Bullenhuser Damm Memorial

Gedenkstätte Bullenhuser Damm

The »Bullenhuser Damm Children Association« established a memorial in 1979 in honour of the twenty Jewish children who were hanged by SS men on the night of April 20, 1945. Prior to this, the children had been subjected to medical experiments by SS doctors at the Neuengamme concentration camp.

History

From November 1944 on, a satellite camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp was located in the Hamburg district of Rothenburgsort. The SS established a camp for up to 1,000 prisoners in the school building on Bullenhuser Damm 92 on initiative of Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann. The prisoners conducted forced labour in the SS-owned »Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH« gathering and sorting bricks and rubble following air raids on the city. There were about 600 inmates at the satellite camp in March 1945 according to eye witness accounts. Between April 17 and 20, 1945, the SS dissolved the Hamburg-Rothenburgsort camp and deported the prisoners by train to the prisoner of war camp at Sandbostel. The SS continued to use the school building: On the night of April 20, 1945, the SS brought twenty Jewish children from the Neuengamme concentration camp, two Dutch nurses and two French doctors who tended to the children, to Bullenhuser Damm. SS doctor Kurt Heißmeyer and his colleague Hans Klein had abused the children for medical experiments at Neuengamme. They had infected them with Tuberculosis by rubbing a bacteria solution in fresh wounds on their chests. When the experiments failed to yield the desired results, the doctors lost interest and left the children behind at Neuengamme. On April 20, 1945, it was decided at the SS headquarters in Berlin that the children were to be killed as they were witnesses of the crimes conducted. In the night of April 20/21, an SS commando led by Johann Strippel hanged the twenty children and their four guardians in the cellar of the school building at Bullenhuser Damm. That same night the commando also hanged 24 Soviet prisoners of war who had performed forced labour in the Hamburg-Hammerbrook satellite camp. Strippel presumably had all 48 bodies brought back to Neuengamme in the morning, where they were burned.

Hamburg, May 1945, Bullenhuser Damm school, damaged by bombs, Museet for Danmarks Frihedskamp

Hamburg, 2008, Memorial stone in the rose garden, Gedenkstätte Bullenhuser Damm

Victims

Little is known of the 600 prisoners who had to work as forced labourers at Bullenhuser Damm. Presumably many more were incarcerated at the Hamburg-Rothenburgsort satellite camp than stated in eye witness accounts. Most of the children who were murdered on April 20/21, 1945, came from Poland, others came from France, Italy and the Netherlands. They were all Jewish and had been deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. From there, SS doctor Josef Mengele had transferred them to his colleagues in Hamburg – ten Jewish boys and ten Jewish girls, aged between five and twelve. The names of all of the children are known thanks to the research conducted by the journalist Günther Schwarberg. Nothing is known of the identity of the Soviet prisoners of war who were killed that same night.

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

The school at Bullenhuser Damm came into operation again in 1948; the crimes, which took place here in 1945, were not spoken of. In 1963, a memorial plaque was affixed to the building on initiative of the »Neuengamme working group« and annual commemorative ceremonies began being held on April 20. At the end of the 1970s, the journalist Günther Schwarberg published an article in which he described the medical experiments and the murder of the children, listing the names of all twenty of them. Following this, the »Bullenhuser Damm Children Association« was founded in 1979, and an exhibition in the cellar rooms was opened. The school was shut down in 1989 and in the next decade the building was home to a vocational school. Meanwhile, the »Bullenhuser Damm Children Association« continuously extended the memorial site. In 1994, a new permanent exhibition was opened. Since 1999, the memorial has been administered by the City of Hamburg. The exhibitions have been revised and extended and many artefacts added. Since 1985, a rose garden designed by artist Lilli Fischer has been located on the former school premises. Relatives of the murdered children funded several memorial plaques which haven been attached to the fence of the rose garden. In 1985, on the fortieth anniversary of the murders, a bronze sculpture by Anatoly Mossiychuk was dedicated to the 24 Soviet prisoners of war who were hanged. Since the mid-1990s, several streets in Hamburg's Schnelsen district have been named in honour of the children who were killed at the school on Bullenhuser Damm.

Neuengamme, about 1944, Medical experiments on children, Archiv KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme

Hamburg, 2011, View of the new exhibition, Gedenkstätte Bullenhuser Damm, Michael Kottmeier

Possibilities

Lectures, film screenings, guided tours, educational study days (twice a year)

Open

Sunday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Guided tours by appointment.

Contact

https://bullenhuser-damm.gedenkstaetten-hamburg.de/

stiftung@gedenkstaetten.hamburg.de

+49 (0)40 428 131 500

Bullenhuser Damm 92
20539 Hamburg

Hamburg, undated, The school on Bullenhuser Damm, Gedenkstätte Bullenhuser Damm

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