More Remaining Nazi Sites in Upper Bavaria

Landsberg am Lech

Forty miles west of Munich, this is the town noted for its prison where Adolf Hitler was incarcerated in 1924 for 264 days after being convicted of treason after the failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch the previous year. Hitler had taken the cell that had held Anton Graf von Arco-Valley who had murdered Bavarian prime minister Kurt Eisner in February 1919. During this incarceration Hitler wrote/dictated his book Mein Kampf together with assistance from his deputy, Rudolf Hess. His cell, number 7, became part of the Nazi cult and many followers came to visit it during the Nazi-period. Landsberg am Lech was also known as the town of the Hitler Youth. After the war it was the location for one of the largest Displaced Person camps for Jewish refugees and the place of execution for more than 150 war criminals after 1945. The Landsberg camp began as a Nazi concentration camp. By October 1944, there were more than 5,000 prisoners in the camp.  The camp was liberated on April 27, 1945 by the 12th Armoured Division of the United States Army; among the liberators was JD Salinger. Upon orders from General Taylor, the American forces allowed news media to record the atrocities, and ordered local German civilians and guards to reflect upon the dead and bury them bare-handed. After the liberation of the camp it became a displaced person camp. Consisting primarily of Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union and the Baltic states, it developed into one of the most influential DP camps in the Sh'erit ha-Pletah. It housed a Yiddish newspaper (the Yiddishe Zeitung), religious schools, and organisations to promote Jewish religious observance. Tony Bennett was another one of the soldiers who liberated the camp. A dramatisation of the discovery and liberation of the camp was presented in Episode 9: Why We Fight of the Band of Brothers mini-series.  A number of prominent leaders emerged from the camp, including Samuel Gringauz, who also became the chairman of the Council of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the American zone. The camp also served as the headquarters for the Jewish education and training organisation ORT. The camp closed on October 15, 1950.

Shown  in 1938 with a banner with a large swastika hanging from the roof when the structure served as a memorial to Hitler's incarceration, after the war when holding Nazi prisoners and today. On November 11, 1923, Hitler was arrested for treason after the failed Beer Hall Putsch. He was arrested in art dealer Ernst Hanfstaengel's villa in Uffing am Staffelsee. After his arrest, Hitler fell into a severe depression, convinced he'd be shot. The Landsberg prison psychologist Alois Maria Ott characterised Hitler as a “hysterist" and “morbid psychopath”  whose "first impression was rather disappointing". In cell 7 of the prison hospital of the Landsberg Fortress, he encountered a “darkly looking, stocky, bourgeois average man with mannered into the forehead combed black hair” with a “broadly spreading, ordinary mouth and a wide-spread, somewhat pressed nose”. Hitler screamed and raged with "white yellow foam flakes on his mouth". Disappointed by the people and full of bitterness, he exclaimed to the psychologist that "[i]f I had a revolver, I would take it! “ He was determined to be extreme and wanted to end his life with a hunger strike which never had to take place. Since he was not in solitary confinement, he had constant contact with “his faithful fellow fighters” who were also imprisoned in Landsberg. Under a swastika flag, they were served chosen culinary delights as they plotted future plans, smoked, and played cards. Hitler had permission to receive visits at any time and as long as he wanted. In October 1924 alone Hitler received 489 admirers and admirers from all over Germany.

Posed propaganda shot by Heinrich Hoffmann and Hitler's return in 1934 after taking power.

Conditions were not actually so bad in this ‘cross between a spa hotel and a barracks’. Wooden partitions were erected to give the prisoners privacy. They were allowed to mix to such an extent that Hitler dictated Mein Kampf while there, and received visitors freely. Party insignia were hung from the walls and other Nazis stood to attention before dinner when Hitler entered the hall and took his seat. Perhaps helped by the singularly mild rules of the institution, Hitler was regarded by the warders as a model prisoner. Upon Hitler’s release in December 1924, the prison governor said that if anyone could save Germany, it would be this man.

Martyn Housden (57) Hitler: Study of a Revolutionary?

Such a description hardly squares with the myth the Nazis would later promote. Already in 1933 children were able to read in the Altona-Bahrenfeld cigarette album Deutschland erwacht: Werden, Kampf und Sieg der NSDAP the following special contribution by Julius Schaub: 

The barred fortress room is only a simle one with an iron bed area with mattress, a woolen blanket, a small table, a bedside and two chairs. Only from time to time was the monotony interrupted by the loading of the guns whilst removing the guard or by the clatter of the keys when the guard makes his lap. In this worldliness, completed by the rest of humanity, surrounded only by his faithful fellow fighters and fellow prisoners, the leader created his great work Mein Kampf. Many came down with discouragement, but when in the evening the Führer gathered his people around him to read them out of his nascent book, faith, confidence and comfort flowed into the hearts. 

Hitler's Chief Warder Franz Hemmrich posing outside the entrance to the prison.

For a thumb-nail sketch of Herr Hemmrich – he is a man perhaps at the end of the thirties. The face and especially the eyes are full of alert activity and energy. One gets the impression of an officer who has put in a good many years of responsible and exacting service. He wears a blue uniform with epaulettes, and an official cap.  “Before I start the story of Adolf Hitler’s detention here,” he tells me, as we prepare to make the tour of Landsberg, “you ought to know something of the place itself. It is, as you can see, fairly modern. It was built in 1909, and originally intended for none but ordinary convicts. It was planned to accommodate five hundred. Only since 1920 have we had political prisoners here – quite a different class. They don’t, of course, rank with criminals at all. We had no special accommodation to allot to them, so a wing was set apart for the purpose and called the ‘Festung.’ In 1920 Count Arco-Valley was sent here. He had been condemned to death for shooting the Bavarian Minister President Kurt Eisner, but his sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life. For a long time he was the only man we had in the ‘Festung.’... “Then, on November 11th, 1923, I remember, there was a regular storm raging. The wind howled and shrieked round the place and tore at the barred windows. Rain dashed against the panes as if it would break them. At that time I had a room within the prison. It was night, and I’d gone to bed. All was still save for the muffled tread of an officer going the rounds, or for the ticking when he clocked in.  “All of a sudden a bell rang through the corridor, and a moment or two later came a knocking on my door. ‘The Governor wants you. You’re to come at once,’ cried a voice without. I jumped into my clothes with all the speed I could, and hurried to the office. Herr Oberregierungsrat Leybold was chief at the time.  “‘See here,’ he said, and his face was as serious as his voice, ‘Hitler’s coming here tonight. He has been arrested at last, and he’ll certainly be sent along to us. We’ll have to be prepared for anything. His followers may make an attempt at rescue ––’ 

Heinz A. Heinz (169) Germany's Hitler

Standing in front of the gaol on the left and as it appeared on December 30, 1924 after the release of the putschists and as it appears with me today. From the left are Gerhard Hoff, Walter Hebel, Hans Eduard Krüger, Julius Schaub and Rudolf Heß. The original caption recorded how the car came courtesy from Landsberger alderman and landowner Franz Strobl who met them upon their release.  

   

After his release, Hitler posed outside the town's Bayertor, built in 1425. Hitler was released from custody at 12.15 with the remaining penalty of "3 years, 333 days, 21 hours and 50 minutes", according to the official note, was issued to him. The fact that his release didn't come so suddenly and unexpectedly for Hitler, as his friend Schaub would have had others believe, was shown when on September 10, 1924, at the Benz representative Jakob Werlin in Munich, Hitler had ordered a suitable motor vehicle for his release from prison. In his September 13, 1924 petition to Jakob Werlin, a Munich car dealer, one of the directors of Mercedes and a friend, Hitler wrote of his hope to purchase a model 11/40 Mercedes from Benz & Cie on credit with the hoped-for earnings from his soon-to-be published Mein Kampf serving as a promissory; the year before the larger Benz 16/50 PS was put to the side as a smaller model. He further asked for it to be in grey and with wire wheels, complaining that “[t]he hardest thing for me at the moment lies in the fact that the biggest payment for my work is not expected until the middle of December, and so I am compelled to ask for a loan or an advance. Of course, a few thousand marks would play a very big role in this.” As shown in Hoffman's photograph of December 20, 1924 upon his release, Hitler got his car from Nazi Party funds. In Daimler-Benz and its Nazi History, Bernard P. Bellon claims that Hitler had been picked up by Werlin. Other accounts state however that he had been picked up from Landsberg by Hoffmann and Adolf Müller, with the former recounting how

With a terse greeting, [Hitler] stepped swiftly into the car, and we drove off  . . . . It seemed to me essential that a photograph to mark the occasion should be taken in Landsberg itself; and if that were not possible in front of the fortress, then I must take one elsewhere. I suggested that we stop by the old city gates, where we would still retain something of the fortress atmosphere. To this Hitler agreed, and I took several pictures.
The same day, I sent the photographs to all the various home and foreign newspapers, with the caption "Adolf Hitler leaves Landsberg Fortress." As I anticipated, the picture was published all over the world. But when I received my copies, I could not help laughing. Not a single newspaper had used my caption. Instead: "The first step to freedom" — "The Fortress Gate has opened" — "On to new deeds" — "Thoughtfully, Hitler stands in front of his prison — what will he do now?"  What Hitler actually did was to say to me: "Get a move on, Hoffmann, or we'll have a crowd collecting; and anyway, it's bloody cold!"  We returned to the car, and I asked him what he intended to do next. "I shall start again from the beginning," he said decisively. "The first thing I want is office space. Do you know of anything in that line, Hoffmann?"  I told him that at 50 Schellingstrasse there were thirteen empty rooms to let. "That's fine!" he answered gleefully. "I'll take twelve of them." Hitler, among other things, was very superstitious.

Flood (599-600)  Hitler: The Path to Power

The 'Hitler-Zelle'

Photos and postcards featuring Hitler's cellroom. In 1945, the American occupying forces completely removed the cell's furnishings so that it could no longer serve as a place of pilgrimage for Hitler supporters, so only the façade remained. The empty room now serves as a common room in the Landsberg correctional facility and tourists are not allowed any entry. From 1937 to 1945 the prison cell at Landsberg am Lech became the third central site of pilgrimage next to Munich, the "City of the Movement", and Nuremberg, the "City of the Party Rallies." Its slogan during the Third Reich was 'Landsberg - Town of youth' and became known additionally as the meeting place of the Hitler Youth. Following the party rallies of 1937 and 1938 delegations of the Hitler Youth marched across the German Reich as part of the "confessional march of the Hitler Youth" to Landsberg . It would culminate with swastika flags, banners and Hitler Jugend torchlight rallies at the Landsberger main square and in the atrium of the fortress prison. In the words of Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach, Landsberg was a "pilgrimage of German youth" and the "station of National Socialist education." The gaol with its "Hitler cell" was to be converted into the largest youth hostel largest of the Reich. The plan also saw the creation of a gigantic parade stadium, which would have had greater dimensions than the entire historic old town. As German troops invaded Poland September 1 1939, the "Adolf Hitler march" was cancelled following the "Party Rally of Peace". As early as 1933 the town marketed with all its available resources itself as the "Hitlerstadt" or "Stadt des Führers"and "Birthplace of the ideas of National Socialism." This "Hitler tourism" brought what was described as "a real economic miracle"- it had been reported that in 1935 37,700 visited the 'Hitler cell.' Eight months later, on November 28, 1936, it was publicly announced that in the year before " 60,000 people were happy to visit the leader's cell and 7,108 participants visited the Landsberg Town Hall ." The following year on August 17, 1937 the Landsberger Zeitung local paper reported how "[o]n average, every Sunday 600 to 800 people visit the room the Leader was and in which the great work "Mein Kampf" arose." By May 27, 1939, the local press reported how "100,000 Volksgenossen," made the pilgrimage to the Hitlerstube. 

On the left is the prison in 1935 and today. The institution itself was built according to plans by Hugo Höfl in a restrained baroque reform style in 1908. Eventually by 1959 the facility has been operated as a correctional facility after the institution was returned to the Bavarian justice system by the Americans. In 2002, Lutz Hachmeister created a documentary about the historical significance of the prison. More recently the running of the prison has caused controversy; in February 2011, two suicides by prisoners occurred within just three days. The relatives subsequently made serious allegations against the prison management and criticised the prison conditions in Landsberg, claiming that the suicides weren't as surprising as the prison director, Monika Groß, made it seem a few days after the incidents. One of the prisoners had been housed in a cell in the basement of the main building with three other inmates, with only a small window high up providing a little sunlight; apparently the outdated cell block has since been closed for fire safety reasons.
From the film "Der Marsch zum Führer" showing Hitlerjugend marching to commemorate Hitler's imprisonment in Landsberg am Lech, the final rally in the main square of the city and the address of the Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach. Unlike the earlier Riefenstahl Nuremberg documentaries, it doesn't focus on the Party congress itself, or even on Nazi leaders, who are not shown until the very end of the film. Instead, it follows HJ boys from various parts of Nazi Germany beginning their journey, camping along the route, being taken in by helpful families on the way and marching through cities in formation, saluting and carrying the swastika banner.

From 1933 onwards, the city marketed itself using various sobriquets: Hitler City, City of the Führer, National Socialist Site of Pilgrimage and Birthplace of the Ideas of National Socialism. In 1938, 100,000 visitors came to Landsberg, most incorporating a glimpse of Hitler’s former prison cell into their tour. Eventually, the town received the official honorific City of Youth, because it welcomed thousands of Hitler Youth members in 1937 and 1938 for massive Adolf Hitler marches. The delegates also visited the prison – which had plans to become the biggest youth hostel in the Reich – and received a copy of Mein Kampf as a souvenir.

Seeing Hitler's Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich (68)

The Hauptplatz on September 19, 1937 during a rally of Hitlerjugend and today. As early as 1933, the Lechstadt marketed itself with all the means at its disposal as a "Hitler city" or "City of the Führer;" a "National Socialist place of pilgrimage" and as the "birthplace of the ideas of National Socialism". From 1937 to 1945 Landsberg am Lech, next to Munich -the "City of the Movement"- and Nuremberg, -the "City of the Nazi Party Rallies,"- served as the third central site of National Socialism.  Landsberg was known during the Third Reich under the slogan "Landsberg - City of Youth" as a meeting place of the Hitler Youth; following the Nazi Party rallies in 1937 and 1938 delegations of Hitler Youth from across the Reich marched in the "confession march of the Hitler Youth" to Landsberg. Against a ghostly backdrop of swastika flags , HJ banners and torch lighting, the final rallies of the so-called "Adolf Hitler marches" took place on the main square of Landsberg and in the forecourt of the fortress detention centre. In the Hitler cell the Hitler Youth received copies of Mein Kampf. Landsberg had become the "place of pilgrimage of the German youth" and the "station of National Socialist education," as Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach called it. The prison with its "Hitler cell" was to be converted into the largest youth hostel in the Reich.  Also planned was a gigantic Aufmarschstadion, which would have possessed larger dimensions than the entire historic old town core.

On the left the statue in front of the town hall is shown covered by Hitler Youth banners. In the city council meeting of May 4, 1937, the Nazi city council declared that "on the order of the Reichsführer ... in future every year - from September 19, 1937 - about 1,000 HJ flags and thus about 3,000 Hitler Youth will come to Landsberg, where in front of the Hitler cell and on the main square a mass rally of the Hitler Youth take place and in which the Reich Youth Leader will speak. The cost of the rally, whose decorative equipment alone requires considerable resources, must, in the opinion of the councillors and the mayor, be supported by the Reich leadership of the Hitler Youth." Thus in 1937 the decision was made that, following the Nazi party rallies, Hitler Youth delegations from all over Germany would march to Landsberg. The big final rallies take place in the prison and on the main square in Landsberg, at which the Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schiach would speak to the boys. If the previous "Adolf Hitler marches" culminated in Nuremberg, by 1937 Landsberg would become the final destination of the Hitler Youth marches in order to "always be aware of its great task at that place and will be worthy of the tradition of National Socialism."

The "Schöner Turm" bedecked with swastikas in 1937 and today as 200 Nazi flags were placed along the route through the city and girls of the BdM lined up on Augsburger Strasse over the railway bridge. When they arrived at the main square, the flags were placed on the stepped substructure erected in the middle of the square as a fire was lit in a sacrificial bowl that rested on a column covered in fir green that rose above. The flags remained in place for the whole of the weekend. Landsberg didn't get its eminent position during the Nazi era - as it is often claimed in official representations of the city - "imposed from outside". In fact, the "Hitler tourism" brought economic recovery; in 1938, 100,000 "Volksgenossen" visited Landsberg and the Hitler cell. Just for the 1937 rally the town adminsistrators estimated that “[f]rom Saturday afternoon to Monday we need: 1,185 litres of milk, 63 kilos of butter, 1,580 portions of cheese, the portion of 125 grammes each, 9 kilos of tea, 256 kilos of sugar, 48 kilos of chocolate powder, fifty kilos of pea powder with bacon, 1,580 portions of spreadable sausage, 1,580 portions of 'Bauernseufzer' of 120 grammes each, 1,480 portions of Regensburger, each 100 grammes and 1,975 pieces of bread. The food is all bought from local business people.”

Hitler Youth marching through the hauptplatz in front of the town hall on the extreme left in 1937 with honorary formations of the Wehrmacht lined alongside.  Roughly 4,000 spectators attended the rally on the main square which marked the end of the Adolf Hitler March which was broadcast on the radio by the Reichssender München. About seventeen spotlights cast their light onto the main square whilst a total of 52 illumination devices were set up throughout the town to illuminate prominent landmarks such as churches, towers, gates et cet..

Alte Bergstraße hasn't changed much. Despite the central importance of the city at the time and the military facilities that were located nearby (including the Penzing Air Base from 1935) or within the city area such as the Saarburg barracks, Landsberg am Lech remained one of the few district towns Germany spared from Allied air raids. According to contemporary witnesses, in April 1944, only a fighter plane that was on its way to attack Munich lost a small explosive device that hit and destroyed a mediæval house on what is now Georg-Hellmair-Platz. This house number 169, which now houses a café, was only rebuilt in the 1980s under monument protection criteria. In 1945, many of the Jewish concentration camp survivors from the concentration camps around Landsberg am Lech were uprooted and homeless. Often they had lost their relatives or did not know where they were. Thousands of these displaced persons were accommodated and cared for by the Allies in Landsberg. The Jewish survivors referred to themselves as “ She'erit Hapletah ” – the rest of the rescued. On May 9, 1945, the Americans set up a DP camp in the Saarburg barracks . At the end of 1945, around 7,000 displaced persons lived there. More were added when around 300,000 Jews fled Eastern Europe into the care of the Anglo-Americans in 1946-1947 following anti-Semitic excesses. During its existence, around 23,000 Jewish DPs passed through it. From 1947 to 1948, the German film about the fate of Holocaust survivors, “Lang ist der Weg” starring Israel Beker, was made on the grounds of the Landsberg am Lech DP camp, among other things; a street was named after him in the same place. A symbolic event was a concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted and played with the DP orchestra made up of Jewish Holocaust survivors in the DP camp in Landsberg am Lech on May 10, 1948, four days before the founding of the State of Israel. Many of the former concentration camp prisoners were preparing for their reintegration and emigration to Israel, the United Kingdom, United States, or other countries of their choice. In the Landsberg DP camp there were, among other things, schools, workshops, nine kibbutzim and also a camp newspaper, the “Yiddische Landsberger Cajtung”. By April 1950 the occupancy number had fallen to 1,500 people. The Landsberg DP camp became a retreat for residents of other dissolved DP camps and was finally also dissolved on November 1, 1950.

Spöttingen cemetery in 1958, just before the final four prisoners were released from Landsberg prison and the running of the facility transferred from American control to West Germany, and today; the prison can be seen behind. During the occupation of Germany by the Allies, the American Army designated the prison as War Criminal Prison No. 1 to hold convicted Nazi war criminals, run and guarded by personnel from the American Military Police. Following the occupation of Landsberg by American troops on April 27 and 28, 1945, and the subsequent release of most of the previous detainees, the detention centre gradually developed into the central "War Criminal Prison" (WCP).  Most prisoners held had been convicted in the so-called Dachau trials, the military courts have carried out since the end of 1945 against numerous Nazi and war criminals. The main groups of prisoners included concentration camp guards and those responsible for the killing of crashed pilots. The proximity of Landsberg to the former Dachau concentration camp, where most of the proceedings took place, was probably the decisive reason for choosing the location in addition to the size of the facility and its structural integrity. Among some prominent convicts were perpetrators such as Oswald Pohl; as head of the ϟϟ Economic and Administrative Main Office, he had been a leading figure in the organisation of the forced labour camp system and in the plundering of Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

 Between 1945 and 1946, the prison housed a total of 110 prisoners convicted at the Nuremberg trials, a further 1,416 war criminals from the Dachau trials and eighteen prisoners convicted in the Shanghai trials. In five and an half years, Landsberg prison was the place of execution of nearly 300 condemned war criminals. 259 death sentences were conducted by hanging and 29 by firing squad. Executions were carried out expeditiously. In May 1946 twenty eight former ϟϟ guards from Dachau were hanged within a four-day period. Bodies that were not claimed were buried in unmarked graves here in the cemetery next to the Spöttingen chapel. Of the death sentences from the Dachau trials and the Nuremberg successor trials, a total of 252 were executed on the gallows in the WCP in the years 1945 to 1949 and again for one day in 1951. Among the last seven executed - the West German abolition of the death penalty by the Basic Law did not apply to the American judiciary - was Oswald Pohl, Head of the ϟϟ-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt, in 1951. In addition, over 33 people were executed in the late 1940s by firing squad. Altogether about 175 executed and deceased from the time of WCP are buried in this cemetery including Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppe D and Paul Blobel, the so-called butcher of Babi Yar.

Of the 255 they executed at Landsberg-am-Lech, 102 were skilled workers, thirty-seven civil servants, with a few academic titles here and there, twenty-three were academics, twenty-two workers, eleven soldiers, and the rest were made up of the professions, Nazi func- tionaries and schoolboys. The oldest was Dr Schilling at seventy-four. (Twenty more died from naural causes.) All the lifers were eventually released, with one exception – Hess. German courts reopened in the summer of 1945, and they too passed judgment on former Nazis. Between 1945 and 1950 the courts sentenced only 5,228 defendants for Nazi crimes. Sentences were either short or the criminals were swiftly pardoned. In the years from 1951 to 1955 there were only 638 convictions. It is now clear that many of the worst culprits, the operatives who sent thousands to their deaths, were not punished at all. 

Giles MacDonogh (467) After the Reich

On January 22, 2003, the Bavarian Ministry of Justice had this plaque attached to the chapel providing information about the history of the place which informs the visitor that there are around 140 victims of National Socialism in the cemetery, along with the same number of Nazi war criminals. At the meeting on January 29, 2003, the Landsberg city council voted to leave the cemetery in its current form as a monument to contemporary history which came after plans since autumn 2002 by the Bavarian Ministry of Justice to remove of the crosses of the executed Nazi entirely and to abolish individual commemoration of the dead in the cemetery. In fact, the cemetery has long served as a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis who left wreaths and candles on the graves of the war criminals and the idea that the maintenance of the graves was financed with state money was impalatable. Incredibly (to me, at least), this came as a sudden moral volte face given that it was only on June 7, 2001- the 50th anniversary of the last executions- that the crosses were renovated and each given a protective copper covering! By the time I first visited the site in August 2018 however, it seems that a compromise of sorts was made and the names on the crosses of executed Nazis were all removed, to considerable controversy.

Roughly three thousand people protesting on January 7, 1951 in Landsberg's main square against further executions. In 2003 the name boards were removed from each cross despite considerable protests given many were victims of the Nazis; 300 people are buried here of whom less than half- 140- were executed by the Americans after the war. Of these, it has been estimated that at least one fifth of the German soldiers sentenced to death after the war were innocent. Of the Nazi victims who share their anonymous resting places with Nazi war criminals include those who served prison sentences for political offences such as "treachery", "destruction of military forces" or "concealment of the Jews". In the last years of the war, more and more prisoners from other areas under Nazi control were transferred to Landsberg, as the institutions close to the front were evacuated because of the withdrawal of the German troops. Thus, these numbers include many Poles and Italians. As the war progressed conditions within the prison. Deaths increased as a result of the exhausting prisoner transports and the pressure of increasing occupancy, hard forced labour, especially in local armaments factories, inadequate food supply, as well as inadequate hygienic and medical conditions. Altogether according to the records of the official registers from the beginning of 1944 over 210 people died including ten inmates who were executed after attempted escape. 

 In 1994, this memorial for the victims of the death march was erected on Neuen Bergstrasse ouside the town walls. Under the usual seemingly-hastily bronze casting by Otto Strehle is the inscription “At the end of April 1945, the trail of suffering of Jewish prisoners of the Landsberg/Kaufering concentration camp command passed this spot on the way to Dachau.” Every year on January 27th, the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of National Socialism, a wreath is lain and ceremony takes place. In 2021 Mayor Doris Baumgartl spoke of Samuel Pisar, prisoner number 127,177, who was barely sixteen years old at the time of his liberation after having survived several concentration camps and, amongst other things, was narrowly selected by the infamous Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz before finally finally being deported to Kaufering. He managed to escape near Penzing during the death march and rescued by American soldiers. He would go on to study at Harvard (long before it became a bastion of anti-Semitism), became a successful lawyer and even at one point serving on Kennedy's advisory staff. As Baumgartl noted, the very day before his stepson, Antony Blinken, was named Secretary of State of the United States of America.

Just outside Landsberg in the town of Schwabhausen is this sign pointing to what is described as a concentration camp cemetery leading into the woods at the site where, on April 27, 1945, American strafers bombed what they had mistakenly believed to be a German military transport train. In fact, the train cars were packed with trapped Jewish prisoners from the Kaufering concentration camps who were being transferred to Dachau. About 150 prisoners were killed in the attack, and were buried in three mass graves in early May. Today the train still runs right beside them. The first grave contains the remains of about sixty of the dead, and graves two and three contain up to eighty remains in toto. Apparently only one of the dead is known by name today- Joschua ben Mosche Chaim Herzel from Hungary. The three gravestones were erected in the summer of 1946 and are nearly identical, differing only in height in order to symbolise the varying number of victims buried in each grave. They had been made by stonemason Franz Xaver Sepp from Landsberg. They all bear the same inscription in Hebrew, cast in metal letters:

לאות זכרון

כל עין עובר תדמה וכל לב

נמס ושאול ישאל מה הציון

הלו אשר אתה רואה זו היא

עצמות קדושים וטהורים אשר

אחרי עינוים קשים הומתו ביום

השחרור י’ד אייר שנת תש’ה

תנצב’ה

Dr. Zalman Grinberg was a Lithuanian medical doctor with a speciality in radiology who was imprisoned in Dachau. He later served as the chairman for the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the American sector of Germany and Austria after the war, dying August 8, 1983. Dr. Grinberg’s first order was to "[c]ollect and bury all the dead!” With a group of healthier Jews, he himself began to dig three mass graves. They were aided by farmers from the vicinity and German army soldiers. About 150 Jews were buried there. For generations of Jews, burial has been a sign of a self-determined life… Israel Kaplan, Fun letstn Churbn, no. 5, May 1947

Apparently the memorial site has been the repeated target of vandalism and desecration. On a sign board beside the first grave is the following In Memoriam: “Each eye of a passerby may cry and each heart may sorrow and ask what kind of memorial is it I am seeing here? These are the bones of the Holies and Pure who after cruel pain were killed on the day of redemption 14th of Adar 5705” (April 27, 1945).

In 1944, the largest concentration camp complex in Germany was built around Landsberg and Kaufering with twelve subcamps of the Kaufering subcamp complex . Other large camps had been built in the occupied territories. All concentration camp subcamps were called “ Kaufering .” Eleven camps had the status of subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp although on June 18, 1944, the first transport with 1,000 prisoners from Auschwitz arrived. As part of the “Ringeltaube” armaments project, they were supposed to build three gigantic semi-underground bunkers for the production of the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter. These large bunkers, along with other numerous buildings such as workers' accommodation, officers' villas and storage cellars, were located in the Landsberger Frauenwald, now known as the Frauenwald industrial park . For this armaments project, thousands of prisoners from the Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps, who were brought directly to the cordoned off area via the Munich-Kaufering railway line via a siding (today the Klausner Holz Bayern supply track), would lose their lives in the most inhumane manner whilst the bunkers themselves continued to be used by the Americans after the war. The Luxembourg concentration camp priest Jules Jost registered a total of 28,838 Jewish concentration camp prisoners in the concentration camp subcamps by March 9, 1945. Because of the inhumane accommodation, hunger, cold and illnesses such as typhus, and the exploitation of labour to the point of extermination, the prisoners referred to the twelve concentration camps of the Kaufering-Landsberg subcamp complex as “cold crematoria”. By the end of October 1944, anyone who could no longer work was sent back to Auschwitz to the gas chambers. From November 1944, prisoners who were unable to work were no longer deported from the Kaufering-Landsberg subcamp complex, but instead died in the camp because the gas chambers in Auschwitz had already been blown up before the approaching Soviet troops and their bodies buried in mass graves in the area. Shortly before the end of the war, the ϟϟ administration tried to “eliminate” witnesses to the concentration camp machinery through the so-called death marches and mass killings. Only around 15,000 prisoners survived the final phase of the extermination of Jews in these camps and were liberated by the American army on April 27, 1945.

At the site of the Kaufering VII concentration camp in front of one of the barracks and as it appeared before the site was recognised as a memorial- vandalised by neo-Nazis with 'Arbeit Macht Frei' scrawled over the remains with the letter 'F' in the shape of a swastika. Set up by the Organisation Todt and taken over by the ϟϟ in September 1944. This was one of a network of subsidiary camps of the Dachau concentration camp at Landsberg-Kaufering. At times, up to 2,000 men and 272 women were housed separately in 55 earthen huts and six clay tube barracks. These latter were 13.5 metres long, 6.1 metres wide and up to 2.8 metres high with the the hut floor one metre below ground level. They were covered with earth for camouflage and constructed as a barrel vault made of many individual arches of clay tubes inserted into one another - "clay bottles" due to their shape - made of terracotta, based on a patent by Frenchman Jaques Couelle.

On the right are examples of the earth huts (here seen in 1945 at Kaufering IV) in which the male  prisoners had to sleep. The prisoners of this camp were survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp, various ghettos in Lithuania and the Warsaw Ghetto. Regardless of age and gender, the prisoners were used to build the bunkers. They had to do construction work such as building the Held & Francke concrete parts factory and on the Einsen railway line. After the Allied air offensive in February 1944, the German armaments industry was hit hard forcing aircraft production to be relocated underground. With the massive deployment of around 30,000 concentration camp prisoners, most of whom were rented out to construction companies, in the Kaufering subcamp complex, three large bunkers were intended for production, among other things of the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet aircraft at “Weingut II”, “ Diana II ” and “Walnuss II”. The camp was built for a total capacity of 3,100 prisoners. and located close to Held & Francke (code name “Erich II”), used to produce prefabricated concrete parts for the Diana II bunker. The prisoners probably also had to work directly on the construction sites of the Diana II and Weingut II bunkers. Camp leaders included ϟϟ-Obersturmführer Arno Lippmann and Johann Baptist Eichelsdörfer. 

 The Jews that were transported to the 11 Kaufering camps to build the bunkers were survivors of the Polish and Lithuanian ghettos, but most were Hungarian and Romanian Jews, with smaller groups of other European Jews from countries such as Holland, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and the Island of Rhodes. In about 10 months, approximately 30,000 prisoners, including 4,200 women and 850 children, went through the Kaufering subcamps. One of the peculiarities of the Kaufering subcamps was the birth of seven babies in the subcamp Kaufering I in the spring of 1945. The mothers, Hungarian Jews, conceived the children shortly before they were deported, and at the time they were selected in Auschwitz, there were no visible signs of pregnancy.

Megargee (489)

From autumn 1944 it was used as a sick camp and for quarantine because of the typhus epidemic, and from the winter of 1944-1945 as a death camp, similar to the Kaufering IV - Hurlach and Saulgau concentration camp subcamps. Those unable to work from Kaufering, as well as other Dachau concentration camp subcamps, were brought here. In contrast to the other death camp in Hurlach, this subcamp was intended for prisoners who were “physically deteriorated” but had a chance of regaining “partial ability to work.” Local eyewitnesses reported that up to fifteen bodies were buried in shallow pits measuring 1.3 by 1.5 metres. In the entire Kaufering subcamp complex, around half of the prisoners died in the ten months of operation. Here a new dimension of brutalisation of the concentration camp system was reached which were less typical subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp, but rather a continuation of the line of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Lublin-Majdanek concentration and extermination camp and others. “To a certain extent, the camps at Kaufering and Mühldorf can also be regarded as satellites of Auschwitz: their prisoners did not come from Dachau, but in large part from Auschwitz, and also returned there again if they fell ill or became unfit for work” (Raim 1992, 237). There are practically no surviving contemporary witnesses known to this subcamp; one of the few exceptions is Jack Bresler, who, after selection in the Auschwitz concentration camp in the late summer of 1944, was initially transported with his brother Joseph to this subcamp of the Kaufering camp complex. 

Tony Bennett was another one of the soldiers who liberated the camp, and dramatisation of the discovery and liberation of the camp was presented in Episode 9: Why We Fight of the Band of Brothers mini-series shown here on the left. The camp depicted is Kaufering IV which was actually liberated by the "Screaming Eagle"unit of the 12th Armoured Division on April 27, 1945 and not Easy Company which had arrived two days later with the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion and 36th Infantry Division arriving on April 30, with some units of the 101st Airborne Division arriving on April 28. There were only about seven prisoners found alive along with about 500 bodies. I had the honour of having dinner with Bill Glied whom I introduced to my school on January 28, 2013 when he came to talk about his life and experiences which included being one of those liberated from here. After spending time in various Hungarian temporary camps, Glied's family arrived in Auschwitz on May 28, 1944; he saw his mother and his then eight-year-old sister for the last time on the platform. He and his father Sandor were classified as “fit for work” and, three weeks later, were transported to the Kaufering subcamp complex. There they had to do forced labour in the construction of large bunkers for the planned underground production of aircraft. Both fell ill with typhus with his father dying just before liberation. Bill survived and emigrated to Canada at the age of 17. I had dinner with him at a friend's home outside Dachau as he returned after testifying at the trial of Oskar Gröning, one of the last surviving members of the ϟϟ, who went on trial as an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people at Auschwitz. Bill was featured in the documentary about the case, The Accountant of Auschwitz.

When I asked him if he had seen the episode and then what he made of it given what I thought were rather minor inaccuracies, he shook his head and questioned why they had to take liberties from the truth.

Around 2,000 dead people from Kaufering VII were buried in nearby mass graves, some of which appear on this page when I visited in 2023. At the end of April, the ϟϟ cleared the camp before the advancing American troops. Using brute force, the ϟϟ drove the concentration camp prisoners to Dachau, Allach and then south on the death march. After the war, German expellees and refugees from the East were quartered in the ϟϟ barracks and in some clay tube buildings. They lived here until the mid-1960s.

Today the site has become the European Holocaust Memorial in Landsberg am Lech and is looked after on a voluntary basis which means its enclosed within a fence and one can only visit the site through prior arrangement and accompaniment with a guide; fortunately there are places where the fence is easily navigated. The memorial contains remains of the Kaufering VII – Landsberg-Erpfting subcamp, the seventh of the eleven assigned camps of the Kaufering subcamp complex and the largest complex of the 169 subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp. It today includes six ruins of clay tube barracks and the last traces of concentration camp earth huts. Such preservation is thanks to the civic initiative of the Landsberg Citizens' Association founded in 1983 which pushed for the structural remains of Camp VII to be protected by the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation and itself acquired the third of the former camp area with a donation from the Jewish Holocaust survivor Alexander Moksel, on which the most important buildings - the clay tube accommodation - were located. In 1991 there were still six clay tube barracks standing but a generation only four remained after two had collapsed as seen on the right.

About a mile from the Kaufering VII site is the Jewish concentration camp cemetery in Erpfting. Around 2,000 people who died from the inhuman Kaufering system of camps are buried in this cemetery which measures 2,624 square metres. Around 2,000 unknown victims of concentration camp subcamp VII are buried in this cemetery. Five victims are known by name as well as another five victims from the post-war period. A low, solid stone wall surrounds the cemetery; the wrought iron entrance gate bears two Stars of David. A central path leads to the monument; on both sides are areas of mass graves. The monument bears a glass mosaic featuring the Star of David. The inscription on a high memorial stone with a Star of David reads: "Command your ways to the Lord! He will bring forth your righteousness like the light and your judgement like the noonday. 37th Psalm David.  Erected in memory of the victims of the Erpfting concentration camp  in 1950."

American soldiers viewing the bodies of victims of Kaufering on April 30, 1945. This site of the Kaufering XI-Landsberg-Stadtwaldhof subcamp was the last of the eleven camps of the Kaufering subcamp complex, the largest complex of the 169 subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp. The concentration camp subcamp was located on Mühlweg near the Landsberger Stadtwaldhof west of Landsberg. This subcamp was set up in October 1944 and its almost exclusively Jewish prisoners were exposed to extermination through work with completely inadequate nutrition. Also in Landsberg were the two subcamps Kaufering I - Landsberg with the commandant's office and Kaufering VII - Erpfting, which were part of the Kaufering subcamp complex. As seen here, the area of ​​the concentration camp subcamp became agricultural land with all traces of the camp removed. Relics of the subcamp can only be glimpsed under the plant cover, these are the concrete foundations of the former functional barracks such as the kitchen, clothing room and washrooms. The site was finally recognised as a concentration camp subcamp site in 1994 and 1995 by the voluntary working group of school class 9b/10b of the Ignaz-Kögler-Gymnasium, under the guidance and moderation of Barbara Fenner, their history teacher. Horst Köhler recalled this student project in his Berlin speech in 2009 on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of National Socialism. In July 1994, a student in the class wrote to the mayor of Landsberg on his own initiative asking him to erect a memorial stone. The city council found the class proposal too expensive, so an old stone cross was ground down as a memorial stone and erected in April 1995 on the camp's former roll call area. 

Today, fourteen concentration camp cemeteries exist in the Landsberg am Lech region, where the Jewish victims of the concentration camp sub-camp complex are buried. This one is the Concentration Camp Cemetery Hurlach consisting of victims of Kaufering Lager IV which was liberated on April  27, 1945 by the 134th Ordnance Maintenance Battalion of the 12th Armoured Division commanded by Captain John P. Jones. Just previously, the ϟϟ had begun marching the inmates of the Kaufering camps to Dachau, but at Kaufering IV they set fire to the barrack huts, killing hundreds of prisoners. Colonel Edward F. Seiller took control and brought 250 civilians from Landsberg to bury the dead prisoners. These 360 prisoners now lie in a cemetery on the site of the camp's roll-call area, about a mile south of the village of Hurlach. A wall runs around the cemetery with its iron gate bearing two Stars of David. Opposite the entrance is the memorial stone made of Flossenbürger granite with an engraved Star of David shown on the right. The memorial stone and the two flanking stones bear the inscription: 

You went through a sea of ​​suffering 

Erected in 1950 in memory of 360 concentration camp victims 

Now rest in God and eternity 

The cemetery was built over a mass grave with victims from Camp IV of the Landsberg/Kaufering subcamp complex which had been run as a “sick camp” from December 1944. The prisoners suffered an absolutely horrific death, burnt alive within the huts on the orders of camp doctor  ϟϟ-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Max Blancke. Lt. Colonel Edward F. Seiller of the 12th Armoured Division explains described how "[w]hen one of our infantry battalions approached Kaufering Lager No. 4, someone at the camp (presumably the ϟϟ guards), herded the inmates into the barracks, nailed the doors shut, and set the barracks on fire." Sergeant Robert T. Hartwig also recorded that when he and another GI approached Hurlach in their jeep, they "knew [they] were near a camp because of the sickening odour of burning bodies;" Corporal Pete Bramble stated that "the stench was terrible, especially the burning corpses." It was possibly this event which contributed most to writer J.D. Salinger's nervous breakdown during the war. 

In 1948, the Bavarian Office for compensation of material damage for victims of Nazi violence started to build a cemetery which was ceremonially inaugurated in 1950 located on the two mass graves with the 360 dead bodies discovered by American soldiers in and around the camp, which were buried in the cemetery with the forced help of 250 citizens between the ages of 16 and 70 brought together from Landsberg and the surrounding area as shown here. Lieutenant Colonel Seiller told German civilians that they shared the blame for Nazi atrocities: “You may say that you weren’t personally responsible for all this, but remember you stood for the government which perpetrated atrocities like these.” When the American army liberated Camp IV on April 27, 1944, a seven-minute documentary film was made on the orders of Colonel Edward Seiler which can be accessed here.

Remembering conversations with her father about the war, Margaret Salinger said how "[a]s a counter intelligence officer my father was one of the first soldiers to walk into a certain, just liberated, concentration camp. He told me the name, but I no longer remember." She also quotes her father as saying, "[y]ou never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nostrils, no matter how long you live."  Salinger would later use the experience to write about the ner-vous breakdowns of two of his fictional characters, Sergeant X in "For Esme - with Love and Squalor" and ex-sergeant Seymour Glass in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" who would commit suicide three years after the war. Like Salinger, Seymour was a sergeant, served in Europe, and wound up in Germany at the end of the war. In the book Salinger has a psychiatrist say about Seymour that "it was a perfect crime that the Army released him from the hospital" because "there's a very great chance that Seymour may completely lose control of himself" which suggests that Seymour was a patient in a psychiatric ward of an Army hospital as Salinger had been.

Other victims include the prisoners left behind during the evacuation in April 1945 and subsequently died. The subcamp itself had been levelled after liberation.

 Today near the cemetery the large gravel pit shown on the right is located on the majority of the former camp grounds. Despite skeletal finds, gravel mining is allowed to continue and to further cover up the traces of evil that took place at this site.

At the Holzhausen concentration camp cemetery in Holzhausen near Buchloe within the Landsberg am Lech district. It's located not far from the Magnusheim, built between 1910 and 1912, which was a reserve hospital looked after by 38 Dillinger Franciscan Sisters from 1942 onwards and, in the post-war period, a concentration camp hospital for survivors of the Kaufering subcamp complex, and also housed a kibbutz until 1947. The cemetery is located at the foot of the former Magnusheim, operated by the Regens-Wagner-Werke, in the fork between Magnusstraße, directly east of Dammoosweg and south of Singold. From April 29 to July 28, 1945, a total of 526 former concentration camp prisoners from the Kaufering subcamp complex were treated in Magnusheim coming from France, Romania, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Africa, Holland, Austria, Greece, Italy, Poland, Russia, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Luxembourg, Hungary and Germany. In the three months after the liberation, 114 of them died.

On April 29th, the first trucks with concentration camp prisoners rolled up. They were packed in straw. They looked miserable, half-starved and injured. They weighed 50-60 pounds. It was swarming with lice. We bathed day and night. When everyone was finished, we started again... A spoonful of gruel every hour could help you slowly regain your strength. 23 people arrived dead; we were no longer able to find out their names or origins. In the first few days, up to ten people died every day. We often put 3-4 in a coffin because we couldn't provide that many coffins. She was buried in the newly built cemetery on the Singold, which was designated by the American military authorities.

Sister Christhilde, 1985

A total of 94 of these concentration camp victims were buried here in the Holzhausen concentration camp cemetery of whom only 71 are known by name. After that, a few Jewish displaced persons were buried there until 1948. The cemetery itself was designed in 1947 with the participation of the Jewish Committee and was laid out in four rows of ten graves and two rows of seven graves each although the individual graves no longer exist today. In 1954 the cemetery was redesigned and 28 gravestones were laid out along the cemetery wall, of which 26 still exist after two were exhumed and transferred. They mainly refer to displaced persons whose relatives who had these individual gravestones erected.

A couple of miles further east is the Igling–Stoffersberg–Wald concentration camp cemetery shown on the right. As with most, it's hidden way down an unpaved field path without any further signs to help direct potential visitors. This cemetery contains the remains of 490 concentration camp deaths in seven grave fields. The German inscription on the central memorial stone reads: "Through death to life! Concentration camp victims rest here".

 

 On the right is a postcard of the town Buchloe and how sites such as the former Adolf-Hitler-Platz appear today when I visited November 1, 2023. The first reports about the Nazi Party appeared in the 'Buchloer Anzeigeblatt' on October 1, 1922 which reported that '[t]he National Socialist leader Hitler gave a lecture on 'The policy of destruction of the middle class' in which he tried to demonstrate the purposeful work of certain circles.' From the beginning of the 1930s onwards, the Nazis' aggressive agitation saw speakers from Kaufbeuren appear on in the spring of 1930, warning about 'official disaster policy' in the 'Jägerhaus' in Buchloe, at the 'Wagner' in Jengen or in the 'Adler' in Waal. The Kaufbeuren tax officer Mathias Kellner - the first Nazi city councilor in Kaufbeuren since 1927 and later deputy Gauleiter in Swabia from 1933 to 1935, spoke at the event. From the November 1932 to March 1933 national elections, the Nazis increased their share of the town's vote from 18.8 to 43.9 percent which is broadly in line with the national average.