Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust by Roger Frie

Author:Roger Frie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

Photo 11: A group of survivors in front of the Limmer subcamp, taken several weeks after their liberation, end of April 1945. Historisches Museum Hannover.

In June 1944 the SS erected two barracks for more than 1,000 women on the premises of the giant Continental Rubber Works factory in Limmer (see Photo 11). It consisted chiefly of French Resistance members and Polish-Jewish survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. They were guarded by the SS and toiled at several different factories. After the Allied bombing raids they were forced to clear rubble in the surrounding city area. As a result the women came into direct contact with the local German population. The fact that they were dressed in the striped garb of concentration camp prisoners would have been hard to overlook. As one French survivor later remarked: “There were many people who passed by, which was not particularly pleasant for us because not only adults but also children called us bandits. And then there were the boys from the Hitler youth who swore and spat at us. Often a woman was hit by a stone or had sand thrown in her eyes” (quoted in Anschütz and Heike, 2003, p. 103).2 On April 6, 1945, with the American capture of Hanover imminent, the women were forced on a death march to Bergen-Belsen. The number of deaths that occurred during the march or in the subsequent days in Bergen-Belsen is not known. It took another 40 years for the Limmer concentration subcamp to be memorialized. The memorial was unveiled in 1987 on the outskirts of the Continental factory premises, because the company refused to take responsibility for the concentration subcamp or its use of forced labor.3

The most notorious of the concentration subcamps in Hanover was established in November 1944 in the district of Ahlem. Approximately 850 chiefly Jewish men and boys of various nationalities were transferred to Ahlem from another subcamp in the district of Stöcken. As a result of the increased Allied bombings, the Continental Rubber Works factory had developed plans to build a new factory underground, for which it received the active support of the SS. The prisoners were housed in barracks surrounding the opening to an old bitumen mine. They toiled in barbaric conditions, using picks and shovels to widen mining tunnels for manufacturing equipment. In short order Ahlem developed the highest mortality rate of all the subcamps, illustrating the same murderous policy of extermination through labor that was implemented at Nordhausen. By January 1945 the high death toll led the SS to import more prisoners from other concentration camps. On April 6 any prisoner still able to walk was forced to march to Bergen-Belsen. Many more were killed on their way there.

When an advance American infantry unit liberated the subcamp on April 10, 1945 (see Photo 12), they saw only skeletal looking men, many deathly ill, lying in their own urine and ravaged by disease. An American infantry soldier, Vernon W. Tott, was among the first to enter the camp and recorded what he saw on a small camera.

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