Langenstein-Zwieberge

Coordinates: 51°50′40″N 11°01′24″E / 51.84444°N 11.02333°E / 51.84444; 11.02333

A survivor transported by American medics

The Langenstein-Zwieberge was a concentration camp, an under-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp. More than 7000 prisoners from 23 countries were imprisoned there between April 1944 and April 1945.

History

The first group of deportees from Buchenwald arrived on 21 April 1944. They were 18, French, and formed the executives of the Kommando future. They were initially placed in an inn of the periphery of Langenstein, then, the convoys following one another, while waiting for the completion of the construction of the camp, in a barn, which still exists, located at the exit of the village. Six convoys arrived, from 26 September 1944 to 18 February 1945.

The construction of the camp was completed in August 1944 with the electrified enclosure; 7 blocks plus the appendices (Revier, kitchen, etc.) the inn and the barn replaced. When manpower reached 5,100 prisoners, in February 1945, there were 18 blocks.

Manpower decreased then (4,400 people at the beginning of April 1945), the number of deaths exceeded the number of the newcomers by far.

In the week from 19 to 25 March 1945, on 1308 dead deducted for Buchenwald and its Kommandos, Langenstein-Zwieberge had the unhappy privilege to arrive at the head, with 234 dead, in front of Ohrdruf (207) and Leau (69).

Work

As of the first days of their arrival, the deportees started to dig galleries in the still virgin site of the hills of Thekenberge. In ten months of terrible sufferings, the prisoners completed nearly 10 km of galleries, of a surface of 60.000 m ². Some were enough vast to accommodate trains of coaches. Some had cost a death per meter of projection. Life expectancy for prisoners was six weeks.

Prisoners worked in two 12-hour shifts under atrocious conditions, in dust, insufficient air, and under the blows of the kapos. Many returned to the camp exhausted, with barely enough energy to eat their soup.

The principal goal of the excavations was to hide production facilities for the Junkers factories that would build new types of jets and weapons. With this in mind, the Junkers firm arranged a small camp of three huts inside the large camp in edge of the place of call to place there deportees specialists, 869 people, arrivals of Kommandos of Halberstadt, Aschersleben, Langensalza, and Niederorschel.

The small camp, with neither reed nor straw mattress, the prisoners, like the others, were forced to dig tunnels.

Deaths

Dead prisoners were initially sent to the Quedlinburg by horse-drawn car, then by truck. The ashes of 912 victims, including 131 French, rest in the cemetery of this city.

In March, the crematory couldn't continue its work for lack of fuel, and the bodies accumulated in a hut. They were buried, either in four large pits outside the camp that contain more than 700, or close to Revier, inside the camp, in a pit where several hundreds of other bodies lie.

The corpses were transported, by two, in wooden cases carried by four prisoners after work. They emptied the cases into the pits and the downward file was going to seek a new loading until almost complete exhaustion of the mass grave. The last bodies, in full decomposition, untransportable, remained in the hut. The S.S. responsible for the loading closed again the hut with key because there had been flights of thighs of corpses…

On the evening of 9 April 1945, ahead of the advance of the American troops, who reached the Elbe, 3,000 survivors of the camp, in six columns of 500, escorted by the S.S. marched east. The majority went during 15 days and, after 300 km, were found close to Wittenberg, on Elbe.

One column was completely destroyed without a trace. Another column marched until 28 April and arrived close to Berlin with only 18 survivors. It is roughly estimated that 500 to 1500 survived these column marches.

Liberation of the camp

On 11 April 1945, the US 83rd Infantry Division liberated the camp. They found that the prisoners were dying at the rate of 20 per day.

Here what a journalist of " wrote; Stars and stripes" in the n° of 20 April: … " The odor of death was everywhere the same one in this calm room. In Revier were dying them…. The remainder of the patients of Revier was reached of dysentery. They lay there, in their excrements, too weak to move. A man stronger than the others was held with the door. He carried only one short shirt. He did not have any more muscles with the thighs, the calves, the basin. Its legs were nothing any more but bones and its knees two large protuberances. Its body was a covered skeleton of gray skin, tended. It is impossible to remain a long time in the room of dysentery. The odor follows you until in the tepid air of spring… "

On 18 April all these patients were taken along, by military ambulances in a barracks of Halberstadt transformed into hospital. It died there still 144 deportees whose majority of the bodies rest in a common grave of the cemetery of the city.

The assessment is heavy: in the best of the assumptions, the half, and in worst the 3/4 of the deportees of Zwieberge did not return.

The Langenstein-Zwieberge Memorial

On 11 September 1949 a memorial and a commemorative plaque were inaugurated at the place of the common graves. Since 1976 there exists a museum on the ground of the Memorial of Langenstein-Zwieberge.

References and sources

Testimonies

Specialized literature

External links

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See also

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