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The Bullenhuser Damm Memorial – the Site, the Victims and the History of Commemoration

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The Bullenhuser Damm Memorial – the Site, the Victims and the History of Commemoration The Bullenhuser Damm Memorial – The site, the victims and the history of commemoration Published by the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial Edited by Karin Schawe Written by Iris Groschek and Kristina Vagt Translated by Georg Felix Harsch ConTenTs 4 INTRODUCTION 8 The NeUeNgamme concentration Camp and its saTellite camps 10 The Bullenhuser Damm satellite camp 13 The persecution of the Jewish population 14 Medical experiments 16 The evacuation of the camps 18 The crime on 20 April 1945 19 The children 36 The children's carers 41 The soviet prisoners 42 The prosecution of the peRpetrators afTer 1945 43 The Curio-Haus Trials 49 Later proceedings 52 COmmemorating the victims 54 Post-war commemoration 54 Reconstructing the crimes 55 The Bullenhuser Damm Memorial 57 Forms of commemoration 59 Chronicle 62 The memorial today 64 Map of the Bullenhuser Damm Memorial 66 literature and archival sources 67 abbreviations (photo credits) 68 Opening hours and guided tours 4 5 IntroDuction The murder of 20 Jewish children at concentration camp, where they the former school building on were wrested from their parents to be Bullenhuser Damm on 20 April 1945 subjected to medical experiments at is one of the many despicable crimes the Neuengamme concentration committed during the Nazi reign of camp for five long months. Finally, terror. shortly before the end of World Today, people all over the world War II, they were murdered in the know about the “Bullenhuser Damm basement of a school in Hamburg by murders”. They feature in exhibitions SS men trying to erase the traces of at the Auschwitz Museum, the their crimes. For decades, their story United States Holocaust Memorial was all but forgotten until the end Museum and Yad Vashem, and they of the 1970s, when a journalist have been the subject of plays and began to search for traces of these films. Schools and streets have been children and look for their relatives named after the murdered children in who survived the Holocaust. France, Italy, the Netherlands, Günther Schwarberg found the Germany and other countries. victims' siblings, nephews and nieces, Twenty children aged between five cousins and even their mothers and and twelve, ten girls and ten boys fathers. Together with the children's from all over Europe, were dragged relatives and a few dedicated locals from their homes with their families from Hamburg, Schwarberg founded and deported to the Auschwitz the Children of Bullenhuser Damm View of the exhibition in 2011. Photograph by Michael Kottmeier. (ANg) Ruchla Zylberberg on a tricycle, undated. (ANg) Eduard (left) and Alexander Hornemann, circa 1942. (ANg) The Bullenhuser Damm school after the war among the ruins of Rothenburgs- ort, probably taken in 1945. (DA HH) 6 IntroductIon 7 association. In 1980, the association The exhibition also documents the set up a small memorial at the school prosecution of the perpetrators and that was run by a private initiative for how the murders were remembered almost 20 years before passing under after 1945, the establishment of the the aegis of the Hamburg city council Bullenhuser Damm Memorial and the and becoming a branch of the development of an international Neuengamme Concentration Camp culture of remembrance. A large Memorial in 1999. A new permanent number of newly-discovered exhibition opened at Bullenhuser documents and photographs have Damm in 2011 following an extensive been included in the exhibition, and redesign and the addition of new materials for further reading as well Symbolic suitcases for the children in the exhibition, 2011. Photo by M. Kottmeier. (ANg) rooms to the memorial. This new as audio and video interviews allow bilingual exhibition is particularly visitors to explore the history of the memorial's rose garden, and a bronze learning. Many school groups come aimed at young people. It contains site in great depth. monument commemorates the to the memorial to learn about the information on the building's use as a In addition to the material shown in murdered Soviet prisoners. In the fate of the 20 children and the adults satellite camp of Neuengamme, the the new permanent exhibition, future, students will be given the who were murdered the same day. persecution and deportation routes artistic treatments of the Bullenhuser opportunity to exhibit their own art The memorial's aim is to ensure that of the 20 children who had come Damm murders play an important projects which they developed in the the stories of the victims are not from Poland, France, the Nether- role at the memorial. The large wall context of project seminars at the forgotten. lands, Italy and Yugoslavia, the painting by Jürgen Waller entitled memorial. medical experiments they were “21 April 1945, 5:00 a.m.”, for The Bullenhuser Damm Memorial is a subjected to at Neuengamme, and instance, is an important point of branch of the Neuengamme the murders of the children, their four reference for the memorial's edu- Concentration Camp Memorial and Dr. Detlef Garbe, carers and up to 30 Soviet concentra- cational work. Visitors can plant roses an important site of commemoration Director of the Neuengamme tion camp prisoners on 20 April 1945. in memory of the victims in the in Hamburg, but it is also a place of Concentration Camp Memorial Exhibition section on the children's carers, 2011. Photograph by M. Kottmeier. (ANg) Section on the Curio-Haus Trials and collection of additional documents, 2011. Photograph by M. Kottmeier. (ANg) The entrance to the Bullenhuser Damm Memorial. (ANg) 8 neuengamme and Its satellIte camps 9 THe neuengamme ConCentration Camp anD its saTellite Camps In late 1938, the SS established a comply with forced labour orders or satellite camp of the Sachsenhausen on racist grounds. concentration camp in a disused Current research into prisoner num- brickworks in the Hamburg district bers states that more than 80,000 of Neuengamme. In the early men and 13,500 women were regis- summer of 1940, the camp was tered at the Neuengamme concen- expanded and put under the tration camp, while another 5,900 authority of the Inspectorate of the prisoners were either never entered Concentration camps as an indepen- into the camp's files or registered dent concentration camp. The Nazis separately. In total, at least 42,900 were planning a redevelopment of people died in Neuengamme itself, Hamburg on a grand scale and in one of its satellite camps or in therefore needed bricks. This was the course of the camp's evacuation. Prisoners on clearance detail in Hamburg in 1943. (StAHH) the main reason for setting up the From 1942, the German Ministry camp. Over the course of the war, of Armaments and the country's over north-western Germany. In roughly 40,000 prisoners, around tens of thousands of people from armaments industry increasingly these camps, prisoners had to 28,000 men and more than 12,000 all over German-occupied Europe demanded concentration camp perform extremely strenuous physical women, had to work for private were deported to Neuengamme prisoners as cheap labour. labour, were subject to maltreatment businesses, the Wehrmacht, the by the Gestapo and the SS security This prompted the establishment of at the hands of the SS, did not receive Nazi state and the SS in the satellite service (SD). Most of them were a large number of satellite camps. adequate medical care or sufficient camps. At the same time, the arrested for resistance against the More than 85 satellite camps of food and often had to sleep in Neuengamme main camp held German occupation, for refusing to Neuengamme were established all provisional huts. In March 1945, 13,000 male prisoners. In 1944, some of the wooden prisoner huts were replaced by solid buildings. Photo from SS files. (ANg) The new brickworks. Photo courtesy of Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich Prisoners working at the Dove Elbe canal. Photo from SS files. (NIOD) 10 The Bullenhuser Damm satellite camp neuengamme and Its satellIte camps 11 The Bullenhuser Damm satellite camp Several satellite camps of Neuen- divided into two wings for boys and Stone Works], an SS-owned Red Cross in 1945 following nego- gamme were established in Hamburg and girls had space for 30 classes. company. In the autumn of 1944, the tiations with the SS. In April 1945, the itself, outside the Neuengamme main After the Nazis came to power in Hamburg council handed the school SS evacuated the satellite camp and camp, to provide companies with 1933, the new political system influ- over to the authority of the SS, and transported its prisoners to so-called cheap labour. Work details of enced the day-to-day running of by late November, the building was “reception camps”, like the former concentration camp prisoners were the school: Flag-raising ceremonies transformed into a satellite camp. Its POW camp at Sandbostel. also used to clear rubble, recover were held in the school yard, windows were fitted with bars and bodies and clear unexploded students had to greet teachers with the grounds were surrounded with ordnance after air raids on the city. the Hitler salute and new subjects a barbed wire fence. The first One of these satellite camps was set such as genetics and racial studies prisoners, most of them from Poland up in a former school on Bullenhuser were introduced which indoctrinated and the Soviet Union, arrived in Damm. The building was erected students with racist ideology. December 1944. They were initially in 1910 as a school for the many Most of Rothenburgsort was de- deployed on clearance detail and had children living in the new Billwerder stroyed in an air-raid by the British to reprocess bricks from destroyed Ausschlag neighbourhood. This and American air forces on 27/28 July buildings.
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