Pfaffenwald. One camp, multiple crimes

Pfaffenwald “Auxiliary Hospital”
 

The RAB camp was empty for just a few months before it was given a new purpose. In 1942, the National Socialist regime increased the severity with which it treated foreign forced labourers who were unable to work. This system, characterised by totalitarian rule and radical racism, had no place for sick forced labourers. In order to separate them from “ethnic” Germans (“Volksgenossen”), an increasing number of separate locations and even “hospitals for foreigners” with “foreign” (“fremdvölkisch”) staff were set up.[5] If it was not possible to restore their ability to work within a few weeks, the sick labourers were allowed to return home. The “incapacitated foreigners” were brought to camps for returnees, which were under the control of the Employment Office (Arbeitsamt) and designed for maximum physical exploitation.[6] One such camp was established in Pfaffenwald in late summer 1942 by the Regional Employment Office Hessen in cooperation with the Regional Insurance Office. The camp consisted of five stonewalled barracks and was overseen by guards, who maltreated the women, children, and men housed there. Two Soviet doctors were in charge of the more than 400 patients. The camp’s primitive conditions did not allow for any sterile medical care. Dressing materials and medication were in short supply. Operations were carried out using a pocket knife.[7] A former Soviet prisoner of war and patient at the camp described it as a “plague-ridden hell”. In his memoirs he describes the conditions as follows: “50 to 60 sick people crammed together in a 49 square metre room. The beds are fully occupied with dying tuberculosis patients alongside people with heart problems, stomach issues, sexually transmitted diseases, mental illness, etc., and often pregnant women and women there for abortions, men and women placed together. The groans, curses, and sobs of the dying make life intolerable.” The person who wrote this eye-witness report had no doubt that the purpose of the camp was to kill off the sick.[8] In an interview in 1981, Marcin B., a Pole who also spent time at this “hospital”, particularly stressed the poor nutrition, which consisted only of nettles and “a small piece of bread for 12 people, baked from chestnuts. […] The food then made us sick. We slowly perished because of it.”[9]

Those who died were initially buried at the cemetery in Beiershausen and later in the nearby forest, where several corpses were thrown without a coffin into excavated pits. Despite their health problems, the sick were forced to work, usually in the forest and on nearby farms. One of the camp inmates was ten-year-old Mitka Kalinski, who had been brought there in an ill state from Dachau concentration camp. He left the camp in December 1942 and was forced to work at Rotenburg an der Fulda.[10]

At the latest following the Reich Ministry of Labour decree of 21 May 1943, there was a stop on repatriation, meaning that the sick were no longer returned to their countries of origin.[11] The camps for the sick thus completed their transition to camps for dying. While the most gravely ill died without medical help and in great pain in these camps, mentally ill Polish and Soviet inmates were killed in one of the eleven collection centres as part of the National Socialist euthanasia programme “T4”, including in the State Hospital Hadamar.[12] Several “mentally ill” patients from the camp in Pfaffenwald died there.[13]

Forced labourers with tuberculosis were also considered terminally ill and thus unable to work and were isolated in the most primitive way in their place of accommodation. In the view of the Employment Office Hersfeld, which was responsible for this region and subordinate to the Regional Employment Office (Gauarbeitsamt) Kurhessen, the Pfaffenwald camp with its primitive barracks was very well suited to housing tuberculosis patients. However, they did not receive any medical care there; either they were left to their fate or, upon instruction from the Employment Office, collectively sent from Pfaffenwald to the State Hospital Hadamar 150 kilometres away, where they were murdered as part of the “decentralised euthanasia” programme. As a result of these transports, “the official mortality rate in Pfaffenwald dropped sharply”. A total of 180 ill persons from the “Pfaffenwald Auxiliary Hospital” were killed by gas in Hadamar. Some of these transports included mothers with babies, for whom no doctor’s referral was provided.[14]