Bullenhuser Damm
53°32′31″N 10°2′53″E / 53.54194°N 10.04806°E
The Bullenhuser Damm School is located at 92–94 Bullenhuser Damm in the Rothenburgsort section of Hamburg, Germany – the site of the Bullenhuser Damm Massacre, the murder of 20 children and their adult caretakers at the very end of World War II's Holocaust – to hide evidence they were used as human subjects in brutal medical experimentation.[1][2]
During heavy
On the night of April 20, 1945, 20
The names, ages and countries of origin of the victims, who'd transited through the Neuengamme concentration camp, were recorded by Hans Meyer, one of the thousands of Scandinavian prisoners released to the custody of Sweden in the closing months of the war.[6]
Neuengamme experimentation
He attempted to prove his hypothesis by injecting live tuberculosis bacilli into the lungs and bloodstream of Untermenschen (subhumans), Jews and Slavs being considered by the Nazis to be racially inferior to Germans.
He was able to have the facilities made available and to test his subjects as a result of his personal connections: his uncle, SS general August Heissmeyer, and his close acquaintance, SS general Oswald Pohl.[7]
The medical experiments on tuberculosis infection were initially carried out on prisoners from the Soviet Union and other countries at the Neuengamme concentration camp. The experiments were then extended to Jews. For this Heissmeyer chose to use Jewish children. Twenty Jewish children (10 boys and 10 girls) from Auschwitz concentration camp were chosen by Josef Mengele and sent to Neuengamme. Mengele allegedly asked the children, "Who wants to go and see their mother?"
The children were accompanied to Neuengamme by four women prisoners. Two were Polish nurses and one was a Hungarian pharmacist, and they were killed upon arrival at Neuengamme. The fourth woman, Polish-born Jew Paula Trocki, was a doctor. She survived the war and later gave testimony in Jerusalem about what she had witnessed:
The transport was accompanied by an SS guard. There were 20 children, one female medical doctor, three nurses. The transport was in a separate carriage that was coupled on a normal train. Presented in this manner it appeared to be an ordinary carriage. We had to take off the stars of David lest we attract any attention. To prevent people from approaching us they said it was a transport of people suffering from typhoid fever... The food was excellent; on that journey we were given chocolate and milk. After a two-day trip we arrived at Neuengamme at ten o'clock at night.
— Paula Trocki[8]
The children were injected with live tuberculosis bacilli, and they all became ill. Heissmeyer then had their axillary lymph nodes surgically removed from their armpits and sent to Hans Klein at the Hohenlychen Hospital for study. All the children were photographed holding up one arm to show the surgical incision. Klein was not prosecuted.
The collapsing western front and imminent approach of
The children, their four adult caretakers and six Soviet prisoners were brought by truck to the Bullenhuser Damm School in the Hamburg suburb of Rothenburgsort. The school had been taken over by the SS to house prisoners from Neuengamme used to clear rubble from the surrounding area after Allied bombing raids. The SS evacuated the building around April 11, 1945, leaving a skeleton crew of two SS guards: Ewald Jauch and Johann Frahm and a janitor. They were accompanied by three SS guards (Wilhelm Dreimann, Adolf Speck, and Heinrich Wiehagen), as well as the driver, Hans Friedrich Petersen, and SS physician
They were then made to undress and were then injected with
Victims
- Marek James,[11] a boy aged 6, from Radom, Poland; prisoner no. B 1159.
- H. Wassermann,[12] a girl aged 8, from Poland. Commemorated with the Wassermann Park in Hamburg-Burgwedel, named after her.
- Roman Witonski,[13] a boy aged 6, and his sister; prisoner number A-15160.
- Eleonora Witonska,Szydlowiec cemetery. Ruzca worked in the laboratory of Josef Mengele. In November 1944, the children were separated from their mother when she was sent to the concentration camp in Gebhardsdorf in Lower Silesia. Roman and Eleonora were sent to the "Kinderheim" (orphanage) at Auschwitz. Rucza survived the war and tried to find her children. She later remarried. Rosa Grumelin has visited the memorial)[15]
- Roman Zeller, a boy aged 12, from Poland. Roman-Zeller-Platz, in Hamburg Schelsen is named after Roman Zeller.
- Riwka Herszberg, a girl aged 7, from Zdunska Wola, Poland. (Her parents were Mania and Moishe Herszberg. They were kept in the family barracks for a period of time. Her mother survived the war.)
- Mania Altmann, a girl aged 5, from Radom, Poland.
- Surcis Goldinger, a girl aged 11, from Poland.
- Lelka Birnbaum, a girl aged 12, from Poland.
- Ruchla Zylberberg, a girl aged 8, from Zawichost, Poland. (Ruchla's sister, Esther, and her mother, Fajga (née Rosenblum), were gassed upon arrival in Auschwitz. Her father, Nison Zylberberg, survived the war in the Soviet Union, with his brother, Henry, and his sister, Felicja; he then emigrated to the United States. He died in Colorado on September 29, 2002, at the age of 86. He visited the memorial.)[16]
- Eduard Reichenbaum, a boy aged 10, from Katowice, Poland. (His brother Itzhak survived the war and emigrated to Haifa, Israel.)
- Blumel Mekler, a girl aged 11, from Sandomierz, Poland. (Her sister, Shifra, survived the war because, as she recalled, her mother told her to "run! Shifra! run!" as the round-up began. She was 8 at this time, and Blumel was 5. She was kept hidden by a Polish family. She emigrated to Tel Aviv, Israel, and married. She has visited the memorial.)
- Eduard (Edo) Hornemann, a boy aged 12. (Born on January 1, 1933), he lived with his mother, Elisabeth, his father, Philip, and his brother, Alexander, at 29 Staringstraat in Dachauwith the "death march". Elisabeth died of typhus in Auschwitz in October 1944.
- Alexander Hornemann, a boy aged 8. (b. May 31, 1936.)
- Georges André Kohn, a boy aged 12, from Paris, France. (b. April 23, 1932.)
- Jacqueline Morgenstern, a girl aged 12, from Paris. (b. May 26, 1932. A cousin, Henry Morgenstern, survived the war and has visited the memorial.)
- Fiume. First sent to San Sabbathen on March 29, 1944, to Auschwitz. His mother survived the war and has visited the memorial.
- Marek Steinbaum, a boy aged 10, from Radom, Poland. (His sister, Lola, survived the war and emigrated to the US, living in San Francisco; she has visited the memorial.)
- Walter Jungleib,[17] a boy aged 12, from Slovakia. As researched by Bella Reichenbaum (Haifa), the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial received a letter from Israel in July 2015 noting that the name Jungleib had been recorded on a list of a prisoner transport from Auschwitz to Lippstadt; contact was made with this family near Tel Aviv via the website of the Yad Vashem Memorial; there the 85-year-old Grete Hamburg, born in Hlohovec / Slovakia confirmed that it was her brother: Walter Jacob Jungleib.[18]
- Lea Klygermann, a girl aged 12, from Poland; prisoner no. A 16959.
The children were in the care of four male prisoners, a French doctor and a chemist and two Dutch prisoners, all of whom had been imprisoned because of their anti-German activities.
The French doctor and the chemist were:
- René Quenouille (born December 6, 1887, in Lyon).[19] He was a physician and radiologist at a hospital in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, near Paris and a member of the French Resistance. He was arrested by the Gestapo, together with his wife, Yvonne, on March 3, 1943. Yvonne was released after three and a half months, but he was sentenced to death, although the sentence was later commuted to imprisonment.
- Professor Gabriel Florence (born June 12, 1884). He was a chemist[20] who taught at the University of Lyon. He fought in World War I and joined the French Resistance during World War II. He was arrested by the Gestapo on March 4, 1944.
The two Dutch prisoners were:
- Anton Holzel (born May 7, 1909), who came from Deventer. He was a driver and a member of the Dutch Communist Party, who joined the Resistance after the German invasion. He became a waiter at the Novotel Den Haag, a hotel in The Hague, to facilitate the transfer of messages. He was arrested on September 11, 1941, and sent to Buchenwald. He was later transferred to Neuengamme.[21]
- Dirk Deutekom (born December 12, 1895), who was a typographer. A member of the Dutch Resistance, he tried to hinder the deportation of Dutch Jews from the Netherlands. He was arrested in July 1941 and sent to Buchenwald, where he was given a job in the infirmary, owing to his fluency in German. On June 6, 1944, he was transferred to the concentration camp at Neuengamme.
Criminal prosecutions
Some of those involved in the killings were tried by a British military court in Hamburg in 1946. Trzebinski, Neuengamme commandant Max Pauly, Dreimann, Speck, Jauch and Frahm were convicted and sentenced to death. They were all hanged at Hamelin Prison on October 8, 1946.
Two of those directly responsible for the children's suffering and murder, Kurt Heissmeyer and
Memorial
The building at Bullenhuser Damm was used by the British as a transit camp for German POWs until 1947. It was then used by the Hydrograpichal Institute's meteorological service until 1949, when it again became a school, for 800 boys. In 1959, the organization representing Neuengamme survivors proposed to the Hamburg school board that a memorial plaque should be placed in the school. However, it was not until 1963 that the text for the plaque was approved. The text aroused controversy because it omitted mention of the Soviet victims and did not state that the children were Jewish or give any information about their personal identity. In 1980, information signs were placed in the basement of the school, and the
In 2005, Wolfgang Peiner, Minister of Finance of Hamburg, published plans to sell the building. However, after several protests a spokesman denied these plans.
In 2011 a new exhibition (telling the story in German and English) was opened at the Memorial.[26]
See also
- List of subcamps of Neuengamme
- The Rose Garden - a film based on these events
References
Notes
- ^ "Chi vuole vedere la mamma faccia un passo avanti (Whoever wants to see their mother, take one step forward)". historyfilesnetwork.com. 27 January 2021.
- ^ Katja Iken (April 20, 2020). ""Like pictures hung on the wall"". Der Spiegel.
The closer the Allies got, the greater the pressure on the SS to make the evidence of their horrific human experiments disappear. Probably on April 20, 1945, the order came from an SS office in Berlin: "The Heissmeyer department is to be dissolved." In plain language: The 20 boys and girls must be murdered, along with their four carers. An SS commando pulled the children out of bed in the evening and took them to school on Bullenhuser Damm, a satellite camp of Neuengamme concentration camp in East Hamburg.
- ISBN 978-0-8131-0977-0
- ^ "6. DV-BEG - Einzelnorm". Archived from the original on 2009-04-23. Retrieved 2009-04-14. Official list (in German)
- ^ "Die Schule am Bullenhuser Damm" (in German). Retrieved 2008-04-20.
- ISBN 978-0-7146-8243-3
- ISBN 978-1-57181-386-2
- ^ Neumann, p. 141
- ^ Neumann
- ^ ""Kunst im öffentlichen Raum" in Schnelsen". www.schnelsenarchiv.de.
- ^ The Children of Bullenhuser Damm association Marek James
- ^ The Children of Bullenhuser Damm association H. Wassermann
- ^ The Children of Bullenhuser Damm association Roman and Eleonora Witoński
- ^ The Children of Bullenhuser Damm association Roman and Eleonora Witoński
- ^ Zwanzig Kinder erhängen dauert lange
- ^ Shalom Funeral Service Archived July 16, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Gedenkfeier am Bullenhuser Damm mit einem besonderen Gast".
- ^ "Walter Jungleib". Kulturkarte.de.
- ^ The Children of Bullenhuser Damm association Dr. René Quenouille
- ^ The Children of Bullenhuser Damm association Prof. Gabriel Florence
- ISBN 978-0-8050-7623-3
- ^ "SS-Mörder Arnold Strippel bekam nach dem Krieg 121 500 Mark". The European (in German). Retrieved 2022-12-25.
- ^ Neumann, p.143
- ISBN 978-0-19-510648-0
- ISBN 978-3-515-08794-0
- ^ "Bullenhuser Damm Memorial". KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme. Retrieved 28 May 2019.
Bibliography
- Garbe, Detlef and Schwarberg, Günther (1985) Die Kinder vom Bullenhuser Damm. Hamburg: Museum fuer Hamburgische Geschichte. (in German)
- Neumann, Klaus (2000-12-22). Shifting Memories: The Nazi Past in the New Germany (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany). University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-08710-5.
- Schwarberg, Günther (1984) The murders at Bullenhuser Damm: the SS Doctor and the Children. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-15481-1
- Schwarberg, Günther (1996) Meine zwanzig Kinder. Steidl, Göttingen. ISBN 3-88243-431-7(in German)
- The Bullenhuser Damm Memorial - The site, the victims and the history of commemoration. Hamburg, 2011
- »... dass du weißt, was hier passiert ist«: Medizinische Experimente im KZ Neuengamme und die Morde am Bullenhuser Damm. Bremen, 2012. ISBN 978-3-8378-2022-5(in German)
- Gedenkstätte Bullenhuser Damm - Geschichte des Ortes, der Opfer und der Erinnerung. Hamburg, 2011 (in German)
External links
- The 20 Children of Bullenhuser Damm[permanent dead link] (Italian)
- Georges-André Kohn at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe In Berlin
- Phillipe Kohn speaks about his brother's deportation and death Archived 2010-06-22 at the Wayback Machine
- Bullenhuser Damm (Dutch)
- Documentary on Sergio de Simone Archived 2016-05-31 at the Wayback Machine (Italian)
- Bullenhuser Damm (Dutch)
- Documentary on Sergio de Simone Archived 2016-05-31 at the Wayback Machine (Italian)
- Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial
- VR Movie: Rose Garden for the Children of Bullenhuser Damm
- Zeit Online The amazing career of the prosecutor Münzberg (German)
- Lea Wohl von Haselberg: "Against Oblivion" – Cinematic Remembrance in "The Rose Garden"
- The Murders at Bullenhuser Damm (English)