»Isenschnibbe Barn« Memorial

Mahn- und Gedenkstätte »Isenschnibber Feldscheune«

On April 13, 1945, members of the SS, the Luftwaffe and the Volkssturm murdered about 1,000 concentration camp inmates in a barn close to Gardelegen – one day before the town was taken by the US Army. The »Isenschnibbe Barn« Memorial and the cemetery, on which the dead were buried, commemorate the massacre.

History

Between April 9 and 11, 1945, several transports carrying a total of about 3,000 prisoners from the various satellite camps of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp as well as from the Hannover-Stöcken camp arrived in the district of Gardelegen in the historical region Altmark. The trains were forced to halt at the Mieste and Letzlingen stations as the rail line was severely damaged and the Allies were approaching from all directions. At least 25 prisoners were shot upon arrival at Mieste; they were buried with a further 60 dead at the side of the railway tracks. On April 11 and 12, 1945, the SS guard unit led by the local NSDAP forced the weakened prisoners to march to the town of Gardelegen, convoyed by members of the SS, the Volkssturm and Wehrmacht soldiers. Prisoners who tried to flee were chased and shot. The inmates were accommodated in a riding and driving school of the Wehrmacht. On the evening of April 12, local NSDAP leader Thiele and his staff, members of the SS and Wehrmacht officers, decided to murder the concentration camp inmates. In the afternoon of April 13, members of the SS, Wehrmacht and Reich Labour Service led the prisoners to a large barn on the Isenschnibbe estate. They locked them in the barn and set fire to it. The prisoners managed to put out the fire again and again, yet the guards lit it anew, while shooting into the barn with guns and panzerfausts and throwing in hand grenades. The massacre went on long after nightfall. In the morning, members of the Volkssturm, the fire brigade and technical support set out to dispose of all evidence of the mass murder. They buried about half of the 1,000 victims. On the evening of April 14, American troops took Gardelegen. The next day, they discovered the charred remains of about 440 people in the barn. They made local residents unearth the remains of over 570 victims from the mass graves.

Gardelegen, 1945, US Army photo of the burned out barn, USHMM

Gardelegen, 2006, Entrance to the memorial, Thomas Herrmann, Berlin

Victims

In all, National Socialists, members of the SS and the Wehrmacht murdered about 1,700 people between April 9 and 14, 1945, in the area of Gardelegen. Many died on inhumane transports, several hundred prisoners were killed by soldiers and SS men for having attempted to flee. Members of the SS, Wehrmacht and Volkssturm murdered about 1,016 people in the Isenschnibbe barn. Only twelve survived the massacre. All of the victims had been inmates of satellite concentration camps. Their countries of origin are not known exactly.

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

When US troops took Gardelegen on April 14, 1945, about 24 hours after the massacre had begun, they discovered several hundred bodies in the smouldering barn. LIFE magazine published photos of the crime scene on May 7, 1945, in a piece entitled »The Holocaust of Gardelegen«. Guarded by the US Army, men from Gardelegen were forced to exhume over 570 bodies from mass graves. The dead were then buried in 1,016 individual graves on a special cemetery. The cemetery was consecrated as a military cemetery by the US Army on April 25, 1945. The commander of the troops stationing in Gardelegen arranged for a commemorative plaque to be affixed, bearing an inscription in both German and English. On July 1, 1945, Gardelegen became part of the Soviet occupation zone, and the American plaque was subsequently taken down. In 1950, construction work on a memorial was begun; in 1953, the remains of the barn were dedicated as a memorial wall. An exhibition in the municipal museum of Gardelegen was opened in 1963. The »Isenschnibbe Barn« Memorial was extended in 1973 to include a bronze sculpture of an inmate by Jochen Sendler. In 1990, the town of Gardelegen had a copy of the American plaque reinstated. The 1963 exhibition was closed.

Gardelegen, 1945, US Army photo, victims of the massacre, National Archives

Gardelegen, 2006, Cemetery for the victims of the massacre, Thomas Herrmann, Berlin

Possibilities

Guided tours may be booked via the Gardelegen municipal museum

Open

Accessible at all times

Contact

https://gedenkstaette-gardelegen.sachsen-anhalt.de/

info-isenschnibbe@erinnern.org

+49 (0)3907 775 908 12

An der Gedenkstätte 1
39638 Gardelegen

Gardelegen, 2006, The 1973 bronze sculpture by Jochen Sendler, Thomas Herrmann, Berlin

Gardelegen, 2006, The remains of the barn, today a memorial wall, Thomas Herrmann, Berlin

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