| Hamelin Prison | |
|---|---|
 View of the prison complex on the Weser from Klüt hill around 1900 | |
| Coordinates | 52°06′02.7″N09°21′09″E / 52.100750°N 9.35250°E |
Hamelin Prison, also known as the Stockhof, was a prison and penitentiary in Hamelin. The penal institution, which had a predecessor since 1698, existed from 1827 to 1980. It was located between the old town and the river Weser. The listed prison buildings are now used as a hotel.
The penal institution dates back to the Stockhof built in 1698, which housed prisoners condemned to build a fortress. The name came from the fact that the prisoners were tied to stocks in their dormitory at night to prevent escapes.
A new prison was built in 1713 because of overcrowding. In 1827 a new building was built on the former site of the Hamelin Fortress directly on the Weser, from which some of the remaining remains of the building originate. There were three wings and outbuildings. This was the Royal Penitentiary, which became a Prussian prison in 1866.
From 1933, during the Nazi period, hundreds of political prisoners were imprisoned in addition to around 500 criminal prisoners. According to the National Socialist rulers, it was primarily communists and social democrats, but also homosexuals and Jews. In 1935 the outer walls were raised and the institution was converted into a penitentiary. During the Second World War, political prisoners from France and Denmark were added, also as Nacht-und-Nebel prisoners. According to official statistics, 305 prisoners died between 1939 and 1945, 55 of them after their liberation by American troops. At the end of the war, on April 5, 1945, while the city was being shelled, the SS ordered the prison to be evacuated and the camp to be walked to Holzen subcamp, which became a death march along the Iths for many prisoners. [1]
In the post-war period, the prison was used by the British military government as a place of execution from 13 December 1945 until 1949, with the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint. 156 people were executed as war criminals during this period. Among them were the concentration camp guards Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath and Johanna Bormann, who were convicted in the Belsen trial, the camp commander Josef Kramer, and the concentration camp doctor Fritz Klein. Other executions due to Allied trials involved the concentration camp doctor Rolf Rosenthal, Hans Körbel and Benno Orendi, Vera Salvequart (Kapo in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp), the SS guards Ruth Neudeck, Dorothea Binz, Elisabeth Marschall and Emma Zimmer, the former battalion commander of the 12th SS Panzer Division Bernhard Siebken and Fritz Knöchlein, chief of the 4th Company of the 2nd SS Totenkopf Regiment.
Another 44 people were executed for violating the laws of occupation. Among them were 42 former forced labourers, some of whom were from Eastern Europe. The last execution in Hamelin was on December 6, 1949 on the Pole Jerzy Andziak (a displaced person) for the use of firearms resulting in death.
In 1955 the Hamelin prison was closed and the inmates were transferred to the Justizvollzugsanstalt Celle prison. On October 1, 1958, the prison became a juvenile detention centre, whose prisoners were transferred to the newly established Hameln juvenile detention center in Tündern in 1980. This ended the prison operations. In 1986 the cell building, east and west wings of the facility were demolished. The remaining parts were converted into a hotel, which opened in August 1993.
 |
Also, 13 further convicted of murdering the Stalag Luft III escapees on the orders of Hitler, all executed on the same day 27 February 1948.
Hamelin is a town on the river Weser in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Hamelin-Pyrmont and has a population of roughly 57,000. Hamelin is best known for the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
Natzweiler-Struthof was a Nazi concentration camp located in the Vosges Mountains close to the villages of Natzweiler and Struthof in the Gau Baden-Alsace of Germany, on territory annexed from France on a de facto basis in 1940. It operated from 21 May 1941 to September 1944, and was the only concentration camp established by the Germans in the territory of pre-war France. The camp was located in a heavily forested and isolated area at an elevation of 800 metres (2,600 ft).
Irmgard Ilse Ida Grese was a Nazi concentration camp guard at Ravensbrück and Auschwitz, and served as warden of the women's section of Bergen-Belsen. She was a volunteer member of the SS.
Aufseherin was the position title for a female guard in Nazi concentration camps. Of the 50,000 guards who served in the concentration camps, training records indicate that approximately 3,500 were women. In 1942, the first female guards arrived at Auschwitz and Majdanek from Ravensbrück. The year after, the Nazis began conscripting women because of a shortage of male guards. In the context of these camps, the German position title of Aufseherin translates to (female) "overseer" or "attendant". Later female guards were dispersed to Bolzano (1944–1945), Kaiserwald-Riga (1943–44), Mauthausen, Stutthof (1942–1945), Vaivara (1943–1944), Vught (1943–1944), and at Nazi concentration camps, subcamps, work camps, detention camps and other posts.
Elisabeth Volkenrath was a German supervisor at several Nazi concentration camps during World War II.
The Belsen trials were a series of several trials that the Allied occupation forces conducted against former officials and functionaries of Nazi Germany after the end of World War II. British Army and civilian personnel ran the trials and staffed the prosecution and judges.
Johanna Bormann ; 10 September 1893 – 13 December 1945) was a German prison guard at several Nazi concentration camps from 1938. She was executed as a war criminal at Hamelin after a court trial in 1945.
Hauptsturmführer was a Nazi Party paramilitary rank that was used in several Nazi organizations such as the SS, NSKK and the NSFK. The rank of Hauptsturmführer was a mid-level commander and had equivalent seniority to a captain (Hauptmann) in the German Army and also the equivalency of captain in foreign armies.
Dorothea "Theodora" Binz was a Nazi German officer and supervisor at Ravensbrück concentration camp during the Holocaust. She was known as one of the most brutal, ruthless and sadistic overseers and in the Nazi system. She was executed for war crimes on 2 May 1947.
Josef Kramer was a Hauptsturmführer and the Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau and of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Dubbed The Beast of Belsen by camp inmates, he was a German Nazi war criminal, directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. He was detained by the British Army after the Second World War, convicted of war crimes, and hanged on the gallows in the prison at Hamelin by British executioner Albert Pierrepoint.
The Dachau trials, also known as the Dachau Military Tribunal, handled the prosecution of almost every war criminal captured in the U.S. military zones in Allied-occupied Germany and in Allied-occupied Austria, and the prosecutions of military personnel and civilian persons who committed war crimes against the American military and American citizens. The war-crime trials were held within the compound of the former Dachau concentration camp by military tribunals authorized by the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Third Army.
Fritz Knöchlein was a Nazi SS commander during WWII. He was tried, convicted and executed in 1949 for committing war crimes during World War II, specifically his responsibility for the Le Paradis massacre which took place on his 29th birthday.
Fritz Klein was a Romanian-German Nazi doctor and war criminal, hanged for his role in atrocities at Auschwitz concentration camp and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during the Holocaust.
Monowitz was a Nazi concentration camp and labor camp (Arbeitslager) run by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland from 1942–1945, during World War II and the Holocaust. For most of its existence, Monowitz was a subcamp of the Auschwitz concentration camp; from November 1943 it and other Nazi subcamps in the area were jointly known as "Auschwitz III-subcamps". In November 1944 the Germans renamed it Monowitz concentration camp, after the village of Monowice where it was built, in the annexed portion of Poland. SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Heinrich Schwarz was commandant from November 1943 to January 1945.
Albert Pierrepoint (1905–1992) was the most prolific British hangman of the twentieth century, executing 434 men and women between 1932 and 1955. This table records the locations of each of the executions he participated in, the numbers in brackets being the number of executions he was assistant executioner at, the other numbers are those in which he officiated as chief executioner.
SS Heimwehr "Danzig" was an SS unit established in the Free City of Danzig before the Second World War. It fought with the German Army against the Polish Army during the invasion of Poland, and some of its members committed a massacre of Polish civilians. After this it became part of the 3rd SS Totenkopf Division and ceased to exist as an independent unit.
The Stutthof trials were a series of war crime tribunals held in postwar Poland for the prosecution of Stutthof concentration camp staff and officials, responsible for the murder of up to 85,000 prisoners during the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany in World War II. None of the Stutthof commandants were ever tried in Poland. SS-Sturmbannführer Max Pauly was put on trial by a British military court in Germany but not for the crimes committed at Stutthof; only as the commandant of the Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg. Nevertheless, Pauly was executed in 1946.
The SS command of Auschwitz concentration camp refers to those units, commands, and agencies of the German SS which operated and administered during World War II. Due to its large size and key role in the Nazi genocide program, the Auschwitz Concentration Camp encompassed personnel from several different branches of the SS, some of which held overlapping and shared areas of responsibility.
Robert Karl Ludwig Mulka was an SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) and later demoted to Obersturmführer. At Auschwitz concentration camp, he was adjutant to the camp commandant, SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss, making him second in command of the camp.
SS-Gefolge was the designation for the group of female civilian employees of the Schutzstaffel in Nazi Germany. SS-Gefolge members were only allowed to serve the Schutzstaffel in a very limited capacity as the organisation was not formally a part of the SS. Members of the Gefolge worked in the Nazi concentration camps as guards and nurses.
