Herbert Lange, the first commandant of the Kulmhof death camp. Part two of five. Murder in Soldau. скачать в хорошем качестве

Herbert Lange, the first commandant of the Kulmhof death camp. Part two of five. Murder in Soldau.

In part one we saw how the career of Herbert Lange developed from working for the Gestapo in Stettin, Aachen and Poznań into being the first to use gas chambers to murder the mentally and physically challenged and then to the use of gas vans to murder those in care homes. In the summer of 1940, Herbert Lange came here to Działdowo. This town was outside of the Warthegau and was in former Polish territory now annexed to East Prussia. At a meeting in Poznań, the HSSPF Wilhelm Koppe mentioned to his counterpart from Koenigsburg, Wilhelm Rediess, about what Sonderkommando Lange was doing and it would seem offered to loan the unit to him. Himmler agreed and Ernst Danzog and Otto Rasch sorted everything else out. The deal involved Rediess paying RM10 per victim and Lange was due to get RM2000 to cover his expenses from Rasch. As it happened Rediess failed to pay. Koppe was so annoyed that he tried to get Himmler involved. The town had reverted to its former name of Soldau. The concentration camp at Soldau had initially been set up by Otto Rasch, first of all for Polish POWs and then for potential opponents of the new regime. The Nazis transferred at least 1,600 of what they considered to be the incurably sick here from all over East Prussia to be murdered here by Lange. Including local Polish people, Lange killed 1,808 people at this location. At the time, the population of East Prussia was around 2.4 million people. There were around 6,100 people who were institituionalised in state and religious care homes. The medical records of many of the victims from East Prussia have survived For some reason I cannot explain, the East German authorities kept these records secret but since the reunification of Germany, they are now available. Those records had been seized by T4 authorities in Berlin after complaints had been made by nursing homes in East Prussia. Thanks to these records we can trace the fate of the victims from East Prussia. Henryk Maliczak, one of the Sonderkommando prisoners stated that one day Erich Koch, gauleiter of East Prussia, turned up to examine the graves. Koppe might not have got paid, but for Lange it was a job well done. Koch presented him with an amber box in appreciation and Himmler allowed him and his men to take a holiday – one source says that they went to the Netherlands which had just been occupied – no doubt an opportunity to do some shopping, purchase some of the luxuries that had been missing in Germany since the National Socialists took over. For Lange’s Polish Sonderkommando, the slaves who had to dig the graves, it was to be no holiday. They were returned to Fort VII in Poznań. One year later, Lange in person sought them out and was disappointed with the starving weaklings he found. He ordered that they be given extra food in order to fatten them up. They would be needing all their strength for the next job he had planned for them. This is Iłowo Osada in northern Poland. I would say that this is one of the most interesting villages I have ever visited – although the themes I explored there were related to my particular interests. This was a border crossing from the Russian Empire to the Second German Reich. As the anti Semitism of Russia forced hundreds of thousands of Jews to flee the country, many passed through the border point here. I would guess that just about every Jewish person in America has at least one descendant who passed through here. There were frontier battles here during WW1, later after the town was captured by Nazi Germany on 2 September 1939, a sub camp of the Soldau concentration camp was built here. The main building still survives as you can see here. Only 2km from here, on 4 – 10 July 2022, a team under Dr. Andrzej Ossowski uncovered 17 tons of human ashes in the Białucki forest. This means with certainty that at least 8,000 people were murdered here and their bodies destroyed at this location by Sonderkommando 1005 as from 1 March 1944. This shows how successful the Nazis could be in destroying the evidence of their crimes. The victims here may not have been from Sonderkommando Lange – that we do not know. Not everyone who was sent to be sent to Soldau to be killed was however killed. Sometimes there were very lucky escapes. I came across the story of Anna S. from Allenstein in East Prussia, today Olsztyn in Poland. Anna was born in 1906 and she found herself in the psychiatric hospital in Kortau, located some 2km from the centre of Allenstein. Kortau is today Kortowo in Poland.