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View, through the barbed wire, of the prisoner barracks in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Flossenbürg, Germany, 1942. See more photographs |
FLOSSENBÜRG |
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In May 1938, the SS Economic-Administrative Main Office established the Flossenbürg concentration camp in the mountains of northeastern Bavaria in southern Germany, near the prewar border with Czechoslovakia. Flossenbürg was a men's camp primarily for so-called "asocial" or "criminal" prisoners. The SS used the prisoners as forced laborers in the nearby stone quarries of the SS-owned and -operated German Earth and Stone Works company. In September 1939, the SS transferred 1,000 political prisoners to Flossenbürg from Dachau in southern Germany and completed the transfer of all prisoners in Dachau to the Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Flossenbürg camps. Prisoners were transferred from Dachau so the Waffen SS (military formations of the SS) could use Dachau for training in the new Death's-Head Division, an elite Waffen SS unit mobilized from concentration camp guards. |
In 1941-1942, about 1,500 Polish prisoners, mostly members of the Polish resistance, were deported to Flossenbürg. In July 1941, SS guards shot 40 Polish prisoners at the SS firing range outside the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Between February and September 1941 the SS executed about one-third of the Polish political prisoners deported to Flossenbürg. During World War II, the German army turned tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners over to the SS for execution. More than 1,000 Soviet prisoners of war were executed in Flossenbürg by the end of 1941. The SS also established a special camp for 2,000 Soviet prisoners of war within Flossenbürg. Executions of Soviet prisoners of war continued sporadically through 1944. Soviet prisoners of war in Muelsen St. Micheln, a subcamp of Flossenbürg, staged an uprising and mass escape attempt on May 1, 1944. They set their bunks on fire and killed some of the camp's Kapos, prisoner trustees who carried out SS orders. SS guards crushed the revolt and none of the prisoners escaped. Almost 200 prisoners died from burns and wounds sustained in the uprising. The SS transferred about 40 leaders of the revolt to Flossenbürg itself, where they were later murdered in the camp jail. |
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See artifact Julian Noga's prisoner uniform jacket |
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There were over 4,000 prisoners in the main camp of Flossenbürg in February 1943. More than half of these prisoners were political prisoners (mainly Soviet, Czech, Dutch, and German). Almost 800 were German criminals, more than 100 were homosexuals, and 7 were Jehovah's Witnesses. The majority of the prisoners imprisoned in Flossenbürg during the camp's existence came from the German-occupied eastern territories. |
During the war, prisoner forced labor became increasingly important in German arms production. As a result, the Flossenbürg camp system expanded to include approximately 100 subcamps concentrated mainly around armaments industries in southern Germany and western Czechoslovakia. In January 1945, there were almost 40,000 prisoners in the Flossenbürg camp system as a whole, including almost 11,000 women. Prisoners were forced to work in the Flossenbürg camp quarry and in armaments-related production. Illness, exhaustion, starvation, and inadequate housing conditions contributed to a high mortality rate. On April 9, 1945, shortly before U.S. forces liberated Flossenbürg, the SS executed Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, General Hans Oster, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and other persons associated with German resistance groups or implicated in the July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler. Canaris, Oster, and Bonhoeffer represented the core of the anti-Nazi resistance in the Abwehr (the military intelligence branch of the German armed forces). Canaris was the chief of military intelligence, Oster was a career officer in military intelligence, and Bonhoeffer was a Protestant theologian critical of the Nazis who was recruited by Oster for the Abwehr after the invasion of Poland in 1939. The Gestapo arrested Bonhoeffer and Oster in April 1943, and Canaris in the aftermath of the failed attempt to kill Hitler in July 1944. As U.S. forces approached the camp, on April 20, 1945, the SS began the forced evacuation of prisoners, except those unable to walk, from the Flossenbürg camp. About 22,000 prisoners, including 1,700 Jews, were forced on a death march from the main camp toward Dachau in southern Germany. SS guards shot any prisoner too weak or ill to keep up. At least 7,000 prisoners died or were shot before reaching Dachau. U.S. forces liberated Flossenbürg on April 23, 1945. They found about 1,600 ill and weak prisoners, mostly in the camp's hospital barracks. Between 1938, when the camp was established, and April 1945, more than 96,000 prisoners passed through Flossenbürg. About 30,000 died there. |
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