Nazi Sites Around Freising

Here, just outside Freising in Dürneck where I cycle past everyday to get to work, is where Ferdinand Marian died in a road accident in 1946. He had been the star of history’s most incendiary film, Jud Süß despite having had an half-Jewish daughter from his first marriage and whose second wife had been married to a Jew whom Marian hid in his house. Apparently he had been driving to Munich drunk with a borrowed car to collect denazification papers that with the permission by US film officer Eric Pleskow that would have allowed him to work again, having celebrated this news just beforehand. Other sources suggest that the accident was suicide although I can't find any support for this claim. His losing fight to not appear in the film was the subject of the German-Austrian movie Jud Süss - Film ohne Gewissen of 2010.

Kloster Wies during the Great War and today. Further down by about a kilometre is the town Tüntenhausen. In its church cemetery is this grave to victims of a death march near the end of the war. Tüntenhausen's pastor Josef Schmid wrote in his report to his bishop on July 15, 1945 that on April 27, shortly after noon, around 850 Buchenwald concentration camp prisoners were driven through the village with two other prisoners who died in Hospital 1004 on Freising's Domberg coming from the Straubing prison. They had come from Zolling twoards the direction of Freising. The prisoners had suffered abuse continuously on every occasion with footsteps, butts, and strokes. Two of the starved prisoners were buried here and are recorded on this memorial.

 

The former site of the memorial to the west of Freising in the village church of Hohenbachern; no trace of it remains.

Just outside Hallbergmoos is this 1.20 metre high memorial on which is written in bronze letters "In memory of the prisoners' march of April 29, 1945. Alberto Labro † May 8, 1945". It is intended to stand on the path of the march, disturbing it as it commemorates the so-called death march of around 300 concentration camp prisoners coming from Neufahrn which ended in Hallbergmoos/Goldach. At the same time, a march of thirty to 40 prisoners from the Straubing prison was underway. The escaped Labro, formerly Mayor of Longwy in northern France, later died in the Loibl estate, where he had found shelter. His body was eventually exhumed in November 1946 and transferred to his hometown. He had been sentenced to five years in prison for 'favouring the enemy' and was then transferred from Brussels to Rheinbach and Kassel to Straubing. From here, Labro had to start the march towards Dachau concentration camp on April 24, 1945 together with around 3,000 other prisoners. On April 29, Albert Labro gained freedom in Hallbergmoos - and died in a stable nine days later.  The fate of Albert Labro is described in detail in Collection Sheet 36 of the Heimat- und Traditionsverein Hallbergmoos. 

Also just outside Freising but to the east is the 'Naturfreunde' centre in Hangenham overlooking the area which hosted the Nazis in 1933.
 The road entering into the complex, Major-Braun-Weg, is named after Major Alois Braun, head of the Freisinger Panzer Replacement Division 17. It was just outside Freising to the north at the Haidberghof (which I run past very week) in the hamlet of Pettenbrunn that Braun chose as a base for the anti-Nazi Freiheitsaktion Bayern (FAB). In early April 1945, the Major met with members of the FAB which consisted mainly of members of the military in Freising, Munich and Moosburg, who had also reached out to civil society groups and even American intelligence in Switzerland. It wasn't until the night of April 27-28 that they initiated any action involving the removal of higher military personnel and the Gauleiter of Munich and Upper Bavaria before, based on a ten-point programme, a transitional government would be established. With leaflets, newspaper and radio, the public was called upon for support. In the end, nearly 440 soldiers were involved.

The CIA Safehouse nearby

The radio station in Ismaning was taken over under the command of Lieutenant Ludwig Reiter with 100 to 150 men and tanks, and from 6:00 the FAB was able to transmit within a radius of more than 100 kilometres, declaring that the FAB had "fought the power of government" and called for support from listeners. In Munich and elsewhere south of the Danube, 78 actions took place involving some 990 participants who responded to this FAB call for action. Governor Ritter von Epp (who had been involved in the Boxer rebellion in China and the first act of genocide in the 20th century against the Herero in German SW Africa, and Nazi member since 1928 when he got elected to parliament, later acting as Reichskommissar and Reichsstatthalter for Bavaria in 1933) had responded hesitantly and had been brought at night to Haidberghof, meeting Major Brown and several officers. However, von Epp left the isolated farm in the morning unconvinced. He was later arrested on Giesler's orders after being associated with the Freiheitsaktion Bayern, led by Rupprecht Gerngroß. However, Epp had not wanted to be directly involved with the group as he considered their goal - surrender to the Allies - a backstabbing of the German army. In total 57 people were arbitrarily executed. After the war, Major Alois Braun worked in the Bavarian Ministry of Education as an elementary school consultant. From 1947 he founded the "Archives of the resistance movement set up by order of the Bavarian State Chancellery."

Memorial in Aign about 20 miles north of Freising to the murdered crew of an American B24 bomber, the Gawgia Peach (42-52709), which crash-landed near Sillertshausen in the district of Freising on June 13, 1944 during a bombing mission to the Milbertshofen Ordnance Depot in Munich, by German ME 109s. Almost all members of the ten-man crew managed to rescue themselves via parachute only to have three of them- Dennis Griggs, Theoron O. Ivy and Robert Boynton- murdered by the Nazis. On the right is a photo of the crew of the 831st Squadron- The second man in the front Row is Boynton; Theoron Ivy is second to the right alongside flight engineer Francis Winners. Griggs, the copilot, is third in the back row next to pilot Herbert Frels who, in 1999, received the Distinguished Flying Cross for heroism from then- Texas Governor George W. Bush. At the time Frels had been loaded into an ambulance and taken to the Freising hospital (where my son was born) where he would stay for two months before going to a PoW camp. Boynton was murdered on the ground by Nazi officials, as was Griggs who was killed by enraged German villagers after parachuting down to safety. It is believed that Ivy was killed several days later by the same group of Nazis.

The incident served as the subject of a documentary by Marcus Siebler

Hohenkammer

Schloss Hohenkammer in kreis Freising, flying the Nazi flag

Allershausen

Drake Winston investigating wartime ruins along the Isarweg bicycle route towards Munich at Mintraching (Grüneck) bei Neufahrn. It was a few yards away The Expositus on April 29 that, whilst  around 30 to 40 inmates of the Straubing penitentiary moved through Goldach towards Mintraching in the afternoon, machine gun fire in front of the Isar bridge occurred. According to reports from pastor Franz Josef Roßberger from Eching and Dr. Joachim Birkner from Goldach, at around 2:30 p.m. a single armoured car from the American Army freed a group of about 250 prisoners from the Straubing prison, which had been moving on the road from Freising to Munich, and brought it to Eching. This group had also been observed by Ludwig Gilch from Mintraching. Another thirty to 40 inmates of the Straubing penitentiary moved through Goldach towards Mintraching that afternoon. After the machine gun fire, the group disbanded, the guards disappeared and the prisoners were housed in the surrounding farms.

Zolling

Memorial to Kurt Willi Schmidt, born on July 15, 1924 in Gera, Thuringia. The non-commissioned officer died at this point in the municipality of Fürholzen near Neufahrn bei Freising, with his ME 109 G6 fighter plane was shot down during a dogfight with an Allied bomber group. He had four siblings; one of his brothers died of war injuries, the other committed suicide after the war ended. Kurt's fate remained with his mother and long unknown to his sisters, since the father kept the news of Kurt's death secret, to the mother's hopes that at least one of her sons would go to war had survived not to destroy. Kurt died on April 24, 1944, at just 19 years of age in Fürholzen in the district of Freising. The young non-commissioned officer flew a Messerschmitt Bf 109 G-6 on that day to intercept an American bomber squadron moving to Munich, where he was shot down. He probably died already in the air, as there are no eyewitnesses when the burning fighter plane crashes Watched the parachute rise. The plane wreck was finally found 69 years after the crash by local historians under the direction of Marco Grätz and Ernst Keller who managed to identify Kurt Schmidt as a pilot using the nameplate of the aircraft. His surviving sisters learned about the discovery only after the investigators appealed to a local newspaper to contact them. A memorial stone was erected at the crash site on the occasion of Kurt's 70th anniversary of death, erected by the Krieger- und Soldatenverein Massenhausen/Fürholzen/Hetzenhausen. His final resting place is in the war cemetery at Schönau near Berchtesgaden. 

Two miles south of Niederhummel are the remains of a Roman road.
Rudolfing