Polish victims in the Hinzert SS concentration camp

The Hinzert SS special camp/concentration camp in the National Socialist camp system
 

Alongside the “Eindeutschungspolen” (“re-germanised Poles”) who were deployed in special “Pole labour groups”, there were large number of other groups of prisoners who were interned in the Hinzert SS special camp/concentration camp. Initially, in 1938, Hinzert was built as a camp complex for workers who were conscripted to work on construction of the “West Wall” or the Reichsautobahn. However, in 1939, other people were already being brought to the Hinzert “work education camp” due to work-related “offences”, while the camp also functioned as a “police internment camp” and an “SS special camp”. From the start, Hinzert fulfilled a trans-regional function, with other, newly-established police internment camps for offending workers being subordinated to the camp commander of the Hinzert SS special camp. This system of “west camps” already became obsolete in 1939/1940 as the Wehrmacht advanced through western Europe. On 1 July 1940, the camp was subordinated to the concentration camp inspectorate in Oranienburg, which by February/March 1942 was in turn incorporated into the newly created SS Main Economic and Administrative Office (SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt). The SS men and guard squads were subsumed by the Waffen-SS. From that time on, Polish prisoners were brought to Hinzert from the European countries occupied by Germany in increasing numbers. In the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office, the work conducted by the prisoners was assigned entirely to serving the war economy, right through to “extermination through labour”. In the vast majority of cases, the work was performed in subcamps, sometimes under the most adverse conditions. Here, as in the main camps, sadistic harassment and maltreatment by the camp guards were an everyday occurrence. From mid-1944 onwards, a network of satellite camps was developed which extended beyond the subcamps.[1] 

It became the central camp for the Luxembourg Résistance. From May 1942 onwards, political prisoners arrested under the terms of the “Night and Fog Decree” of 7 December 1941 were brought to Hinzert from France. There were 2,000 such prisoners in all, and included resistance fighters from the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg as well as France. The female “night and fog prisoners” were taken temporarily to the Flussbach women’s detention camp near Wittlich (now in Rhineland-Palatinate). Three times, groups of prisoners were brought to Hinzert solely for the purpose of executing them. This occurred in mid-October 1941, when 70 Soviet prisoners were executed in what was the largest case of mass murder in Hinzert. In September 1942, 20 Luxembourgers were executed in Hinzert, as were 23 Luxembourgers in February 1943. They were buried in shallow graves in the forest. In total, at least 13,600 men from 20 countries were deported to Hinzert between September 1939 and March 1945.[2] Overall, 321 people are known to have died in Hinzert, although various sources indicate that the actual number is in fact far greater, and that it has not been possible to locate the remains of all the victims.[3] To date, it remains unclear how many of them were Poles. In 2003, Volker Schneider, a teacher from Hermeskeil who has worked for decades to uncover the history of Hinzert, recorded what prisoners remembered about the murders and the burial of the bodies in shallow graves as follows:

“From 1943 onwards, the existence of mass graves in the semi-official prisoners’ cemetery was known to nearly every camp inmate, and were called ‘Little Katyn’, as prisoners who are still alive today [2003] can confirm”.[4]

 

Also among the prisoners were approximately 100 Jews, as well as Sinti and Roma, who had been deported to Hinzert mainly for political rather than racist reasons. Around a third of the Jewish prisoners were murdered in the most brutal way, while in the case of the Sinti and Roma, there is clear evidence of just one murder of a Roma prisoner.[1] One of the Jews brought to Hinzert was Aron Silberstein, born in 1895 in Weislitz in the district of Petrikau (Piotrków). He was classified as stateless and lived in Luxembourg City during the 1940s. Silberstein was forced to work on the construction of the Reichsautobahn near Wittlich. On 25 February 1942, he was arrested for not wearing a “Judenstern” (yellow Star of David badge). On 10 March, he was transported to Hinzert. After spending two months in the Hinzert SS special camp/concentration camp, he was transferred by the SS to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was murdered on 28 May 1942. His son Adolf (b. 1928) was deported to the Izbica concentration camp (voivodeship of Lublin) in April 1942.[5] His wife Esther died in the Theresienstadt camp in July 1943. Nothing is known of the fate of his two daughters, who were taken to Theresienstadt in May 1944 aged ten and twelve, and who from there were transferred to an unknown camp.[6]

In July 1941, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler changed the procedure regarding the threat of punishment, through to punishment by death, of Polish forced labourers accused of committing offences. The penalty was now to be preceded by a “racial assessment”. The goal was to determine any possible “Wiedereindeutschungsfähigkeit” (“potential for re-germanisation”). The aim from the perspective of the National Socialists was to retain as many forced labourers as possible.[7] The overriding ideological and racial goal was a “desired increase in the population” for the German “Volkskörper” (“racial corpus”), while at the same time removing the “racially valuable families” from the elites of the “ethnic Polish race”.[8] The Hinzert SS special camp/concentration camp was the central facility within the National Socialist camp system for the “germanisation” of Polish men. 

However, like many other forced labourers from western and eastern Europe, Poles were also brought to Hinzert for reasons other than “re-germanisation”. Stanislaus Kowalski, born in Hörde near Dortmund in 1912, was taken to the “work education camp” in Hinzert. He and his parents were “Ruhr Poles”. His family returned to his parents’ homeland, to Wielkopolska (Greater Poland), where Kowalski’s last place of abode before he was arrested was in the district of Śrem. He was married and had a child who was born around 1936. Several months after the occupation of Poland, at the end of May 1940, under circumstances that are not known, he was brought to the Else II mine owned by the Anhaltische Kohlenwerke AG group in Mücheln, to the south-west of Halle on the Saale river. From September 1940, he worked as a forced labourer on several farms in the west of the Reich. In November 1942, unable to bear the heavy work far away from his family, he escaped from his last place of work in Bad Kreuznach. Soon afterwards, he was seized and taken to the Gestapo headquarters in Koblenz, and from there, on 17 December 1942, to the “work education camp” in Hinzert. On 25 January 1943, he was transferred from Hinzert to Natzweiler, where he arrived in a very poor state of health. Even so, he was only admitted to the prisoners’ hospital barracks over a week later, on 3 February. He died there on 5 February 1943.[9]

 

Processing and remembering the past
 

During the post-war years, several guards who worked at the camp in Hinzert were sentenced in court. Among them was the former camp doctor, Waldemar Wolter, who was hanged after being found guilty by a US military court in Landsberg am Lech for his crimes committed in Mauthausen concentration camp. The camp commander, Eugen Wipf, a Swiss citizen, died shortly after being sentenced to life imprisonment by the confederate High Court in Zurich in 1947. Hermann Pister, who founded and then ran Hinzert as an SS special camp before becoming commander of Buchenwald concentration camp (while retaining responsibility for Hinzert there) was sentenced to death by a US military court in 1947 during the Buchenwald trials, although he died before the sentence could be carried out. In 1948, in two cases brought before the supreme court for the French zone of occupation – the Tribunal Générale Gouvernement Militaire de la Zone Française d’occupation en Allemagne et en Autriche – which was set up in Schloss Rastatt palace, charges were brought against 22 people. Some of the accused were found not guilty; others received other sentences, including life imprisonment for defendants Windisch and Heinrich. Defendants Pammer, Reiss, Schattner and Fritz were sentenced to death. These sentences were ultimately commuted to lifelong imprisonment, while the duration of the terms of imprisonment for the others was shortened. In 1950, Georg Schaff and Josef Brendel were sentenced before German courts to terms of imprisonment which were short in relation to the severity of their crimes (Mannheim district court). In 1955, the second commander at Hinzert, Egon Zill, who later became the commander of the Natzweiler Struthof concentration camp and Flossenbürg concentration camp, was sentenced to life imprisonment before the high court in Munich. However, he was released in 1961. This was the year in which Josef Brendel again appeared in court, this time in Trier, for the murder of the 70 Soviet prisoners of war in Hinzert in October 1941, a crime for which he had thus far not faced trial. He was cleared of the charge of being an accessory to murder.[11]

It was not until the 1980s that interest in the history of the concentration camp began to grow in Hinzert. This was supported by the activities of political and church youth organisations and by the Catholic Academy in Trier. From the 1950s onwards, the former site of the prison camp, which had been returned to its original owners, was again used as a farm. In October 1945, former prisoners erected the “Hinzert cross” in the former prisoners’ cemetery. In the early 1980s, the largest material trace of the camp was the “honorary cemetery” laid out on the site of the former guards’ camp in 1946 by the French military authority. Here, 217 dead were reburied whose remains had been found in shallow graves in the surrounding area. There, a “chapel of conciliation” was built in 1948 on the initiative of a German vicar. The lack of interest in examining the past in Hinzert was reflected in the treatment of this period in history per se and in the way in which it was perceived by the general public. For example, for a long time, it remained a point of contention as to whether Hinzert ranked as a separate concentration camp within the National Socialist camp system. On 2 March 1967, Hinzert was officially categorised as being a concentration camp in the list of concentration camps and their subcamps published in the German Federal Law Gazette (Bundesgesetzblatt).[12] Even so, for a long time, the functions fulfilled by Hinzert, for some of which the camp played a central role, were ignored by the authorities, which focused “only” on the history of the site as a “work education camp”.[13]

 

Rather than contributing to any public remembrance, the term “Ehrenfriedhof” (“honorary cemetery”), which is taken from the French, and which is used in the German to refer to the burial of members of the military, rather cast a veil over the true nature of the site. This changed as a result of the growing level of interest in that period of history during the 1980s. Remembrance of the concentration camp and the prisoners who were murdered here finally manifested itself in the public arena on 11 October 1986 with the unveiling of a sculpture by Lucien Wercollier (1908–2002), a former prisoner in Hinzert.[14] Wercollier, who after 1941 was no longer allowed to exhibit his work, joined the resistance. In the autumn of 1942, he was arrested along with many others for participating in the Luxembourg general strike and was deported to Hinzert. From there, he was later taken to the Lublin-Majdanek concentration and death camp. He also managed to survive this camp, and was able to return to Luxembourg in June 1945. Wercollier, who dedicated himself to abstract art, became one of the most highly regarded contemporary artists in Luxembourg.[15] His bronze sculpture in Hinzert shows three stelae that taper upwards. The abstract forms call to mind the figures of three prisoners. They are bent, facing towards each other and towards a brazier in their midst. An inscription in Latin and German reads: “Imbued with humanity, peace and justice”. 

The work to examine and portray the history of the camp was also met with resistance, with which the very active teacher from Hermeskeil, Volker Schneider, who worked on the topic with his pupils, was confronted, among others. In 1989, an association was founded to support a documentation and meeting centre. Two years later, responsibility for maintaining the concentration camp memorial sites became an important focus of the work of the federal state government. These developments resulted in the creation of a concept and in 2002, an invitation to tender was issued for the architectural design of a new documentation and meeting centre. The centre was officially opened on 10 December 2005. The building contains a permanent exhibition created by the Centre for Political Education of Rhineland-Palatinate (Landeszentrale für politische Bildung).[16] 

 

Julia Röttjer, May 2022