Hirzenhain. Forced labour, a mass shooting and remembrance

In the middle of the Second World War, Hirzenhain, a small village at the foot of the Vogelsberg hill in Hessen, had just 600 inhabitants. Thanks to its location in a narrow valley, Hirzenhain was relatively well protected against air raids. This hilly landscape was home to the Breuer-Werke factories, which were owned by Buderus AG, an armament production company. During the war, these factories employed forced labourers, as did local farmers. The Breuer-Werke began producing cast iron parts for the VI Tiger armoured battle vehicles. The plant also produced petrol engines for the Wehrmacht, and was therefore classified as a second-highest priority war production operation. From 1943 onwards, production was increased, resulting in a need for more workers. On 26 March 1945, the treatment of the forced labourers became even more brutal. An SS unit shot 87 women and men, many of whom came from Poland. 

There were three labour camps in Hirzenhain: a camp for convicted prisoners, which was part of the Rodgau-Dieburg prison complex, the labour education camp run by the Gestapo, and a forced labour camp that was directly owned by the Breuer-Werke, which held mainly civilian labourers from Poland and the USSR.

 

The Hirzenhain satellite camp belonging to the Rodgau-Dieburg prison complex
 

The prisoners’ camp in Hirzenhain was created specifically for female Polish prisoners and was run by the Darmstadt prosecution services as a satellite of the prison in Dieburg (Rodgau).[1] The decision to build the camp was made in November 1942; construction was completed in March 1943. Conditions in the camp were harsh. In the makeshift barracks, the Polish women suffered from the extreme cold and had only limited sanitation facilities and an inadequate drinking water supply. In the Breuer factories, they performed hard labour seven days a week, working in shifts.[2]

Transport lists from Ciechanów (German: Zichenau in the Reichsgau of East Prussia) that have been preserved record female prisoners being deported directly to Hirzenhain from the town.[3] Polish women were also deported to Hirzenhain from prison camps in the Warthegau region, including Wronki. They lived under guard in isolated barracks. Among the many prisoners in Hirzenhain was 38-year-old Władysława H., who was sentenced by the German court in Ciechanów to one year and nine months’ imprisonment. She was not released when her term came to an end in August 1943; instead, she was transferred to the Gestapo, who sent her to the Ravensbrück concentration camp (Fig. 1 . ).[4] 28-year-old Anna G. shared the same fate. A German court in Ciechanów in occupied Poland sentenced her to nine months’ imprisonment in Hirzenhain for “war economy crimes”. On 9 September 1943, the camp commanders transferred her to the Gestapo in Darmstadt, who also deported her to the concentration camp in Ravensbrück (Fig. 2 . ). Anna survived the camp, and with the support of the Swedish Red Cross was taken to Sweden after the end of the war to convalesce.[5]

After serving their terms, the women were taken to the police prison in Darmstadt, from where they were transferred to the Buchenwald or Ravensbrück concentration camps by order of the Reich Security Head Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt; RSHA). Some were able to escape the concentration camp by remaining in Hirzenhain at the request of the Breuer-Werke “in the interest of armaments production”, because they had conducted their work “well and with ease”.[6] The company also requested that Anna G. and Władysława H. remain, but the application was made too late, since by that time, the two women were already in Ravensbrück. In December 1943, the RSHA rejected a submission for the women to be returned to Hirzenhain from Ravensbrück, although it did allow for the women prisoners who had not yet been transferred to the concentration camp to remain in Hirzenhain for eight weeks longer.[7] The company justified its request by saying that taking these “trained labourers” away would have a highly negative impact on tank production, which would have disastrous military consequences. At the end of March 1944, the company’s directors even asked for highly productive women to be released as prisoners and granted civilian status. As civilian workers, they would have received a wage and been able to provide support for their children back home.[8] However, their request was denied, since according to the RSHA decree of 11 March 1943 (II A 2 Nr. 100/43–176), after serving their time in prison, the women were to spend at least six months in “protective custody” and interned in a concentration camp.

Not all the female Polish prisoners were deported to Ravensbrück from Hirzenhain. Some of them succeeded in avoiding being sent to the concentration camp and remained in Hirzenhain after serving their sentence. Maria F., for example, managed to evade the concentration camp. She had been found guilty of anti-German sentiment in Chojnice and was sent by a German special court to a penal camp in Fordon (a district of Bydgoszcz). From there, she was transferred to Hirzenhain.[9] Her poetry album from Hirzenhain, in which her fellow camp inmates wrote entries in 1944/45 (Fig. 3–6 . ), has been preserved. They included Janina Ch., who was a year younger than Maria. She came from Poznań, where she had been arrested in 1940 for helping English prisoners of war. Like Maria, Janina worked in the Breuer engine factory until the end of the war. On 4 April 1945, at the orders of the US authorities in Germany, she was sent to a Displaced Persons (DP) Camp in Hanau, and shortly afterwards, to a DP camp in Gießen.[10] Wacława M. from the Poznań region also wrote an entry in the album. The young married woman was arrested together with her father when she was just 22, and incarcerated in Konin, Wronki, Fordon, Braunau and Hirzenhain. After liberation, she was taken to the DP camp in Gießen, from where she was later repatriated to Poland.[11]

Despite running to just a few words, the album entries give us an idea of just how much the young women prisoners suffered. They write about moments of sadness, of shared periods of suffering and of their hopes of liberation and a quick end to the war. The entries also clearly show that the Polish women stuck together and supported each other, mainly with words of comfort. The number of fellow sufferers was by no means small. In October 1944, there were 319 female Polish prisoners in the Hirzenhain camp.[12]

The women were placed under guard in their living spaces and at their place of work in the Breuer armaments factory. One of the guards helped them as far as he could. In particular, he would turn a blind eye when they failed to fulfil their daily quotas, and gave them larger bread rations. We know this from the report given subsequently by the prisoner Edmunda Z., who at 20 had been found guilty in Gniezno in the Warthegau region for helping prisoners of war.[13] 

 

Labour education camp
 

The labour education camp (Arbeitserziehungslager; AEL), which fell within the remit not of the judicial system but the secret police, was structured differently. It was most likely established in order to clear away the rubble following air attacks on the production sites, when the need for labour in this small community increased further and armaments production had to be continued at all costs.[14] According to another theory, the AEL was set up following air raids on the police prison in Frankfurt/Main. The prison needed to be moved to a safe location.[15] In one contemporary witness report, however, mention is made of the restructuring of the camp run by the judicial system into an AEL.[16]

The camp is generally referred to as “AEL”, although officially, it was run as an “extended women’s prison” with a capacity of 250–300 prisoners. This police prison for women also contained around a dozen male prisoners, who were put to work on various construction projects. The AEL was overseen by around 30 guards. Some of the women who worked as guards were violent towards the prisoners. The camp fell within the remit of the Security Police in Wiesbaden and the Gestapo in Frankfurt. Decisions about who should be imprisoned or released were made in Frankfurt. The AEL was kept separate from the local population, and entry was forbidden. The majority of the prisoners were women from Poland and eastern Europe, although German women who had run foul of the Gestapo were also incarcerated there. In the AEL, prison gear was worn, sometimes with an AEL badge. Inmates worked at the Breuer factory in columns monitored by guards. The average length of prison time spent in the AEL was 56 days, although even after their term expired, the women remained in the camp and continued to work at the Breuer-Werke as trained labourers.

 

Forced labour camp
 

As well as the penal and police camp, there was a civilian camp in Hirzenhain for foreign women and men, which was established in 1942 in barracks built on the factory grounds. In March 1944, the camp contained 62 Polish civilians. A large proportion of the people living in the camp were labourers from eastern Europe (“Ostarbeiter”) – 564 in January 1945.[17] One of the prisoners in the camp was 23-year-old Antoni K., who gave a statement about the crimes in Hirzenhain before the Polish investigation authorities in 1983. He said that the civilian camp was located right next door to the penal camp. He often saw how the Polish prisoners in the camp would be forced to muster for long periods of time and in all weathers.[18] The people living in the civilian camp were permitted to move about freely, as the photographs that have been preserved of Polish forced labourers show (Fig. 7–11 . ).

The three camps described here were not linked as institutions, but they were located close to each other (Fig. 12 . ). However, together, they provided workers for the Breuer factory, which employed around 1,100 foreign forced labourers. The people living in the camp sometimes watched what the others were doing, but they were not allowed to speak to each other. It was only in the production halls that they were able to pass by each other and pass on secret letters asking for help. 

 

Mass shooting
 

During the first half of March 1945, the order came from Wiesbaden to disband the AEL, since the entire SS personnel from the city, the main quarter of which was subject to frequent bombing raids, was to be moved to Hirzenhain.[19] The buildings occupied by the AEL were to be used to house the SS men. Prisoners who had been found guilty of low-level crimes were to be released, while the others were to be taken to Nonnenrod estate near Fulda. At this point in time, the AEL in Hirzenhain contained around 300 female prisoners. About 30 women had already been there for some time, since an application had been made to send them to protective custody – in other words, to a concentration camp. These women remained imprisoned in Hirzenhain until a decision was made by the RSHA in Berlin regarding their “protective custody”. Following the order to disband the camp, most of the female prisoners were in fact released. Around 50 women remained in the camp. Some of them were waiting either to be deported to a concentration camp, while others were accused of politically motivated crimes, theft or sabotage. A unit of around 12 SS officers led by Emil Fritsch had already arrived in the AEL in mid-March. The unit consisted of mainly young people from the occupied eastern regions of the Reich, who were classified as ethnic Germans and who often spoke almost no German at all. 

The liquidation of the camp was slowed down by the arrival of around 50 women who were unexpectedly brought to Hirzenhain from the Gestapo prison in Klapperfeldstrasse in Frankfurt, which had been closed down. The names of these women are given in a rationing book. They wore civilian clothes and brought small bundles of possessions with them. There were German citizens among them. Their train was guarded by police officials with dogs. Since the train route from Hirzenhain had been damaged, the women were taken to the AEL in the town during the early morning of 24 March. At the station, five women managed to escape by mingling among the forced labourers, who were marching towards the armaments factory in a column. The remaining 49 women, whose number is noted in the case files, were forced to remain standing in the muster ground in the rain and sun for two days. They were only allowed to go indoors at night, where they were housed in a temporary laundry building in the local water tower. The women were completely exhausted, and one of them died. The original plan had been for them to leave Hirzenhain the following day, and to be transferred on foot to the labour office in Büdingen, which was responsible for assigning them to civilian workplaces following their release from prison. At this point in time, the head of the Security Police and the “Rhine Westmark” Security Service in Wiesbaden, Hans Trummler, ordered the entire camp to be cleared immediately. He also gave the order for his private wooden lodge to be built near the AEL. The SS personnel, around 50 in total, arrived in Hirzenhain on 24 March, at the same time as the train carrying the women. Even amongst his own staff, Trummler was regarded as being “brutal”. Shortly after his arrival, he publicly beat several Poles who were holding white flags in their hands and waiting for the American liberators to arrive.

On Saturday and Sunday, 24 and 25 March, the SS and AEL functionaries held long discussions about the unexpected arrival of the women in the camp. Following these meetings, Trummler ordered the women to be shot. The precise circumstances under which this decision was reached still remain unknown today. It appeared that there were too many female prisoners remaining in the camp to be evacuated to another prison, and since they were allegedly guilty of severe crimes, there was no question that they could be released. Many of them were ill and were in no condition to leave. From the spring of 1944 onwards, it was common practice to dissolve prisons and camps in the face of the ever-encroaching front in the occupied eastern regions. On 20 July 1944, on behalf of the Government General, the commander of the Security Police and the Security Service issued an order for those prisoners to be killed who could not be removed, largely due to the rapidly approaching Soviet front. Prisoners accused of minor crimes were released, while those who were ill and unable to march were murdered. In Hirzenhain, the SS operated according to a similar logic, sending some prisoners to Nonnenrod near Fulda, while the rest, who were either in poor health or who posed a political threat, were shot en masse. 

In the early morning of 26 March, just three days before the Americans arrived, and shortly before Easter, the SS in Hirzenhain murdered 87 people – 76 women and eleven men – mainly by shooting them in the neck. The victims were rudely awakened in the night and taken to a ditch that had been dug at the edge of the forest. Some of them were wearing their grey prisoner’s uniform, while others were in civilian clothes. Some of the women were completely naked. In addition to the 49 women who had arrived on the train from Frankfurt, young women were also “selected” who had already been incarcerated for a long time in the AEL prison. They included two Russian doctors and an engineer. When the bodies were later exhumed, some witnesses recognised them.

The execution was carried out by Trummler’s subordinates and the SS commander Emil Fritsch, who had arrived ten days previously. Prior to the execution, two young AEL prisoners were forced to dig a large ditch, under supervision by the SS, into which they themselves were later pushed. Several other prisoners from the construction brigade, one of whom is likely to have been French, were also killed. Two residents of Hirzenhain witnessed the ditch being dug. They also heard the shots. According to the report on the incident, which was compiled after the war ended, the forced labourers from the civilian camp were locked in their camp for three days, and were able to imagine what was happening outside (Fig. 13 . ). On the same day of the massacre, the camp inventory and the remaining women prisoners were taken away in the direction of Fulda, together with the guards. At their destination in Nonnenrod, they, too, were to be killed. However, the officer responsible for carrying out the order refused to do so, and the prisoners were finally either released or sent on to the concentration camp in Buchenwald. The SS left Hirzenhain on 28 March 1945.

It is not known exactly how many of the victims came from Poland. However, on the basis of the Frankfurt list, it is possible to reconstruct the life stories of some of the women with Polish-sounding names. Two of the women on the transport list were named as Anna Fułka and Walentyna Gruza. It’s worth taking a closer look at their life stories. Anna Fułka (possibly Anna Fułek), born on 29 April 1929 in Warsaw, was incarcerated in Hanau from February 1944 to 1 March 1945 and was taken from there to the Gestapo prison in Frankfurt.[20] Walentyna Gruza, born on 24 July 1924 in Czechowice, was employed at the Kalle & Co. chemicals plant in Wiesbaden from September 1944 and lived in the “Landgrabenlager” camp[21] in Wiesbaden/Biebrich. On 21 February 1945, she was imprisoned in Frankfurt.[22] The two Polish women arrived in Frankfurt prison just a few weeks before they were taken to Hirzenhain. After arriving in Hirzenhain, they disappeared without trace. It is therefore highly likely that they were shot. 

 

Criminal prosecution
 

Immediately after the discovery of the mass grave in April 1945, American functionaries began the first investigation into the events in Hirzenhain, and questioned the inhabitants of the town. In August 1946, the family of the Luxembourg citizen Emilie Schmitz reported her death to Dr. Hans Niedner, the attorney in Duisburg, who then also began an investigation into what had happened. The family had already had contact with the attorney during the war, since he was a customer at the family’s shop in Luxembourg. Emilie’s sister contacted him and asked him to take on the case. In July 1947, in the wake of a decree issued by the Allied Control Council, Dr. Niedner filed charges against at least nine SS and Gestapo men from Wiesbaden and Hirzenhain for crimes against humanity. The charges related to the murder of inmates from the AEL prison, in particular Emilie, whose identity was confirmed when her remains were exhumed. In 1948, a preliminary investigation was begun.

Following the questioning of numerous witnesses, the suspects were named as Emil Fritsch and his SS unit. It became clear that the crime was not committed by AEL functionaries, but by a special unit that was subordinate to the headquarters in Wiesbaden. Fritsch had joined the SS in 1935 and was by no means averse to the use of violence, since he had served in the Neue Bremm Gestapo camp in Saarbrücken in 1944, among other places. In February 1949, the search began for Fritsch, who had settled in Berlin without his former SS membership having been registered with the authorities.

On 22 September 1949, he was arrested and taken to the remand prison in Berlin-Moabit. During his first hearing in September 1949, he adamantly denied any wrongdoing, claiming that he had only recently heard about the massacre. After his transfer to Gießen in April 1950, where the investigations were being conducted, he repeated that he “was in no manner involved in the shooting of concentration camp prisoners in Hirzenhain”. He claimed to have spent just four days in Hirzenhain and that he had been in poor health. He said that he had also never led an SS unit. He placed the blame for the murders on the camp personnel and the “Russian members of the guards unit”. 

His denials were not believed, however. On 30 September 1950, the state prosecution service filed charges against Fritsch. It was not until the criminal trial that he finally changed his statement and admitted that he had received the order to execute the prisoners from Trummler’s assistant. At the same time, however, he claimed that he had refused to carry out the shootings. A short time later, he gave another version of events, claiming that when he arrived at the place of execution, the shootings had already begun. However, witnesses stated that Fritsch had by no means kept the massacre secret among his colleagues; rather, he had even boasted about it, and Trummler had given him a bottle of schnapps as a reward for his good work.

During the trial, Fritsch pleaded that he was merely carrying out an order issued by a superior. However, this line of argument was rejected by the jury court in Gießen: “He was thus aware that in complying with the order, he was committing a crime. [...] the defendant revealed a high degree of reprehensible convictions.” Fritsch was found guilty of the execution and was sentenced to lifelong imprisonment. The judgement of 1 March 1951 stated that Emil Fritsch had “intentionally and cruelly killed 87 people in collusion with others.” In April 1951, the lawyer acting in his defence submitted a request for the judgement to be rescinded, on the grounds that “[The] defendant must be granted clemency due to the necessity to act on an order and in light of the prevailing conditions that presented a risk to his life and limb.” On 5 July 1951, the German Federal Court of Justice rejected the appeal. On 8 April 1952, Fritsch submitted a statement claiming that the command to carry out the shootings had come from the head of the camp – a claim that was not corroborated by witnesses. 

Other members of the SS were also accused of being accessories to the murders. The shots that were fired during the execution were allegedly fired by an SS man who was in a state of inebriation and who was barely able to stand. This circumstance, which was confirmed by the witnesses questioned, meant that the investigation proceedings against him (2 Ks 1/53) were brought to a close. Due to his state of inebriation, it was not possible to formally accuse him of attempted murder, but only of the crime of “complete drunkenness”, which had already lapsed after five years. Thus, during the post-war period, Fritsch was the only perpetrator to be charged and punished for the massacre in Hirzenhain (Fig. 14–18 . ). His SS superiors succeeded in evading prosecution for the murders in Hirzenhain. On 22 October 1948, in Landsberg am Lech, the head of the SS in Wiesbaden, Hans Trummler, was executed for the murder of US pilots.

The massacre at Hirzenhain also came to the attention of the Polish legal authorities after the end of the war. In December 1947, the sister of the murdered Luxembourg citizen, Emilie Schmitz, sent a list of the Frankfurt prisoners to the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and requested that further investigations be conducted due to the large number of Polish names it contained. The reason for doing so, she said, was to “remove our heroes from enemy territory and to bury them in their homeland, for whose liberation they had sacrificed their lives.” In April 1948, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Warsaw began to search for further information. In 1951, the Luxembourg mission in Moscow sent a copy of an article from a Luxembourg newspaper about the Hirzenhain massacre to the Polish embassy. In the years that followed, however, no further investigations were conducted in Poland. It was only several decades later that the case was taken up again by the judiciary there. The decision to do so was made after three photographs were received by the district commission for the pursuit of National Socialist crimes in Katowice. The images were of the commemorative ceremony for the victims in October 1945, and had been sent by Antoni K., who was interned in the forced labour camp of the Breuer-Werke production plants at the time of the massacre. In 1983, he was questioned by the state prosecution service and gave details about the “Hirzenhain concentration camp”, the massacre, and the exhumation of the bodies. In order to obtain more information about the crime, calls for witnesses to the crime to come forward were issued on the radio. As a result, women who had worked as forced labourers in Hirzenhain contacted the authorities, although they had only heard about the massacre through conversations later on in the DP camps. Above all, however, the witnesses questioned had no doubt that all of the victims were Polish women, and the Polish judiciary took this to be the truth. However, enquiry was brought to a halt when it became clear that the state prosecution service in Gießen had already pursued investigations into the crime during the 1950s.[23]

 

Commemoration
 

By the time the US Army reached Hirzenhain on 30 March 1945, the AEL prison had already been liquidated. Rumours about a mass grave quickly spread throughout the town, causing some of the residents to look into the matter. At first, no-one felt obliged to dig up the bodies, since it was assumed that the mass grave was situated outside of the town’s official boundaries, in the Steinberg district. However, at the end of May, the US authorities ordered the bodies to be exhumed and to be taken initially to the cemetery in coffins. The exhumation work was conducted by the German inhabitants of the town, supervised by Polish servicemen (Fig. 19–21 . ). At that time, the Polish forced labourers who had been liberated thought that only fellow Poles had been murdered.[24] 

At the beginning of October 1945, a memorial to the murdered prisoners was unveiled in the cemetery in Hirzenhain. It took the form of a cross and had commemorative panels in Polish, German, French and English. The English inscription read: 

“Here rest in peace Those who during their lives have gone through the Pains of Concentration Camps. They perished at the hands of their oppressors on April 3 1945. They were denied the privilege of seeing the Evening Star of Freedom... Glory to their memory! Polish soldiers of the ‘Warsaw’ Camp in Hirzenhain, 1945”. 

Directly after the unveiling of the memorial, a group of people, most of whom were probably Polish, gathered to remember the victims. Photographs were taken of the ceremony. In the “Gniezno” DP camp in Niederlahnstein, Jan F., one of the participants, gave Antoni K., the former prisoner mentioned above, the three photographs shown here (Fig. 22–24 . ).

The victims of the massacre found their final resting place in the war victims’ cemetery in Kloster Arnsburg monastery, which was created there in 1959/1960 in accordance with the war graves law. The purpose of the cemetery was to provide a place where individual and mass victims of the war from three districts in Hesse could be laid to rest in dignity. Contrary to the standard practice, war victims of different nationalities were interred next to each other. In 1959, the graves at Hirzenhain were transferred to Kloster Arnsburg. The six allegedly male victims were the subject of particular interest, since rumours were circulating among the residents of Hirzenhain that they were the bodies of SS men who had been shot after refusing to carry out the execution. It was not until the court files from 1951 were examined that it became possible to clarify what had really happened and to clearly identify the bodies as being those of former camp prisoners.

In 1960, the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (German War Graves Commission) published a special brochure, “Kriegsopferfriedhof Kloster Arnsburg in Oberhessen” (“The War Victims’ Cemetery at Arnsburg Monastery in Upper Hesse”). It contained information about six male corpses, who were classified as “victims of political violence”.[25] In 1966, the graves were marked with two commemorative plaques, containing information about the crime and its victims. Just two of the murdered prisoners could be identified by name, thanks to subsequent research by family members. Until 2017, it was assumed that 81 women and six men had been shot. However, detailed research revealed that there were 76 female and eleven male victims.[26] It is interesting that US data from 1947 lists 78 women and nine men as the victims (Fig. 25 . ).[27] Recently, new information panels have been created, enabling the memorial site to also be used for educational purposes.

After the graves had been transferred to Kloster Arnsburg in 1959/1960, the memorial cross that had been donated in 1945 remained in the cemetery in Hirzenhain. In 1990, the cross was installed at the site of the massacre, where it remains today. Memorial ceremonies are regularly held at the site. The crime will also soon be the subject of a graphic novel, which will examine the topic.[28]

 

Katarzyna Woniak, November 2025