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The Massacre in the Arnsberg Forest: Nazi crimes perpetrated on Russian and Polish forced labourers in 1945

In the spring of 1945, the Western Allies crossed the Rhine for the first time and were to occupy all of Westphalia during the following few weeks. At the same time, in the Sauerland region, members of the Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht were committing one of the greatest crimes outside prisons and concentration camps in Germany at the end of the war, when they murdered 208 Russian and Polish forced labourers and buried them in various places in the Arnsberg Forest. After more than 70 years, Dr. Marcus Weidner, at the LWL-Institute for Westphalian Regional History, has now succeeded in throwing further light on the National socialist crimes in the Arnsberg Forest, on the basis of interdisciplinary and systematic research. Furthermore, in cooperation with Dr. Manuel Zeiler at “LWL-Archaeology”, the execution sites were excavated in 2018/19 and numerous finds recovered.

The shooting place in the Langenbachtal near Warstein.

Foto: LWL/Thomas Poggel

Shortly after US troops occupied Warstein at the end of April 1945, a tip from the militia revealed the truth about two of these three brutal massacres. The third, the Eversberg massacre, only came to light at the end of 1946. In the Langenbach valley and Suttrop the US soldiers ordered former NSDAP party members to exhume the murdered victims and forced the inhabitants of the surrounding villages to march past the corpses. This shock form of “re-education” was practised by the Allies as a form of 'denazification through confrontation with Nazi crimes' shortly after the end of the war. But whether it really triggered a rethink or rather a defensive reaction, is a matter of controversy. That said, in the socio-political climate of the Adenauer period the reactions of the local population to the massacres were predominantly defensive. They were marked by denial, stylising their own role as victims, a “put-it-behind-us-once-and-for-all” mentality and by insisting that these events had nothing to do with the civil population. Such attitudes were also reflected in the broad protest against the erection of an “Atonement Cross” in 1947 after the third mass grave in Meschede became known. Shortly after, following heated debates about guilt and responsibility and repeated damage to the cross, it was buried. It was only publicly exhibited once again in the Maria-Himmelfahrt church in Meschede in 1981.

Both the efforts of “re-education” measures and the clashes and protests against the “Cross of Atonement” were regionally limited. The trial against the perpetrators, which began in 1957, was not only covered by the regional media, but also nationwide. Hans Kammler, the man mainly responsible, was now beyond reach as he was said to have committed suicide at the end of the war. In the first instance the verdict on the remaining six defendants was scandalously mild, thereby revealing the striking disproportion between crime and punishment that still prevailed at the time. It was only after a legal appeal that the sentences were significantly increased by a jury court in Hagen.

In 1964 the bodies of the murdered forced labourers from Suttrop and Warstein – with the exception of seven bodies that could no longer be found in Suttrop – were transferred to the “Fulmecke” forest cemetery in Meschede. Here, as in 1947, several corpses could be identified on the basis of their papers. Nonetheless, regardless of the legal regulations they were buried at the new grave site anonymously. Misleading inscriptions on the memorial stones also concealed any references to the murders. Thus the victims of the massacre in the Arnsberg Forest gradually fell into oblivion.

Now, more than 70 years after the appalling deeds, the memory of the victims and the confrontations with the NS crimes have been revived. After several years of historical research by Dr. Marcus Weidner, archaeological excavations were carried out in 2018 and 2019 by the “LWL (Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe) Archaeology for Westphalia” in cooperation with the LWL-Institute for Westphalian Regional History, at specific locations in the Arnsberg Forest. The archaeological excavations were designed to help reconstruct the exact circumstances of the crimes and shed further light on the National Socialist crimes in the Arnsberg Forest. The latest finds – including projectiles and ammunition, but also everyday objects like a prayer book and a dictionary in Polish, shoes and parts of clothing, colourful buttons and pearls, crockery and cutlery – not only bear witness to the final hours of the murdered victims, but also provide information about the course of these horrific events. So far only a few names of the murder victims from March 1945 are known. Within the framework of the ongoing research in Germany and abroad it has been possible to find 14 names to date and to give the anonymously buried victims an identity. This work offers us the opportunity to contact their descendants and keep alive the memory of the “long forgotten group of victims” amongst foreign forced labourers.

Marcus Weidner/Katarzyna Salski, June 2019