The collective grave of the 528 prisoners of Katzbach concentration camp in the Adlerwerke

The collective grave of the 528 prisoners of Katzbach concentration camp in the Adlerwerke in Frankfurt am Main

The Adlerwerke in Frankfurt am Main was badly damaged by the allied air strikes in 1944. To counter the labour shortage in arms production, the company recruited prisoners from concentration camps. To this end, 1,000 detainees were quartered in barracks on the third and fourth floors of the factory in the Frankfurt suburb of Gallus. This camp, the “Katzbach” camp, was administratively subordinate to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace. The command kept a 25-man SS unit under the orders of SS Hauptscharführer Erich Franz. The Adlerwerke also deployed support units which were mainly made up of SA storm troopers. Otherwise, the prisoners were overseen by 300 civilian factory workers.

On 22 August 1944, a command of 200 prisoners arrived in the Adlerwerke from Buchenwald concentration camp. The prisoners were mostly Poles who had been involved in the Warsaw Uprising, as were the 1000 prisoners that Dachau concentration camp had assigned on 29 September 1944. The Katzbach camp operated extermination by labour resulting in up to 20 people losing their life each day. These losses were replaced by new arrivals. On 26 January 1945, 167 prisoners were brought to the camp. Most of these prisoners had also taken part in the Warsaw Uprising and, up to that point, had been exploited in the Daimler-Benz camp in Mannheim-Sandhofen, which had been destroyed. On 1 February 1945, a further 225 prisoners from Auschwitz-Jawischowitz and Buchenwald concentration camps arrived in Frankfurt. From this date, the cohort of prisoners in the Katzbach camp was made up of eight different nationalities. With the allied front approaching, production in the Adlerwerke was stopped on 23 March 1945. One day later, around 360 prisoners began the evacuation march, which was later to be referred to as the death march. The first stage finished at Buchenwald. From there, they continued on to Dachau. Of the 1,600 prisoners, only around 50 survived to the end of the war.

Mortality rate in Katzbach concentration camp

528 prisoners who died in the Adlerwerke or near the factory were to find their last resting place in the collective grave in the main cemetery in Frankfurt am Main. Almost all of them were Poles, with at least 11 probably hailing from Russia and the Ukraine. Whilst the camp had its own infirmary, it only had 20 beds, which meant that the sick and weakened inmates were selected. 245 prisoners were taken to the infirmary in Vaihingen and were de facto transported to their death.

The air raid on 6 January 1945 cost 62 prisoners in the Katzbach camp their lives. They had been incarcerated in a miserable cellar which was hit by a bomb. The last big selection took place just before the evacuation march. 500 prisoners, who were unable to march, were transported in railway wagons to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; only eight of them survived the journey. Yet more prisoners, around 300 in number, died on the death march or in the quarantine in which they were placed in the destinations camps.

The most frequent causes of death in the Katzbach camp, as noted in the cemetery book, were tuberculosis, damage to the cardiac muscle or blood poisoning, whilst those who survived the camp talk of malnutrition and hypothermia for want of warm clothing. After the war, the prisoners also spoke of brutal abuse at the hands of the SS and the concentration camp guards; abuse which also frequently resulted in death. Eight cases of shooting and hanging are known from the files, although the authors Kaiser and Knorn cannot rule out that such killings were more frequent. The public executions, floggings and detention sentences in the bunker were used to intimidate prisoners. And so it happened that the prisoners Wincenty Bocheński and Władysław Sumara were hanged on 24 January 1945 for alleged sabotage. The same fate awaited Ukrainian Georgij Lebedenko and the Russian Adam Golub on 14 March 1945. Both escaped from the camp, but were betrayed by the residents in the neighbourhood around the Adlerwerke soon after. Katzbach concentration camp had the highest mortality rate of all 28 concentration camps and sub-camps in Hesse.