Posted on 04/27/2015 4:11:26 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Nazi concentration sub-camps Landsberg, Kaufering liberated 70 years ago today (Apr 27 1945)
(Friday, April 27, 1945; part of The Holocaust during World War II) — The remaining 3,000 inmates, including 1,400 women, at the Nazi concentration camp Landsberg, a sub-camp of the Dachau concentration camp located in southwest Bavaria, Germany, about 65 kilometers west of Munich, was liberated today by the 12th Armored Division of the United States Army. As U.S. Army troops neared today, the SS officer in charge ordered that 4,000 prisoners be destroyed. Windows and doors of their huts were nailed shut. The buildings were then doused with gasoline and set afire.
Prisoners, who were naked or nearly so, were burned to death, while some managed to crawl out of the buildings before dying.
The Kaufering IV sub-camp of Dachau was also liberated today by the 12th Armored Division of the US Seventh Army with help from soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division, who arrived on April 28, 1945.
Kaufering IV was one of 11 camps, all named Kaufering and numbered I through XI, which were located near Landsberg am Lech, not far from the city of Munich.
All Kaufering sub-camps were set up to specifically build three underground factories (Allied bombing raids made it necessary for them to be underground) for a project called Ringeltaube (wood pigeon), which planned to be the location in which the German jet fighter plane, Messerschmitt Me 262, was to be built.
In the last days of war, in April 1945, the Kaufering camps were evacuated and around 15,000 prisoners were sent up to the main Dachau camp. Approximately 14,500 prisoners in the eleven Kaufering camps died of hunger, cold weather, overwork, and typhus.
A dramatization of the discovery and liberation of the sub-camps was presented in Episode 9: “Why We Fight” of the Band of Brothers mini-series.
Video:
Throughout the last days of the Third Reich, it ruthlessly forced its desperate conscripts by threat of summary execution into service to slow the overwhelming Soviet army.
Borrowing a page from Gen. Ferdinand Schoerner‘s no-mercy demonstrative hangings of any “straggler” found behind front lines without orders, Goebbels issued a radio proclamation to the trapped troops [of Berlin]: “Any man found not doing his duty will be hanged from a lamp post after a summary judgment. Moreover, placards will be attached to the corpses stating: ‘I have been hanged here because I am too cowardly to defend the capital of the Reich. I have been hanged because I did not believe in the Fuhrer. I am a deserter and for this reason I shall not see this turning point in history.
SS members, aware that they would be in for the worst of it after the war (and that their mandatory blood-type tattoos would make them easy to identify) were the ones sufficiently motivated to impose this policy. One German in the city at the time recalled the horror of seeing boys who were found hiding were hanged as traitors by the SS as a warning that, ‘he who was not brave enough to fight had to die.’ When trees were not available, people were strung up on lamp posts. They were hanging everywhere, military and civilian, men and women, ordinary citizens who had been executed by a small group of fanatics.
Video from the battle for Berlin:
Photo: On April 27, 1945, three days before the end, and four days before his death, Martin Bormann writes a furious note attacking Heinrich Himmler for S.S. inactivity and his "treachery": one of the documents found (David Irving collection)
The Colonel John Bradin (US Army) collection: 22 pages of documents found on Bormann's desk in the Berlin bunker in July 1945
I’ll look to see what I can find. But until now, nothing in the Pacific has come close to matching the protracted meat grinder battles of Cassino, Normandy, the Siegfried Line and the Ardennes. The disparity of casualties does not surprise me.
I was thinking of moving to Detroit and building cars. Great city and the kind of place I want my grandkids to grow up in.
:-)
Good luck with that. What could go wrong?
Come to think of it the winters in Detroit are harsh, maybe move to the Gulf Coast instead. I hear Texas City, Tx has a booming waterfront with plenty of work.
Buy land around the DC Beltway. Eventually they’re have all the money.
Ruhl came from a distinguished family. His father killed his mother and then committed suicide. His brother did hard time for bank robbery. Ruhl himself was out on parole for bank robbery.
Surprised the feds gassed him in a state institution. Now they use their own at Terre Haute, when it suits them.
I’ve seen that telegram somewhere before. Or the text of it anyways.
I’m going to learn how to market vacuum tubes. There should be a huge growth in the American electronic industry, and vacuum tubes is the way to go. Another guy in my outfit is talking about building beach front condos in Biloxi Mississippi.
The Reichsbahn workers knew, and everyone in Germany knew someone who worked for the Reichsbahn. I'm convinced the average German knew enough, but as long as he didn't have to walk through the camp himself, he could bury it in the back of his mind in the midst of a terrible war.
The average German can't do that any more.
The murders happened near Laramie and he was tried in federal court in Cheyenne. I suppose they didn’t think he was worth shipping back East to execute.
That's a relatively recent development. Up until the 1960s or 70s, when executions were more common, federal convicts were executed in the state prison of the state where they were convicted, using whatever method of execution that state used. So someone sentenced to death in a federal court in California died in San Quentin's gas chamber, while someone sentenced to death in federal court in New York died in Sing Sing's electric chair.
My dad took the vacuum tubes to be tested in one of those at Graham Electronics in the basement of Glendale Shopping Center. Behind the counter at Graham were racks containing bins with every type of vacuum tube.
That memory was the inspiration for my post.
My older brother lived at Graham Electronics, buying whatever he needed that could not be cannibalized from dad’s old electronic junk in the basement. He built radios from scratch at age 14, and built a music synthesizer from component parts when he was 21.
That was back in the day TV repairmen made house calls. A do-it-yourselfer could save a few bucks by testing his own tubes and replacing the culprit himself.
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