honorary citizenship of the city of Fürstenwalde in 2015 for his services to the historical processing of the history of the camp .
literature
- Jan von Flocken , Michael Klonovsky , Christian Münter: The dead from "Freedom Square": Ketschendorf camp and Halbe cemetery. Two sites of Stalinist crimes in Germany. In: The morning. 24./25. February 1990.
- Jan von Flocken, Michael Klonovsky: Stalin's camp in Germany 1945–1950. Documentation, witness reports. Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-550-07488-3 .
- Karl Wilhelm Fricke : Politics and Justice in the GDR. On the history of political persecution 1945–1968. Science and Politics, Cologne 1979.
- Renate and Jan Lipinsky: The road that led to death. On the history of the special camp No. 5 Ketschendorf / Fürstenwalde. Ed. Initiativgruppe Internierungslager Ketschendorf e. V.
- Kurt Noack: Postwar Memories. When he was fifteen in Stalin's camps. Niederlausitzer Verlag, Guben 2009, ISBN 978-3-935881-70-8 .
- Andreas Weigelt: Book of the Dead. Soviet special camp No. 5. Ketschendorf 1945–1947. Wichern-Verlag, Berlin 2014.
Web links
- Gerhard Finn: The special camps of the Soviet occupation forces 1945 to 1950, p. 367 (PDF file) (199 kB)
- Camp plan - photo of a memorial display board
- Website of UOKG
Coordinates: 52 ° 20 ′ 10 ″ N , 14 ° 5 ′ 10 ″ E