»Wille« Satellite Camp Memorial

Denkmal KZ-Außenlager »Wille«

A memorial and an exhibition in Rehmsdorf are dedicated to the Jewish prisoners of the »Wille« satellite camp. The prisoners had to conduct forced labour at the Brown Coal-Petrol-AG (Brabag) fuel production factory. The SS had deployed inmates of the Buchenwald concentration camp at Brabag since June 1944, regularly exchanging labourers who were no longer capable of working.

History

From 1937 to 1939, the Brabag established a fuel production factory in Tröglitz, in the south of what is today the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt. Between 1939 and 1944, the factory operated at full stretch. On May 12, 1944, Allied air raids interrupted production at the factory crucial to German war efforts. A second air raid brought the factory to a complete standstill.
In order to get the factory running again, the Brabag required labourers. The Brabag had already previously applied for forced labourers with the SS Economic Administration Main Office (WVHA). On June 4, 1944, the first 200 Jewish prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp arrived. They were primarily deployed in heavy construction and clearing work on the factory premises. As there was no way to accommodate further prisoners from Buchenwald, the Brabag had a tent camp for 5,000 people set up in Tröglitz. This satellite camp of Buchenwald was codenamed »Wille« in reference to the factory manager of the Brabag in Zeitz, Dr. Wille. The living and working conditions of the prisoners were catastrophic. Insufficient provisions, 12 hours of labour a day and constant abuse by the SS guards meant that many of the prisoners were completely exhausted and unable to work after only four weeks. The Brabag therefore exchanged its labourers for new prisoners on a regular basis, and those unfit for labour were sent back to the main camp at Buchenwald. By December 1944, the inmates had built 18 stone barracks in Rehmsdorf to replace the tent camp. In April 1945, the camp was hastily evacuated. The 3,000 prisoners were deported by the SS to Leitmeritz (in czech: Litoměřice) and Theresienstadt (Terezín) in ten open coal cars.

Rehmsdorf, 2000, Memorial to the former »Wille« satellite camp in Rehmsdorf, Lothar Czoßek

Rehmsdorf 1996, Remaining barrack of the »Wille« satellite camp, Lothar Czoßek

Victims

In total, over 5,800 of the approximately 8,600 prisoners to pass through the »Wille« satellite perished between June 1944 and April 1945. Most of the victims were Hungarian Jews who had been deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp via Auschwitz. Other forced labourers came from France, Poland, Romania, Latvia, and the Netherlands. Prisoners no longer able to work were sent back to Buchenwald. The SS deported most of them on to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were murdered. Many forced labourers lost their lives in the repeated Allied air raids on the Brabag factory complex.
About 900 prisoners did not survive the transport from the »Wille« satellite camp to Leitmeritz and Theresienstadt in April 1945. The train came to a halt in Reitzenhain, ninety kilometres outside of Theresienstadt, due to an American air raid. Members of the SS and locals shot 380 prisoners who had attempted to flee from the train.

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

Already in September 1946, a monument to the victims of the »Wille« satellite camp was dedicated in Rehmsdorf. On October 1963, a memorial was set up, at which commemorative ceremonies have been held annually ever since. An exhibition on the history of the camp and its victims was opened at the »Bürgerhaus«, or community hall, in Rehmsdorf in 2005. Part of the former prisoner barracks serve as residential housing until today.

Rehmsdorf, 2007, Bürgerhaus Rehmsdorf, which houses an exhibition on the camp's history, Hartmut Krimmer

Possibilities

Brochure on the permanent exhibition, lectures for school groups, clubs or institutions on various themes, by appointment meetings with former inmates of the camp

Open

Exhibition
Monday to Friday
8 a.m. till noon

Contact

https://www.gemeinde-elsteraue.de/de/ortschaften/rehmsdorf-20000148.html

info@gemeinde-elsteraue.de

+49 (0) 3441 226-0

Brunnenplatz 5
06729 Rehmsdorf

Rehmsdorf, 2000, Former inmate Israel Lazar at the memorial in Rehmsdorf, Lothar Czoßek

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