Documentation and Information Centre Stadtallendorf

Dokumentations- und Informationszentrum Stadtallendorf

Between 1938 and 1945, over 17,000 forced labourers were deployed in the arms industry in what is today Stadtallendorf. The Documentation and Information Centre (DIZ) deals with this time period and commemorates the fate of the thousands of men and women affected.

History

During the National Socialist period, the region east of Marburg became a centre of the German arms industry. In 1938, the Reich-owned real estate company »Verwertungsgesellschaft für Montanindustrie GmbH« decided to construct two dynamite works on a 1,000 hectare large plot of land south of the town of Allendorf. Additionally, Verwertchemie, a subsidiary company of Dynamit Nobel AG and the Westfälisch-Anhaltische Sprengstoff AG built a complex for the production and processing of dynamite. In certain areas of work, such as production, the management deployed foreign labourers from the beginning. Apart from civil forced labourers, soon there were also many prisoners of war from the Stalag IX A Ziegenhain camp, but also criminal convicts as well as concentration camp prisoners were being deployed. From August 1944 on, about 1,000 female inmates from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, most of them from Hungary, were forced to work at Allendorf in excavation work, in the laundry or the tailor workshop. The Hungarian forced labourers were exposed to especially hazardous work conditions at the filling plant, where the poisonous explosives were filled into grenades and bomb shells. They had to work six days a week and up to twelve hours a day.
Already at the beginning of 1940, the Münchmühle camp comprising 26 barracks was constructed to house the forced labourers deployed in Allendorf. In August 1944, after concentration camp prisoners had become part of the labour force in Allendorf, Münchmühle became a satellite camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
After the end of the war, the Allies accommodated POWs and »displaced persons« in the former satellite camp.

Allendorf, 1940, The POW camp under construction, Fotoarchiv Karl Weitzel

Stadtallendorf, 2006, Exhibition area at the Documentation and Information Centre, DIZ Stadtallendorf

Victims

Initially, the units deployed in the Allendorf arms factories consisted of workers of the Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD, Reich Labour Service) – civil forced labourers from Poland, France, Italy and the Netherlands as well as French, Serbian and Italian prisoners of war. Many of the female Jewish forced labourers who were brought to Allendorf from 1944 on came from Hungary, part of them came from Slovakia. Due to the difficult and hazardous work conditions in the arms factories, many of them suffered life-long health damage. The SS deported several pregnant women and women deemed unfit for labour to the Auschwitz extermination camp and to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

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 Documentation and Information Centre (DIZ) is located in the side wing of the former administrative seat of the Dynamit Nobel AG. The city of Stadtallendorf began dealing with its National Socialist history in 1986. In the course of these efforts, the Documentation and Information Centre was established in 1994. The DIZ's mission is to document and come to terms with the fate of forced labourers in Allendorf. The administrative district of Marburg-Biedenkopf set up a monument on the former premises of the Mühldorf satellite camp in 1988.

Stadtallendorf, 2006, Former forced labourers visit the DIZ, DIZ Stadtallendorf

Stadtallendorf, 2006, Entrance to the former Münchmühle camp, DIZ Stadtallendorf

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition, guided tours, introductory lectures, reference and media library, exhibitions on the topic of National Socialism and regional history, workshops and seminars, events with external lecturers, film screenings, thematic tours through the town

Open

Tuesday to Thursday 9 a.m. to noon and 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., every first Sunday each month 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Contact

http://www.diz-stadtallendorf.de

info@diz-stadtallendorf.de

+49 (0)6428 707 424

Aufbauplatz 4
35260 Stadtallendorf

Stadtallendorf, 2002, A part of the former administrative building of Dynamit AG now houses the DIZ, Archiv DIZ Stadtallendorf

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