Hohenbruch Labour Education Camp Memorial

Место концентрационного лагеря »Хохенбрух«

Since 1995, several memorials in the township of Gromovo (German: Lauknen, from 1938: Hohenbruch), situated at the Großer Moosbruch bog in what was once East Prussia, commemorates the shot prisoners of the Hohenbruch police internment camp, which was later the Hohenbruch »labour education camp«. The police internment camp was established here in 1939; between 1941 and 1945 the Hohenbruch »labour education camp« was located here.

History

The State Police Headquarters in Königsberg, a duty station of the Gestapo, established a police internment camp in the fall of 1939, located in the Großes Moosbruch bog close to Lauknen (after 1938: Hohenbruch) in East Prussia, not far from the Lithuanian border. From the fall of 1939 onwards, the first prisoners were held captive in the building complex along the road to Mehlauken, which had until 1934 been an outpost of the Wartenburg jail. The State Police mostly brought members of the Polish intelligentsia to Hohenbruch. In the course of the so-called intelligentsia »Aktion«, people from the educated Polish upper classes were deported to camps and murdered since the National Socialists considered them dangerous after Poland's occupation. From Hohenbruch the prisoners were taken to other camps and murdered there. At least four Polish prisoners known by name were shot in the vicinity of Hohenbruch in February 1940. The camp in Hohenbruch was converted into a so-called labour education camp, most probably in 1941, in which prisoners were held captive for several weeks and deployed in forced labour. Most of these forced labourers were foreign prisoners who had been transferred from their initial camps to the labour education camp for disciplinary purposes. They had to perform forced labour in clearing forests, harvesting potatoes and constructing roads. The approximately 600 Hohenbruch prisoners were guarded by the SS at the behest of the Gestapo. The Red Army probably reached the camp on January 20, 1945.

Gromovo, 2008, Former commandant's office of the police internment camp and the labour education camp, Jürgen Leiste

Gromovo, 2009, Stone memorial to the four Polish prisoners on the shooting site, Stiftung Denkmal

Victims

According to estimates, there were about 600 prisoners in the Hohenbruch labour education camp; the majority of them were Poles, there were also many Czechs and Lithuanians. In the course of the war, many Soviet prisoners of war came to Hohenbruch. Presumably 50 people died in the Hohenbruch camps between 1939 and 1945. On February 24, 1940, the SS shot four Polish prisoners as part of the »Intelligenzaktion«. The victims are known by name.

In the Russian Federation, the 9 May – the anniversary of the victory of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War against »Hitlerite Fascism« – is the most important public holiday to have been retained from the country’s Soviet past. On 23 August 1939 the Soviet Union, led by Josef Stalin (1878–1953), initially signed a »non-aggression pact« with the Third Reich. This pact defined the »spheres of interest« of both regimes in East Central Europe and contained the provision to divide Poland between them. On June 22, 1941 the German Wehrmacht and its allies commenced their invasion of Soviet territory. Recent research estimates that by the end of the war in 1945 there had been up to 28 million civilian and military deaths in occupied Soviet territory. The Soviet culture of memory continues to have an impact on today’s Russia. Its symbols, such as the monumental style memorials in Saint Petersburg or Volgograd, are still popular and used to stage large-scale memorial services such as on 9 May. However, these sites of memory are less places of mourning and remembrance of the victims than places to honour wartime heroes. For a long time the victims were not remembered at all, and later they were classed as »victims of fascism«. The influence of this approach to the past can be seen, for example, in the conflict surrounding a sculpture put up in 1995 in front of the Great Patriotic War Museum in the capital Moscow. Entitled »Tragedy of Peoples«, the monument is dedicated to the approximately twenty million civilian victims in the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1944 and was intended to bring about a turnaround in the Russian culture of memory. However, the monument had to be moved behind the building following intense criticism, also from the general public, that the message was too pessimistic. At the same time, however, there were also non-governmental human rights organisations such as »Memorial«, which deal with repressed aspects of history, for example the prisoners of war from the Red Army and forced labourers held captive in Germany during the Second World War. Upon their return to the Soviet Union, these individuals were classed as traitors, universally accused of collaborating with the Germans and again imprisoned in camps. In terms of official state remembrance, there are regular remembrance initiatives on the part of committed local departments for culture, which have succeeding in establishing specific memorials as well as a culture of remembrance that includes the victims. It is often thanks to the commitment of individuals or Jewish communities that small sites of memory have been able to emerge in a number of locations, often funded with the smallest of budgets. After 1941, some 100,000 Soviet Jews died on the territory of today’s Russian Federation, mainly as a result of mass shootings carried out by SS Einsatzgruppen and their auxiliaries. They were remembered as »peaceful citizens« in the Soviet period. It is only since the early 1990s that additional plaques have been put up at official monuments and that Jewish victims have been named or commemorated by translating the inscriptions into Hebrew. There was also rudimentary Russian research into the Holocaust. In 2012, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre was opened in Moscow, acknowledged also by international experts. At the same time, however, the political regime ruling the country has become more and more nationalistic. State propaganda is dominated by an openly revisionist historical narrative which has only turned more aggressive with the war of aggression against Ukraine. Important civil society organisations, including »Memorial«, have been repressed severely.

Remembrance

In 1995, together with the Polish government the Russian regional administration set up a wooden cross to commemorate the four Polish prisoners on the site where they were presumed to have been shot. In 2009, a concrete monument was added. In March 2011, the wooden cross was replaced by a cross made of stone.
Between 2011 and 2015, the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe had been co-ordinating an interdisciplinary research project with scholars from Germany, Poland and Russia in order to find out more about the history of the camp. One of the conclusions of the project was that it is very likely that when the memorials were erected, there was confusion about the exact location of the camp. The memorials are not at the site of the police internment camp, but at the site of a camp of the Reich Labour Service (German: Reichsarbeitsdienst), a National Socialist agency to reduce unemployment. At the authentic site, there are only very few traces remaining of the forced labour camp. In June 2015, a memorial plaque with a trilingual (German, Russian and Polish) inscription was erected there at the initiative of the Foundation.
In the marshland about a kilometre from the authentic site, there is a memorial stone dedicated to a murdered Lithuanian and five other, unidentified prisoners.

Gromovo, 2011, Memorials for the prisoners who were shot, Stiftung Denkmal

Gromovo, 2011, Stone cross for the shot Polish prisoners, Stiftung Denkmal

Possibilities

The memorials are accessible at all times.
GPS coordinates of the camp site: 54°57'56.4"N 21°26'13.4"E

Contact

Hauptstraße des Ortes Lauknen (Gromowo)

Lauknen, o.D., The prison and the later poice internment camp were situated in the building in the middle, Kreisgemeinschaft Labiau

Gromovo, 2015, Memorial and information plaque at the former camp site, Stiftung Denkmal

Gromovo, 2015, Detailed view of the information plaque at the former camp site, Stiftung Denkmal

Gromovo, 2008, Remains of a camp building, Jürgen Leiste

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