Main camp VI F

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The main camp VI F was a camp for prisoners of war during the Second World War in Bocholt , from the end of 1944 in Münster .

The main camp in Wehrkreis VI (Münster)

In the German Empire there were 17 military districts , which were designated with Roman numerals. The main camps (Stalags) bore the number of their military district and, in the order in which they were set up, a capital letter. In the military district VI (Münster) there were camps VI A Hemer, VI B Neu Versen (near Meppen), VI C Bathorn (in the county of Bentheim ), VI D Dortmund (Westfalenhalle), VI F Bocholt, VI G Bonn (Duisdorf), VI H Arnoldsweiler (in the Düren district), VI J Fichtenhain (near Krefeld) and VI K Senne (near Paderborn). Basic regulations on the structure, organization and function of the prison camps were regulated by the Wehrmacht High Command in special service regulations.

Camp of the "Austrian Legion"

The prisoner-of-war team main camp VI F was located on a site belonging to Bocholt's city forest today, which was originally owned by Bocholter Reit- und Fahrverein e. V. had heard. In 1935, the NSDAP's North-West Relief Organization set up a reception camp for around 1,000 SA men who fled Austria after the July coup , the so-called “ Austrian Legion ”, which two former legionaries in 1940 described as “beautiful, if not the most beautiful Camp what legionnaires have ever lived in ”. Rioting by the Austrian SA men was the order of the day in Bocholt. Through it was so z. B. the Kolping monument in front of the St. George Church in Bocholt damaged and the many Bocholt visits by Clemens August Cardinal von Galen from Münster disrupted.

After Austria was annexed to the German Reich in 1938 , the camp residents returned to Austria. The NSDAP sold the camp buildings to the Wehrmacht . After concluding a garrison contract with the city of Bocholt and setting up a shooting range, the camp was to be used for the accommodation and training of short-term recruits . In fact, from 1938 to 1939 the camp was used as a training camp for the Reich Labor Service with a capacity of up to 3,000 people.

Establishment as a main camp

Beginning at the end of 1939, prisoners of war from Poland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France and Senegal arrived at the camp, which was presumably set up in 1940 as "Stalag VI F" for prisoner-of-war crew ranks and NCOs . According to the Geneva POW of 1929, captured soldiers of the team ranks could be used by the detaining power for all kinds of work except in the armaments industry. This manpower reservoir was of considerable importance for the war economy, especially since the employment ban in the armaments industry was hardly observed during the course of the war. The camp was a central facility for supplying heavy industry with labor. The prisoners of war, including Russians since 1941, were used for labor service as far as the Ruhr area. On November 20, 1941, the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) designated main camp VI F as a “general mining reception camp”. 

The camp (with the exception of the camp section for the Soviet prisoners of war) was considered "one of the best camps" in 1940 by the Red Cross and in 1943 as "relatively bearable". In 1941 the camp was considerably enlarged by the addition of emergency barracks. In total, far more than 1,736 Soviet prisoners of war died in the separate “Russian camp” from hunger, violence and typhus. They found their final resting place in nameless graves in a separate cemetery on Vardingholter Strasse in Bocholt. It was only recently that the names of 1,333 deceased could be clarified. 

Subcamp

One of the sub-camps was the "Hammerstein Stalag VI F Bocholt 108 camp" in the Hückeswagen village of Hammerstein near Kräwinklerbrücke . It was set up in the former carded yarn factory of the Lennep factory owners Engels & Oelbermann. Polish and French prisoners of war were brought there from 1940 and Soviet prisoners of war from 1941/42. Many of these prisoners of war, who came from a prison camp in Stablack in the former East Prussia and were to be relocated to Bocholt, had already been unloaded in Wuppertal and brought to the Hammerstein camp because, according to eyewitnesses, they were no longer transportable. Upon arrival, they were in very poor physical condition, were malnourished, and had typhus. It is unclear how many people have been accommodated in the camp over time. Statements by contemporary witnesses who assume a number of up to 6,500 cannot be proven. If you take official information after the end of the Second World War as a basis and consider the situation on site in the hamlet of Hammerstein, then there was a maximum of several hundred people who were in the camp at the same time.  

From December 1942 the management of larger POW camps in Wuppertal was transferred to Stalag VI J in Fichtenhain. However, it is unclear whether this applies to the Hammerstein camp. 

Camp commanders

From May 1942 , the commandant of the camp was Lieutenant Colonel Hans Jauch , who took his leave as a colonel when the Bocholt camp was closed in 1944. In his capacity as commander of Stalag VI F, after the war, Jauch witnessed the defense in the criminal proceedings ( Krupp trial ) against Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach because of the illegal use of prisoners of war for arms production. The prisoners of the Stalag were deployed in the Essen region. He took the position that under the sign of total war in companies like Krupp a strict separation of the use of prisoners of war in civilian production instead of in war production was objectively impossible. He was of the opinion that if the OKW had wanted to strictly adhere to the Geneva Conventions , it should generally have refrained from making prisoners of war available to companies like Krupp. 

Use after World War II

On September 18, 1944, the camp was disbanded because of the approaching front and relocated to Münster (Hoher Heckenweg), with around 5,000 Soviet prisoners of war. 

Subsequently, until August 1951, it became a “residential camp for foreigners”, a so-called “DP camp” for displaced persons , homeless or forcibly displaced foreigners. At that time it served to repatriate foreigners of various nationalities, but also in 1946 to intern 2,500 Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians who had been captured as members of SS units in Denmark. In addition, the facility functioned as “probably the only camp for Jews willing to leave” in today's North Rhine-Westphalia, who called it the “Palestine Transit Camp”.

At the end of 1952 the camp was set up as the main transit camp for refugees from the GDR , and at the end of 1956 it was used for refugees from the Hungarian uprising , after which the Bundeswehr moved into it.

The memorial

In 1985 the city of Bocholt bought the warehouse to expand the Stadtwald leisure area. The buildings had already been torn down and in 1987 a memorial of former prisoners of war from the camp in Bocholt's city forest was unveiled. The memorial has repeatedly fallen victim to vandalism, which is why the city of Bocholt had vandal-proof plaques installed on the memorial at the end of March 2014 and handed them over to the public. In addition, the original memorial was supplemented by three steles, which symbolically indicate the cornerstones of the former barracks camp. In addition to a plan of the camp and a general timetable, the steles each contain an individual text that is dedicated to individual sections of the camp's history.

literature

  • Otto Bokisch, Gustav A. Zirbs: The Austrian legionnaire. From memories and archives, from diaries and sheets. With numerous photos from the picture archive of the Austrian Legion. Österreichische Verlags-Gesellschaft, Vienna 1940 (especially pp. 123–140).
  • Wilfried Egerland, Norbert Bangert, Ralf Lochmann, Ralph Vesper: "You can drink water ..., tomorrow you will be dead!" Hammerstein camp 1933–1945. Association for Bergische Zeitgeschichte e. V., Hückeswagen 2008.
  • Winfried Grunewald, Ingeborg Höting: Forced labor in Westmünsterland. Documents, files, statements. District Borken, Borken 2004, ISBN 3-927432-00-0 , ( series of publications of the district Borken 17), (with special inventory of sources and extensive bibliography).
  • Hans D. Oppel: On the history of the city forest camp. In: Our Bocholt. Vol. 38, H. 4, 1987, ISSN  0566-2575 , pp. 31-41.
  • City of Bocholt (Hg): History of the Bocholt City Forest Camp , Bocholt 2015

Web links

Coordinates: 51 ° 51 ′ 22.1 ″  N , 6 ° 39 ′ 6.5 ″  E

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Otto Bokisch, Gustav A. Zirbs: The Austrian Legionnaire, Vienna 1940, p. 123
  2. ↑ Reinhard Otto: "Wehrmacht, Gestapo and Soviet prisoners of war in the German Reich territory 1941/42" . 1988, ISBN 978-3-486-64577-4 , p. 325.
  3. ↑ www.bdwo.de (PDF; 140 kB)
  4. ^ Camp Hammerstein 1933 - 1945 ( Memento of December 13, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) on the private website www.wuppertalsperre.net
  5. ↑ Wilfried Egerland, Norbert Bangert, Ralf Lochmann, Ralph Vesper: "You can drink water ..., tomorrow you will be dead!" - Hammerstein camp 1933–1945
  6. ↑ Klaus Goebel: "Wuppertal in the time of National Socialism" . 1984, p. 194.
  7. ↑ United Nations War Crimes Commission: Law reports of trials of war criminals . 1997, ISBN 978-1-57588-403-5 , p. 94.
  8. ↑ Gisela Schwarze: "Captured in Münster: Prisoners of War, Forced Laborers, Forced Laborers 1939 to 1945" . 2008, ISBN 978-3-88474-825-1 , p. 173.
  9. ↑ www.muenster.de
  10. ↑ Stephan Hermsen: From the concentration camp via Bocholt to Palestine . Article from January 26, 2018 in the portal nrz.de , accessed on February 18, 2018