[The following is in regards to the state prison population in Nazi Germany towards the end of the war. Faced with advancing Allied armies and fewer resources to house and feed the prisoners, and also for fear of ‘undesirables’ roaming German streets as their ability to police them became more compromised, the Nazis liquidated many in the prison population.]
Not only concentration camp and prison guards but also the police took part in this final orgy of murder. In the autumn of 1944, Himmler had authorized local police commanders that, ‘should the uncertainty at the front continue or even grow’, the ‘danger’ this posed was ‘to be removed’, i.e. prisoners were to be ‘fetched from the goals and liquidated’.
These were not empty words. In Cologne the Gestapo began selecting foreign prisoners for execution in late October 1944, and the killings continued until the beginning of March 1945. In the last weeks of the war, people whose court cases were still pending were executed. Altogether hundreds of prisoners were killed, hanged in the courtyard of the Cologne Gestapo headquarters.
An assembly-line routine was established: the local Gestapo would prepare a list of prisoners on a Wednesday evening, the list would be confirmed by the Gestapo command by Thursday evening, and on Friday morning the listed prisoners would be executed one by one, after which the corpses were taken away by the city’s refuse service to be dumped in a mass grave in Cologne’s Western Cemetery. The killings continued until the Americans reached the city, and the last of the planned mass executions, scheduled to take place on 4 March, was called off only because of the heavy bombing that had taken place the night before.
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “Murder and Mayhem.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 53-4. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:**
Quoted in Gabriele Lotfi, KZ der Gestapo, Arbeitserziehungslager im Dritten Reich (Stuttgart and Munich, 2000), pp. 292-293.
Further Reading:
No comments, yet...