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

Liberated, yet still not free
 

Most of the few prisoners who survived returned to Poland. Some remained in Germany, while others tried to emigrate to the US, Canada or Australia. Many of the survivors remained in displaced persons camps for months, in some cases even years, or spent long periods of time in sanatoriums in order to return to health. Many families in Poland waited in vain for their husbands, sons, fathers and brothers to return. While those whose relatives’ deaths had been officially recorded in Frankfurt/Main were able to obtain information from the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, this was not the case for the families of the many hundreds of people who had died during the death marches. Their places and dates of death will remain unknown forever – a cause of agony for the families involved even today. 

Years after the war ended, they were still issuing missing persons notices in the hope of finding their loved ones. (Figs. 24 . , 25 . ) Wiktoria Bittner, the mother of Zdzisław Bittner, published a missing persons notice in the “Repatriant” newspaper in May 1947. She received a letter from his childhood friend, Zygmunt Świstak. Zygmunt had been deported to the “Katzbach” satellite camp together with Zdzisław, but at Christmas 1944 was transferred to Vaihingen. He was therefore unable to provide any information about the circumstances in which Zdzisław died. However, he wrote in detail about their last meetings, the conditions in the camp and his own situation following liberation. He had been deported to the Adlerwerke together with his father and brother. Neither had survived. His postcards and letters to Zdzisław’s mother illustrate how difficult it was for the survivors to return to normal life. The loss of their health, their family and friends, their homes and their prospects for the future, as well as the destruction of Warsaw, meant that they also lost their courage to face life again. The letters he received from Wiktoria Bittner, his friend’s mother, who had known him from before the war, gave Zygmunt Świstak the feeling that he was not entirely alone in the world. In one letter, he wrote: “Now I know that someone knows me and knows who I am.”[7]

Was there any atonement for the crimes committed?
 

The first criminal investigations into the murders in the “Katzbach” camp and during the death march began as early as 1945. Two employees of the Adlerwerke who had maltreated the prisoners as ancillary guards were sentenced to prison in 1946; another employee was deported to Poland, where he stood trial in court.[8] It is no coincidence that in the case of the Adlerwerke, it was only ancillary guards who were found guilty of violence against the prisoners. Unlike the former SS men, they lived in Frankfurt and the surrounding area, and were therefore easy to find for the law enforcement agencies. By contrast, the SS men had already left the city. It was not until the 1960s, after the investigations of the legal authorities were conducted on a more professional basis with the founding in Ludwigsburg of the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, that former members of the SS who worked in the camp could be located. None of them were convicted, even though reliable allegations had been made against camp director Erich Franz, his deputy Emil Lendzian and the camp cook Martin Weiß. Responsibility for the proceedings against Erich Franz was transferred to the Austrian legal authorities due to his place of abode in Austria. The Austrians conducted half-hearted investigations before finally closing the case due to lack of evidence. Emil Lendzian had already died in Mönchengladbach in 1956. Martin Weiß, an ethnic German from Transylvania, returned to Romania after the war, and the German authorities felt they had no possibility of putting him on trial. 

The company managers, Ernst Hagemeier and Franz Engelmann, were interned in a US prison until the spring of 1947, before being allowed to go free as part of a mass prisoner release operation. Attempts to bring them to trial again failed. The half-hearted legal investigations into the crimes in the Adlerwerke is by no means unusual. Rather, it can be seen as typical of the way in which justice for National Socialist crimes was pursued. The way in which compensation payments were handled is just as appalling. The survivors who returned to Poland did not receive any supplementary pension payments until the 1970s as a consequence of the German government’s change in policy towards eastern Europe. One-off payments were made as a result of the “Good neighbourhood agreement” between Germany and Poland in 1991, and were administered by the “Erinnerung, Verantwortung, Zukunft” (“Remembrance, Responsibility, Future”) foundation, which was set up in 2000. By that time, only a small number of them were still alive, and the amounts paid did not constitute serious compensation for what they had suffered.

The information sources that emerged during the course of the legal proceedings, particularly the statements made by members of staff and people living in direct proximity to the Adlerwerke, documented the entire range of contemporary perspectives on this camp soon after the events occurred, and in stark detail. Their reports illustrate the dynamics that led to a situation in which the death by starvation of so many people in their own factory was perceived to be simply part of everyday life in war. However, they also show that there were large numbers of company staff and neighbours who did not think that this was “normal”, and who did what they could to intervene under the circumstances.