From the Warsaw Uprising to Frankfurt/Main. Polish concentration camp prisoners in the ‘Adlerwerke’ factories

The story behind the satellite concentration camp in Frankfurt/Main
 

The Adlerwerke factories in Frankfurt/Main was a well-known company with a long tradition. It had made a name for itself as a producer of cars, bicycles and typewriters. During the war, they switched to producing armaments, specialising in the construction of “traction vehicles”. These were half-track vehicles that had a steerable front axle with wheels and continuous track propulsion at the rear. They were used as a chassis for lightweight armoured personnel carriers, among other things. (Figs. 1 . , 2 . ) 

Like all German companies, the Adlerwerke suffered from a lack of labourers during the Second World War. From 1941 onwards, this was compensated by the use of civilian forced labourers from Poland, Ukraine, France, the Soviet Union and, from the autumn of 1943, from Italy. The influx and violent deportation of forced labourers had dwindled due to the advances being made by the Allies. During the final year of the war, armament companies began to make increased use of prisoners from the concentration camp as a source of labour, for whom they paid the SS a daily rental fee. However, since the SS were keen to retain control of the prisoners, this led to the creation of more than 1,000 satellite concentration camps within the German Reich and the occupied territories. This was also the case in Gallus (a district in the centre of Frankfurt – translator’s note), where in August 1944, an advance party of 200 prisoners and a squad of SS guards arrived at the Adlerwerke factory building on Kleyerstrasse. The official application for the employment of 1,000 prisoners for the production of traction vehicles and the related gears and engines was submitted in early September 1944. (Figs. 3 . , 4 . ) For reasons that are not known, the satellite camp was given the code name “Katzbach”. It was placed under the purview of the Natzweiler concentration camp.

Who were the prisoners?
 

In total, the SS provided the Adlerwerke with 1,616 prisoners, who were taken to Frankfurt in four larger-scale transport operations. All the prisoners from the first three transports were Polish men who had been seized from August 1944 onwards during the Warsaw Uprising. They had been taken to the Pruszków transit camp, which the Germans had set up a few days after the start of the uprising for the purpose of deporting the population of Warsaw. From there, they were sent to various concentration camps within the German system. Originally, the SS, the Reich Security Head Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) and the Wehrmacht had planned to take mostly active fighters from the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) to the concentration camps, and to use the remaining citizens of Warsaw as civilian forced labourers. However, the process of distributing the prisoners among the transports in the transit camp in Pruszków was chaotic and arbitrary. The prisoners taken to Frankfurt included a large number of civilians as well as fighters. After arriving in Buchenwald or Dachau, they were haphazardly assigned to one satellite camp or another. In the autumn of 1944, no-one foresaw that Frankfurt would become one of the most murderous places to work, with little chance of survival.

The final transport, in February 1945, included prisoners from different countries for the first time. Most of them were former civilian forced labourers from Poland and the Soviet Union, who had been incarcerated in a concentration camp by the Gestapo for committing various “offences”. Often, they had attempted to flee or to improve their appalling living conditions by stealing clothes, food or heating materials. Other prisoners came from Belgium, France, Greece, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Many of them had been transported to Buchenwald during the clearance of other concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, and had then been sent from Buchenwald on to Frankfurt. The final transport to the camp also included 36 prisoners of Polish-Jewish origin, as well as 28 German prisoners.

Lists containing precise information about the names, ages and origins of the prisoners have been preserved for all transports. (Fig. 5 . , 6 . ) We therefore know the prisoners included a large number of children, such as Andrzej Branecki, who was just 14 years old, who returned to Frankfurt multiple times after the war to report on his experiences. (Fig. 7 . ) For many of the prisoners, the identity cards created by the SS administration have been preserved, which provide information about their family circumstances and where they had previously lived. In some cases, relatives have also provided photographs. (Figs. 8 . , 9 . , 10 . )

Only 30 survivors have recorded their testimony about their experiences in the concentration camp assigned to the Adlerwerke. The earliest report, which dates from December 1945, was written by Witold Szuman.[1] Several survivors testified as witnesses as part of various investigation proceedings or gave interviews during the 1990s.[2] Two autobiographical novels were also published. The “Diary of a Clairvoyant”, which appeared in Warsaw in 1976 under a pseudonym, was written by the former prisoner Józef Marcinkowski, but only features the “Katzbach” camp a few times.[3] The second novel, which has now been translated into German, is by Janusz Garlicki. “Von der Wahrscheinlichkeit zu überleben” (“On the Probability of Survival”) provides an extremely vivid description of the period from the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising to the author’s liberation by the Americans.[4] No other testimony enables us to imagine everyday life and the mental state of the Polish prisoners during their brutal incarceration in the “Katzbach” concentration camp to the same degree of intensity. 

Since taking photographs inside the factory at this time was prohibited, we have no photographic evidence of the camp or the prisoners. The drawings made by the former inmate Zygmunt Świstak (1924–2022) are therefore of particular value. They document the life and suffering, the hard labour and the violence from the perspective of the prisoners.