Breitenau Memorial

Gedenkstätte Breitenau

A memorial in Guxhagen near Kassel commemorates the fate of the prisoners of the early concentration camp Breitenau and the »labour education camp« later set up by the Gestapo. Both of the camps were located on the premises of the former Breitenau monastery.

History

Shortly after the National Socialists had come to power, the authorities established numerous »protective custody camps« in the German Reich for the purpose of incarcerating a large number of political prisoners. One of these early concentration camps was set up in Guxhagen in Hessia, in an old monastery dating back to the 12th century. The chief of police in Kassel ordered to prepare the complex for admitting new prisoners; it had previously been used as a correctional facility. Between June 1933 and March 1934, about 470 political prisoners were incarcerated here. In the first months, the Kassel police was in charge of guarding the prisoners. Authority over the Breitenau concentration camp was gradually ceded to the SS. The prisoners had to work in mat production in Breitenau or were deployed in work details in the area. Several of the political prisoners were severely abused by the guards. From October 1933 on, many prisoners left Breitenau as plans were being made to dissolve the camp. Some of the men were released, though most were transferred to other concentration camps. From March 1934 on, the monastery was used as a correctional facility again.
After the beginning of the Second World War, the Gestapo established a »labour education camp« for thousands of non-German forced labourers here. The men and women had been arrested for having committed deeds such as: leaving their workplace without permission, sabotage or refusing to work. The forced labourers were to be »re-educated« in the course of their one to two month-long prison sentences. The Gestapo also used the monastery as a prison for political opponents and as a collection camp for Jews from the Kassel region.

Guxhagen, after 1936, The Breitenau correctional facility, Gedenkstätte Breitenau

Guxhagen, 2003, Exibition room at the memorial, Gunnar Richter

Victims

In the nine months of its existence, about 470 men passed through the Breitenau early concentration camp. How many of these prisoners died after being transferred to other concentration camps is unknown.
In total, over 8,300 people were later incarcerated in the »labour education camp« by the Gestapo in the years 1940 to 1945. About 7,000 of them were forced labourers. They came, among others, from the Soviet Union, Poland, France, the Netherlands as well as Italy. Most of them were aged 17 to 25, many were also younger. Over 150 Jewish men, women and children were deported by the SS from Guxhagen to the Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps. Other prisoner groups included political opponents of the National Socialist regime, Jehovah's Witnesses and »asocials«. The Gestapo and SS deported some of them to the Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. Members of the SS and Gestapo shot about 28 prisoners in Guxhagen at the end of March 1945, shortly before the arrival of the US Army.

The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority. With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany. Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war. In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives. Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals. The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.

Remembrance

After the war, between 1952 and 1973, a community home for girls was located at the Breitenau monastery. Since 1974, it has been home to an open psychiatric hospital. The Breitenau Memorial was established in 1984 by the University of Kassel with the support of the Hessian welfare organisation. In 1992, the exhibition was remodelled in cooperation with artist Stephan van Borstel. The community of Guxhagen had already previously, in 1987, dedicated a monument to the forced labourers who were shot on March 30, 1945, on the banks of the Fulda river. Located there are also the remains of an »SS war memorial«, which prisoners of the Breitenau concentration camp had to erect in 1933.
By coincidence, thousands of documents on both camps were discovered in the basement of the Hessian welfare organisation. The documents included a list of the political prisoners at Breitenau, files on the prisoners of the labour education camp as well as correspondence of the camp authorities. Professor Dietfrid Krause-Vilmar evaluated the sources in cooperation with students and academics at the University of Kassel. The results were incorporated into the exhibition at the memorial.

Guxhagen, undated, Part of the exhibition which was remodelled in 1992, Gedenkstätte Breitenau, Gunnar Richter

Possibilities

Readings, meetings with survivors, temporary exhibitions

Open

Monday to Friday 9.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m. and 2.00 p.m. to 4.00 p.m., Sunday 1.00 p.m. to 5.00 p.m.

Contact

http://www.gedenkstaette-breitenau.de

info@gedenkstaette-breitenau.de

+49 (0)5665 353 3

Brückenstraße 12
34302 Guxhagen

Guxhagen, undated, View of the former monastery grounds on the banks of the river Fulda, Gedenkstätte Breitenau

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