"I will never forget what I saw there:" The Hell of Kaufering

He has not yet been able to go in full detail about what he saw, but he offered me some insight as to how he will always feel. In broken up words softly crying, Technical Sergeant Edward Geiser said these words in relation to what he saw on this day 70 years ago, “I will never forget what I saw there.”

What Mr. Geiser is referring to is the day that his unit, the 63rd Infantry Division, liberated the Kaufering concentration camp.

Beginnings
This camp was built as one of 123 sub camp systems of the Dachau concentration camp. This camp consisted of 11 camp systems from I-XI. This camp located around Landsberg was built to house facilities and factories to build and develop secret German weapons such as the V-1 and V-2 rockets, and the Me-262, and other secret weapons.

This set of camps was built in response to intense Allied bombings of Germany’s industrial capabilities, and was used to construct underground facilities where they would use a large number of conscripted labor from the camps to work on these secret weapons.

Many other camps such as Kaufering were built to accommodate for similar purposes.
Kaufering wasn’t the only major set of these camps in Bavaria. Another set of camps, Muhldorf, was also set up as a sub camp of Dachau.

On June 18, 1944 the first shipment of 1,000 inmates, sent from Auschwitz, arrived at the camp. These inmates were scheduled to start the work on a project, whose goal was to build the underground facilities. This project was called Ringeltaube and was part of Operation Todt

Living Conditions
To accommodate for the increasing number of prisoners and forced laborers, places for them to reside in had to be constructed. It ended up not being the duty for the SS but for OT, as well as providing them food and medical care for the inmates. OT immediately got to work to make places for the inmates to reside in quickly. They made the inmates construct “Sperrhozzelte” (plywood tents) and dugouts.

These dugouts were designed in this fashion:
“For the dugouts (Erdbarrake) a pit had to be dug out, over which a tent like roof was erected ad covered with soil and grass as camoflage. The prisoners were lying along the sides of the so called “Erdbarrake” slightly above the floor shelf like bunks. The flooring were wooden planks which was covered with straw. Each hut was provided with a stove.”

These kinds of conditions, were very inadequate considering the bad weather conditions near the Alps. Leaky roofs were common, and the Erdbarrake was infested with vermin.

Many workers were put to hard physical work no matter what the conditions of the weather and were given inadequate clothes for these conditions along with the uncomfortable wooden clogs. On top of hard labor with inadequate clothing, the prisoners were given insufficient food. Anyone who was sick was given even less food since they couldn’t do any work. They also had to deal with tyhpus and typhiod fever which began to quickly spread among the camp.

In a report by OT in December 1944, it said, “Over the past, inmates have been abused to such an extent, that as of today a total of 17,600 prisoners have to be provided for and fed, but only 8,319 of them are able to work.”

When the typhus epidemic grew worse among the camps, some of the Kaufering camps had to be put under quarantine.
When the situation in one of the camps, Kaufering IV, was declared intolerable, it was designated as a “Sterbelager” (death camp). Most of the sick inmates with typhus were transferred to this sub camp. Complaints arose when patients were being placed in mud huts and that a proposed sick bay barrack was not possible, along with how slow OT was to deliver drugs for the sick inmates, and the drugs that were delivered were insufficient.

In March of 1945, the camps last camp commander (Lagerfuhrer) of Kaufering IV, Johann Baptist Eichelsdorf, made a final critical report. During that month 2000 sick prisoners were accomodated in Kaufering IV. Their ailments ranged from edema, scabies, typhus, and TB. But this report was largely ignored.

Medical Care in the Camp
Lots of the medical staff of the camp were inmates themselves and the equipment they had was insufficient and inadequate and not enough to care for the growing number of sick inmates. For 2100 sick inmates there were 9 inmate doctors, 41 male nurses, 49 other helpers. According to a Greek inmate doctor’s memoirs, his duty was restricted to only writing death certificates and giving numbers and names to the dead.

The End of a Living Hell
Towards the end of the war, a liquidation of the camp was planned by Chief of the RSHA Kaltenbrunner under the code name of “Wolke A-I.” In an interrogation of the state secretary of Bavaria, Brutus Gerdes, he stated that the Nazi Gauleiter of Munich and Upper Bavaria received orders from Kaltenbrunner to prepare a liquidation of the camp in April 1945. The plan of liquidation, was to use the Luftwaffe to bomb the camps with the inmates still within the camps. However Gerdes didn’t go along with the plan basing it on the lack of petrol and bombs for the plaes and bad weather. Then Kaltenbrunner ordered the inmates to be evacuated to Dachau. During the beginning to the middle of April inmates were evacuated by marching, or by train towards the main camp of Dachau.

The camp doctor Blanke gave the order to begin torching the huts, and soon afterword he committed suicide. Some of the inmates were left inside the huts, these huts were then burned and when the US army discovered the camps they found smoldering ruins of the huts along with charred bones of the inmates trapped inside.

In late April the 63rd Infantry Division, sent a battalion to search for these camps and on April 27, 1945 that battalion would liberate 7 of the Kaufering camps. Mr. Geiser was part of that battalion. Also on April 27, 1945, Kaufering IV was liberated by the 12th US Armored Division.
War Crimes Trials
During the Dachau War Crimes Process, 40 SS members who were stationed at Kaufering were accused and sentenced to death by hanging in Landsberg. During other American post war trials, may other members of the SS guards were sentenced to long sentences in prison. One of the commandants, Auimeier, was sent to Poland to answer for crimes committed while at Auschwitz. Another Kaufering commandant, Heinrich Foster managed to evade justice. In October 1955 he died during a bicycle accident.

In 2000, the 63rd Infantry Division was officially recognized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and US Army’s Center of Military History as a liberating unit

During the camp’s existence, the camp priest, Jules Jost, recorded around over 28,000 inmates. By the time the camp was liberated, approximately 14,500 of these inmates would be murdered or die from illness. In a war criminal commission, it was determined that the Kaufering subcamps were the worst ones in Germany in its terms of inhumanity, hunger, and the illness.
http://dachaukz.blogspot.com/2011/11/prologue-dachau-kz-satellite-camp.html
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauLiberation/KauferingIVLiberation.html
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10006171-title=KAUFERING-date=May
http://www.buergervereinigung-landsberg.org/english/historicalfacts/history.htm
http://www.buergervereinigung-landsberg.org/english/historicalfacts/Geschichtskarte.pdf
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/gallery.php?ModuleId=10006171&MediaType=PH

Picture of Kaufering IV commandant Johann Baptist EIchelsdorfer among bodies of inmates at the site of Kaufering IV

 

for most of us, unimaginable.....but what this does show us, is what ''we'', humans, are!....not animals, no.....animals don't set up death factories...and they were factories.....just like an auto factory, only producing death, efficiently and fast....and it involved hundreds of humans to produce death....when the world was at war, murder, rape, robbery etc was out in the open...and it was really sanctioned and consented to by many more than we would like to believe......

 

sorry to ask an unpopular question but this was clearly a forced labor camp, and conditions were such that i wouldn't even bother to compare it with others. however, this was not a purposed extermination camp like auschwitz. am i correct?

 

It was not a purposed extermination camp. However when the conditions were getting so bad, such as with the diseases such as typhus spreading and the high number of people dying, one could name it a "death camp," but more of a technical term.

 

forced labor ...just like the V2 Mittlewerk....not the famous death factories, but conditions were inhuman just as well......inhuman being the key term in this and my above post....mac, I'd say that was a good question....

 

I agree. Mac that was a good question.

 

thanks, gents.

 

Info on Eichelsdorfer. It is translated from German, and some of the sentences are just a little incoherent after being translated to English. But most of it is easy to understand

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Baptist_Eichelsd%25C3%25B6rfer&prev=search