KZ Mannheim-Sandhofen

Polish graves in Mannheim

Twice a day, the inhabitants of Mannheim watched a column of prisoners marching to their work place 5 kilometres away, rushed by screams and beating of the guards. The prisoners helped their companions to walk or even carried their comrades, who were no longer able to move on their own, and the residents called them names, threw mud and stones at them. The murderous work in a two-shift system (taking 14-15 hours including the walk) and the terrible camp conditions very quickly devastated the prisoners' bodies. Apart from SS wardens, who could torture or kill a prisoner, the biggest enemies were insufficient food and cold. The daily ration consisted of breakfast in the form of a low quality grain coffee substitute, a watery soup with a small amount of potatoes, cabbage and beetroot for lunch and the same coffee or soup with 1 kilo of bread and 20 grams of margarine for three people for dinner. The Warsaw group came from Dachau in thin clothing, with no change nor a possibility to wash it. These clothes had to be enough for them as camp and work dress until liberation. One form of harassment was punishment for using warming lining under the drill (newspapers, cement sacks), for which they were beaten on the spot and additionally an application for punishment was submitted to the commanding officer. Penalties were announced and executed during the evening roll call, after returning from work and before dinner. There were also additional roll calls in free time, which involved forcing prisoners to run or crawl around the roll-call square, hour-long standing or kneeling with their hands raised, holding stones or bricks.

The sick bay was always overcrowded, and on the commanding officer's order, no more than one hundred sick people could be in it at one time. For exceeding this number, the prisoner serving as an orderly was beaten. Apart from a minimum amount of dressings, the orderly had a thermometer and several remedies for a cold in the case of high temperature. In such cases, the camp doctor, who was a French prisoner of war, could issue a one-day release from work, thanks to which a sick person remained in the camp, but according to camp regulations, he was not allowed to lie down or sit on a bunk, but could only stand and walk. Daimler-Benz AG got rid of inefficient prisoners by handing over 200 of the most exhausted and sick people to the death camp in Vaihingen in December 1944, where 111 of them died shortly after. 400 prisoners were sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp and 200 to the Unterriexingen sub-camp. The last transport with about 90 patients, mostly suffering from advanced tuberculosis and hunger disease (Hungerödemen), unable to stand upright by themselves, was sent on the 8th of March 1945 to Vaihingen.

The remaining able-bodied prisoners - about 200 of them - were evacuated in a death march to the Kochendorf sub-camp on the 22nd of March 1945. In early April, a murderous march, known as the Hessentaler Todesmarsch, set off together with prisoners from Kochendorf and the Hessental sub-camp. Following the route marked with hundreds of graves, the survivors, extremely exhausted, reached KZ Dachau. A small group of 1,060 people from the Warsaw transport was liberated on the 29th of April 1945 by American troops.

It was not until 1978, thanks to a report on the day of remembrance of war victims published in the "Mannheimer Morgen" newspaper, that the public learned about the existence of a concentration camp in Mannheim for the first time after the war. This information reached young people from the Mannheim Youth Club, who participated in the ceremony. The new generation, unencumbered directly by war crimes, demanded the commemoration of the concentration camp and initiated relevant actions. In 1995, two new commemorative plaques were unveiled on the facade of the building where Poles were imprisoned, one of which contains a text in Polish:

W TYM BUDYNKU SZKOŁY OD WRZEŚNIA 1944 DO MARCA 1945 R. WIĘZIONYCH BYŁO 1060 POLAKÓW. TU CIERPIELI I GINĘLI POWSTAŃCY WARSZAWSCY Z KOMANDA OBOZÓW KONCENTRACYJNYCH DACHAU I NATZWEILER-STRUTHOF ZMUSZANI DO PRACY W ZAKŁADACH DAIMLER-BENZ.

[BETWEEN SEPTEMBER 1944 AND MARCH 1945, 1060 POLES WERE IMPRISONED IN THIS SCHOOL BUILDING. IT WAS HERE THAT WARSAW INSURGENTS FROM THE DACHAU AND NATZWEILER-STRUTHOF CONCENTRATION CAMP LABOUR UNITS, WHO WERE FORCED TO WORK IN DAIMLER-BENZ PLANTS, SUFFERED AND DIED.]

The official number of Warsaw victims of KZ Mannheim-Sandhofen is 22 dead prisoners and 1 unregistered person. The deceased were buried at the main cemetery in Mannheim at Röndgenstraße. The same necropolis is also the place of final rest of 149 Polish and Russian victims of World War II (original German spelling preserved):

JANKOWSKI EDMUND

* 1911

† 20.10.1944

MURAWSKI LEON

† 07.11.1944

BOCHINSKI WACŁAW

* 4.8.1889

† 12.11.1944

REBUS ANTONIE

* 1908

† 1.12.1944

SLOWIK MIECZYSLAW