Documentation Centre Hersbruck Concentration Camp

Dokumentationsstätte KZ Hersbruck

Since 1999, the »Documentation Centre Hersbruck Concentration Camp« association has commemorated the satellite camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp in the Middle Franconian town of Hersbruck. The satellite camp was in operation between May 1944 and April 1945. The SS forced the camp prisoners to construct an underground aeroplane engine factory in the Houbirg mountain.

History

On May 17, 1944, the first 147 prisoners from the Flossenbürg concentration camp arrived at Happurg close to Hersbruck. The SS accommodated the prisoners in a barn in Happurg; soon, the number of prisoners rose to somewhere between 400 and 500. The satellite camp at Happurg was under the command of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. The prisoners had to conduct forced labour in the nearby Houbirg massif close to Happurg, digging a tunnel complex which was to house an underground arms factory for the production of BMW aeroplane engines code-named »Doggerwerk«. In addition, the forced labourers set up the infrastructure necessary for a large construction site in Happurg. In August 1944, the SS transferred the Happurg camp and its approximately 1,900 prisoners to the newly established satellite camp at Hersbruck. The camp was in direct vicinity of the Hersbruck »Strudelbad« outdoor swimming pool. From then on, the SS used the camp at Happurg as a forced labour camp. Another camp, the Förrenbach camp, was set up in the area as a camp for police and SS prisoners. The number of concentration camp inmates at Hersbruck rose to over 2,000 in December 1944 and finally to nearly 6,000 in February 1945. In the winter of 1944/45, the SS erected a crematory not far from Förrenbach due for the many victims of the Hersbruck satellite camp. At times, up to 30 people died daily due to the harsh labour, insufficient living conditions or brutal punishments of the SS guards. The SS additionally burned bodies of the dead at two forest sites near Hersbruck. On April 7 and 8, 1945, the SS evacuated the camp and chased about 3,000 prisoners on a south-bound death march. The underground factory was never completed. On April 17, 1945, American troops entered Hersbruck and liberated the camp.

Hersbruck, 1945, American machine gun in front of the former prisoner barracks following the end of the war, National Archives Washington

Hersbruck, 2004, Information panels at the former camp premises, Dokumentationsstätte KZ Hersbruck e.V.

Victims

A total of about 9,000 people of 21 nationalities were imprisoned at the Hersbruck satellite camp during its 11-month existence. The largest prisoner groups were Hungarian Jews, Russians and Poles. Approximately 4,000 prisoners died of the living and working conditions, many also fell victim to abuse and executions. Hersbruck was thus one of the largest satellite camps of the Flossenbürg concentration camp; it also noted an especially high death rate.

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 end of World War II, the US Army first used the former camp premises as an internment camp, later it was used as a refugee camp. Already in 1945, survivors set up a wooden cross and a small cemetery on the former camp premises. Later, residential houses were constructed on a part of the area. In 1972, the Hersbruck finance authority moved into what was once commandant's headquarters; in 2007, the building was torn down and replaced by a new construction. In 1983, the Bavarian youth of the Confederation of German Trade Unions erected a monument in honour of the victims of the satellite camp. The entrances to the mines at Happurg, many in danger of collapsing, were sealed in 2002. The former camp premises were built over by the Hersbruck municipal administration in 2003: a thermal bath was set up next to the »Strudelbad« swimming pool. The Förrenbach camp was also used as a refugee camp after the war, and in 1955, the premises – including the former crematory – were flooded by a new reservoir and a memorial was set up at its banks.
In 2007, a former prisoner and professor of art, Vittore Bocchetta, unveiled a monument in memory of his former fellow prisoners at Hersbruck. The sculpture he created is entitled »Nameless«. Events regularly take place at the monument. In the autumn of 2009, the Bavarian Memorials Foundation set up information plaques on the former camp premises and in front of the entrance to the Doggerstollen mine. Since 1999, the »Documentation Centre Hersbruck Concentration Camp« association has advocated the establishment of a documentation centre and engaged in commemorating the Hersbruck satellite camp. The association presents a small exhibition on the camp at its offices in the Hersbruck town centre.

Hersbruck, about 1948, Wooden cross, set up by survivors in 1945 at the former camp premises, Association des Déportés de Flossenbürg et Kommandos

Hersbruck, 2007, Former commandant's headquarters, Konrad Tzschentke

Possibilities

Guided tours to the former camps premises and the Doggerstollen mine, reference library, travelling exhibition »The Hersbruck satellite concentration camp and the Doggerwerk mine«

Open

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday: 10.00 a.m. till noon.

Contact

http://www.kz-hersbruck-info.de

info@kz-hersbruck-info.de

+49 (0)9151 822 920

Mauerweg 17
91217 Hersbruck

Hersbruck, 2010, Monument by Vittore Bocchetta, Dokumentationsstätte KZ Hersbruck e.V.

Hersbruck, 2005, Interior of Doggerstollen mine, Wilhelm Henke

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