2nd August 1941
Wieda (Südharz)

Wieda (Südharz)

Wieda is a village and a former municipality in the district of Göttingen, in Lower Saxony, Germany. Since 1 November 2016, it is part of the municipality Walkenried. Wieda is on River Wieda, a tributary of Zorge in the southern part of the Harz mountains.

Source: Wikipedia

WIEDA (BUCHENWALD, MITTELBAU, AND SACHSENHAUSEN) (SS- BB III).

The SS- Baubrigade III was based in Wieda, a small village in the Harz Mountains, from May 1944 to April 1945. The location put it in the radius of the Mittelbau concentration camp complex then being established. Hans Kammler, head of Amtsgruppe C (Construction) in the SS- Business Administration Main Office (WVHA), was responsible for establishing this camp.

After the sites for assembling the long- distance A4 (Aggregat 4) rocket (the later V-2) were bombed, Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler, and Heinrich Himmler decided in mid-August 1943 to push for the enlargement, 'with the heavy utilisation' of concentration camp prisoners, of an underground facility in the Harz Mountains.

Himmler appointed Kammler to carry out the construction. The whole project was coordinated under the so- called Mittelwerk GmbH, established in September 1943. Kammler wanted to use the SS construction brigades to build a new rail line so the existing Osterhagen to Nordhausen line could be used exclusively for armaments industry transportation. The Mittelwerk GmbH entrusted management and construction of the rail line to the Deutsche Reichsbahn (German Railways), which in turn revived an older plan to build a 22- kilometer- long (13.7- mile- long) track (called the 'Helmetalbahn') south of the existing line and through the Helme valley. The Berlin company Tiefbau AG Julius Berger undertook the major excavation work. The construction of Helmetalbahn dominated the prisoners’ life until the end of the war. SS- Baubrigade III was assigned the westernmost of the three construction zones, the section from Osterhagen to Mackenrode. The administration for this section was in Mackenrode, and the SS- Baubrigade III established three subcamps along this part of the line: at Osterhagen, Nüxei, and Mackenrode. After the Cologne camp with its remaining 311 prisoners of the SS- BB III was dismantled, and the Wieda camp was set up, the brigade began its work on 16th May 1944. Then 700 prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp joined them on 7th June 1944.

An empty club house of a marksmen’s association formed the center of the camp in Wieda. Around it were other buildings that served as the brigade’s administrative offices, a kitchen, a laundry, and an infirmary, and the grounds were fenced in and outfitted with watchtowers. On average, about 100 prisoners were housed here. Living conditions in this auxiliary camp generally were better than in the sub-camps, especially as Wieda had the central kitchen. In addition, inmates here did not have to do exhausting construction work but, instead, either remained in the camp, built barracks in Niedersachswerfen, worked for private persons, or were set to work in or by the communal administration. Brigade guards lived in barracks built for them close to the camp. Unlike in Cologne, where police and auxiliaries had been recruited, here the SS relied on Luftwaffe soldiers, in any case available because the Luftwaffe was having difficulties with its supply lines. They came under the command of the SS as of 1st September 1944. In January 1945, the SS- Baubrigade III guards included an SS leader, 42 SS noncommissioned officers, and 132 SS men. The integration of the Wieda camp into the system of camps centered on Mittelbau meant death loomed more sharply over the prisoners. A small infirmary was set up in Wieda for minor cases, while other cases were sent to the Buchenwald auxiliary camp Dora or, starting in May 1944, to the Ellrich- Juliushütte camp that became part of Mittelbau and after January 1945 to the Boelcke- Kaserne. After June 1944, all transports to and from the construction brigade went through Mittelbau, without exception. As of July 1944, the guard details came under the control of the 'SS- Standort Mittelbau'; and by October 1944, the construction brigades in the Harz came under the control of what had become the independent Mittelbau concentration camp. The transfer of control in January 1945 to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp was proforma. In the first few weeks, a surprisingly strong interaction developed between the Wieda camp and the surrounding community. Soldiers serving as guards played soccer with the prisoners on the sports field, and it is said that after the game they all marched singing through the village. One female villager reported: 'In the first weeks after the camp was set up, it was like the annual fair. After work, in the evenings, the prisoners sat in the cleared area in front of the marksmen’s tent, and some of them, especially the Gypsies, had instruments, mandolins or guitars, and made music. Many villagers, both young and old, stopped on the main street in front of the barbed- wire fence to listen in. This apparent lack of discipline in the camp resulted in the dismissal, in June 1944, of Karl Völkner as leader of the construction brigade. He had been in command since September 1942 and was now transferred to the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Until 20th July 1944, a certain SS- Oberscharführer Freys, who had been at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, temporarily replaced him. SS- Obersturmführer Fritz Behrens replaced him in turn. Following Behrens’s appointment, conditions in the camp deteriorated, and prisoners were replaced.

On 27th July 1944, groups of prisoners from SS- Baubrigade III were taken away to Dora from the sites where they were working. Two days later, around 1,000 new prisoners from Dora filled the four camps. With this ruthless replacement, relationships that had developed over the course of a year and a half between at least some of the prisoners were broken. Paul Rassinier, who learned about the SS- Baubrigade III while in the Dora infirmary, accurately remarked that 'in less than two months, Wieda became as hard and inhumane as Dora.' Behrens remained the leader of SS- Baubrigade III until just before the end of the war but was replaced in early April 1945 by SS- Untersturmführer Karl Merkle. Some 16 deaths are registered as having occurred up to the time the brigade came under the control of Mittelbau. During the summer, the living conditions deteriorated rapidly, so that by the end of August 1944, 300 prisoners incapable of working were taken away to the Ellrich- Juliushütte camp. The main reason for prisoner exhaustion lay in the heavy construction work demanded of them; the pace of work dictated by Kammler and the Armaments Ministry was also repeatedly increased. According to Georges Pieper, camp elder (Lagerältester) and Kapo in the construction brigade’s office and hence a good source, death rates increased markedly in the winter of 1944–1945: he recalls 74 prisoners dying between 30th December 1944, and 7th April 1945.

In early 1945, the SS- Baubrigade III received Jewish prisoners for the first time: about 200 of them were transferred from Dora, though by the end of March they were transferred to the SS- Baubrigade IV. For the most part the railway line was double-tracked, and many bridges and sections were already finished when work had to stop at the end of March 1945 due to the advancing Allied forces. In a report prepared after the war by the building department of the Reichsbahn office in Kassel, the mass use of prisoners received only scant mention: 'In 1944/45, a new rail line for goods traffic from Osterhagen to Nordhausen was built to relieve the Northeim to Nordhausen line, length about thirty kilometers [18.6 miles.] . . . Several thousand men (prisoners and concentration camp inmates) worked on it. Work stopped at the end of the war due to the American advance.' On 5th April 1945, the prisoners from the Nüxei and Mackenrode subcamps were taken to Wieda, and the next day, so were the prisoners from the Osterhagen subcamp.

On 7th April, 135 prisoners were marched, in a northwesterly direction, through the Harz Mountains. A train took those who were ill, numbering somewhat more than 300. On 9th April 1945, SS- Baubrigade III, now reassembled, left the Wernigerode railroad station in a single train: camp leader Merkle had by now disappeared. The train made it as far as Letzlingen, a village north of Magdeburg at about the same latitude as Berlin. About 900 prisoners were able to flee here during a bombing raid, though during the course of the day, 200 were recaptured and returned to the train by SS guards. The SS then forced these 200 on a march at whose end, on 24th April 1945, 50 prisoners remained to be liberated. Some in this group were able to escape en route, but most had collapsed dead by the wayside or had been shot. A second group of around 600 prisoners who had been recaptured near Letzlingen was marched in a southeasterly direction. Here, too, there were mass escapes and shootings, whereby civilians and men from the German Home Guard (Volkssturm) particularly distinguished themselves. Around 500 prisoners of this group were liberated near Burgstall on 14th April 1945. The ill, who remained behind on the train at Letzlingen, were probably the victims of the infamous massacre at Gardelegen. According to estimates by historian Joachim Neander, of the 1,135 prisoners who left Wieda, only about 700 lived long enough to experience liberation.

Source: muse.jhu.edu (The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume I)

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