KZ Walldorf was a subcamp of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp and existed from 22 August to 24 November 1944 near the village of Walldorf in Hesse. Erected after the deportations of the Jews in Hungary as part of the Nazi extermination through labour plan, about 1,700 female inmates were assigned to work on the first paved runway of the nearby Rhein-Main Airport.
A Reichsarbeitsdienst hut camp in the forest north of Walldorf already existed at the site during the construction of the Reichsautobahn section from Frankfurt to Darmstadt (the present-day Bundesautobahn 5) opened in 1935. From 1943 it was used as a forced labour camp of the Rodgau-Dieburg prison.
Upon the invasion of Wehrmacht troops into Hungary ( Operation Margarethe ) and the accession of Döme Sztójay as Prime Minister in March 1944, the deportations of the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz supervised by Adolf Eichmann began on April 27. The Hungarian Jewish women arriving in Walldorf came directly from Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they had narrowly escaped the selection of Josef Mengele and the gas chambers. The arrested 1700 young girls and women aged 14 to 45 years were requested by the Organisation Todt under chief engineer Franz Xaver Dorsch at the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt and had to perform forced labor at the construction site of the Züblin company at Frankfurt Airport. About 50 women did not survive this four-month time period of hard work, insufficient rations and physical abuse. Most of the remaining women were no longer able to work when the camp was closed after the liberation of Natzweiler-Struthof in November 1944. Only about 300 survived the further deportations to the Ravensbrück concentration camp and the Holocaust.
After World War II, the runway construction was completed under the US occupation forces and is in use up to today. The former camp, forgotten or repressed, was blown up and the area reforested again. In the 1970s, the camp was rediscovered and a first memorial stone was inaugurated in 1980. From the year 1996 on, there was a continuous and lively analysis of the history of the outpost camp. In the year 2000, attended by 19 survivors, a memorial path was opened in the forest: On several plates the history of the camp and the women imprisoned are described with their individual fates. In addition, a brick-built cellar under the former kitchen barrack was excavated, in which prisoners were beaten to death.
The Margit-Horváth-Foundation was founded in 2004. Margaret Horváth was one of the survivors of this camp. Her son gave his mothers so-called compensation money to the foundation, which now forms the symbolic core of the Foundation. History and review of the KZ-branch Walldorf are also the subject of the movie The Runway by Malte Rauch, Eva and Bernard Voosen Türcke (2003). [1] [2]
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).
Aufseherin[ˈaʊ̯fˌzeːəʁɪn] was the position title for female guards in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. Of the 55,000 guards who served in Nazi concentration camps, about 3,700 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. The German title for this position, Aufseherin means (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 other Nazi concentration camps, subcamps, work camps, detention camps, etc.
The German camps in occupied Poland during World War II were built by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945 throughout the territory of the Polish Republic, both in the areas annexed in 1939, and in the General Government formed by Nazi Germany in the central part of the country (see map). After the 1941 German attack on the Soviet Union, a much greater system of camps was established, including the world's only industrial extermination camps constructed specifically to carry out the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".
Płaszów or Kraków-Płaszów was a Nazi concentration camp operated by the SS in Płaszów, a southern suburb of Kraków, in the General Governorate of German-occupied Poland. Most of the prisoners were Polish Jews who were targeted for destruction by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. Many prisoners died because of executions, forced labor, and the poor conditions in the camp. The camp was evacuated in January 1945, before the Red Army's liberation of the area on 20 January.
Josef Kramer was 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 Gallus is a city district of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It is part of the Ortsbezirk Innenstadt I and the location of the Frankfurt train station.
August Hirt was an anatomist with Swiss and German nationality who served as a chairman at the Reich University in Strasbourg during World War II. He performed experiments with mustard gas on inmates at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp and played a lead role in the murders of 86 people at Natzweiler-Struthof for the Jewish skeleton collection. The skeletons of his victims were meant to become specimens at the Institute of anatomy in Strasbourg, but completion of the project was stopped by the progress of the war. He was an SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) and in 1944, an SS-Sturmbannführer (major).
There were internment camps and concentration camps in France before, during and after World War II. Beside the camps created during World War I to intern German, Austrian and Ottoman civilian prisoners, the Third Republic (1871–1940) opened various internment camps for the Spanish refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Following the prohibition of the French Communist Party (PCF) by the government of Édouard Daladier, they were used to detain communist political prisoners. The Third Republic also interned German anti-Nazis.
Holocaust trains were railway transports run by the Deutsche Reichsbahn national railway system under the control of Nazi Germany and its allies, for the purpose of forcible deportation of the Jews, as well as other victims of the Holocaust, to the Nazi concentration, forced labour, and extermination camps.
Karl-Friedrich Höcker was a Nazi war criminal, German commander in the SS and the adjutant to Richard Baer, who was a commandant of Auschwitz I concentration camp from May 1944 to December 1944. In 2006, a photo album created by Höcker, with some 116 pictures from his time at Auschwitz, was given to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, sparking new interest in his activities as a concentration camp administrator.
Kaufering was a system of eleven subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp located around the town of Landsberg am Lech in Bavaria, which operated between 18 June 1944 and 27 April 1945. Previously, Nazi Germany had deported all Jews from the Reich, but having exhausted other sources of labor, Jews were deported to Kaufering to create three massive underground bunkers, Weingut II, Diana II, and Walnuss II, which would not be vulnerable to the Allied bombing which had devastated German aircraft factories. The bunkers were intended for the production of Messerschmitt Me 262 aircraft, but none were produced at the camps before the United States Army captured the area.
The Höcker Album is a collection of photographs believed to have been collected by Karl-Friedrich Höcker, an officer for the SS during the Nazi regime in Germany. It contains over one hundred images of the lives and living conditions of the officers and administrators who ran the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex. The album is unique and an indispensable document of the Holocaust; it is now in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C.
Franz Hößler, also Franz Hössler was a Nazi German SS-Obersturmführer and Schutzhaftlagerführer at the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dora-Mittelbau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps during World War II. Captured by the Allies at the end of the war, Hößler was charged with crimes against humanity in the First Bergen-Belsen Trial, found guilty, and sentenced to death. He was executed by hanging at Hameln Prison in 1945.
Kristian Ottosen was a Norwegian non-fiction writer and public servant.
Otto Bickenbach was a German internist and professor at the University of Strasbourg. He joined the Nazi Party on 1 May 1933. Between June and August 1943 in the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, Bickenbach and his assistant, Helmut Rühl, conducted a series of tests by poisonous gas in gas chamber experiments with phosgene. More than 50 prisoners, mainly gypsies transferred for medical experiments from Auschwitz, were murdered in the course of these experiments.
Hans Fleischhacker was a German anthropologist with the Ahnenerbe and a commander in the SS of Nazi Germany. He worked with Bruno Beger on some projects, making measurements of Jewish people. He was with Beger at Auschwitz when the people were selected to be part of the Jewish skeleton collection, a project of the Ahnenerbe. At their post-war trial, Beger was found guilty of full knowledge of the scope of that project, while Fleischhacker was found not to be aware that the purpose of the measurements was to select the 86 people to be murdered at Natzweiler-Struthof camp.
Subcamps, also translated as satellite camps, were outlying detention centres (Haftstätten) that came under the command of a main concentration camp run by the SS in Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe. It enables a distinction to be made between the main camps and the subcamps subordinated to them. Survival conditions in the subcamps were, in many cases, poorer for the prisoners than those in the main camps.
The Holocaust in Hungary was the final act of mass murder of a Jewish community by Nazi Germany during the 1941–1945 genocide of the European Jews. New restrictions against Jews were imposed soon after Germany occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944. The invading troops included a Sonderkommando led by SS officer Adolf Eichmann, who arrived in Budapest to supervise the deportation of the country's Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland. Between 15 May and 9 July 1944, over 434,000 Jews were deported on 147 trains, most of them to Auschwitz, where about 80 percent were gassed on arrival.
Denise Vernay-Jacob was a member of the French Resistance during World War II, who operated under the aliases of "Miarka" and "Annie" from 1941. She narrowly avoided the March 1944 roundup of Jews in Nice, France which resulted in the deportation of her parents to Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland. Captured less than three months later, she survived torture by the Gestapo and imprisonment at two Nazi concentration camps – Ravensbrück and Mauthausen. She was rescued by the Red Cross in April 1945 and returned home to France at the conclusion of the war.
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Coordinates: 50°1′7.6″N8°35′0.5″E / 50.018778°N 8.583472°E
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