Hundsfeld and Gross-Rosen, autumn 1944 to February 1945

Hundsfeld and Gross-Rosen, autumn 1944 to February 1945 - Chapter 4

Hundsfeld was one small part of a system that scarcely existed a year earlier. Before 1944 there were no women in the Gross-Rosen camp complex at all. By January 1945 it held nearly 26,000 women, most of them Jews, in dozens of subcamps. For the chronology below I use the documented dates, because the Soviet advance can only be lined up against them. Mrs. Ilkow gives January 8 as her departure date and names Krupp as the firm. The Gross-Rosen Museum’s record dates the evacuation to January 24 and names Rheinmetall-Borsig. I am not trying to adjudicate between them.

How the women’s subcamps came to exist

In the second half of the war Himmler turned the concentration camp system into a labor reservoir for the war economy, while still using Auschwitz and Majdanek as instruments of extermination. Roughly three-quarters of the women in the Gross-Rosen subcamps came through Auschwitz, and the two largest groups were about 12,000 Hungarian and 11,000 Polish Jewish women. Hundsfeld belonged to the third wave of foundations, small and mid-sized firms, many in the aircraft sector, of which Rheinmetall-Borsig in Breslau-Hundsfeld is a named example.

The Museum’s own entry says the decision to create the camp was made on June 18, 1944, and that about 1,500 Jewish women from Poland, Hungary, Holland, Romania and Germany were held there after being brought from Auschwitz. They worked for Rheinmetall-Borsig of Düsseldorf, making sights for anti-aircraft guns, bomb fuses and aircraft ammunition. After the war the same works became PZL Hydral. Yad Vashem’s encyclopedia dates the opening of the camp to July 1944. The commander of the women’s unit is listed as Kommandoführerin Emilie (Emma) Kowa. Female SS staff ran Hundsfeld, as they did several other Gross-Rosen women’s subcamps. Litigation records on corporate slave labor likewise list Hundsfeld among the places where Rheinmetall used forced labor.

Hundsfeld also lies in a particular part of the city. Psie Pole, the Polish name for Hundsfeld, is in the north-eastern part of Wrocław. That matters for the January march.

October 1944: the transports leave Auschwitz

Her departure from Birkenau fell in the most chaotic weeks of Auschwitz’s history. On October 7 the Sonderkommando revolted after learning the SS planned to reduce their number again. The SS dated the destruction of the gas chambers to November 7, 1944. So her mother’s selection and her own transfer happened while the killing machinery was still running but about to be dismantled. From autumn 1944 the evacuation of Auschwitz sent tens of thousands of Jewish men and women to Gross-Rosen.

Hundsfeld was only one possible destination, and the others were worse. In late October 1944 about a thousand women from Auschwitz were taken to each of the Birnbäumel, Hochweiler and Kurzbach subcamps, near Milicz north of Breslau. They dug trenches, ramparts and anti-tank ditches under the “Barthold” operation, which was meant to shield Lower Silesia and Wrocław from the approaching front. Women who went into a roofed factory camp like Hundsfeld, with a production line and a firm that needed them, were in a different position from those digging in the frozen ground.

The SS selection apparatus also stayed connected to these camps. At the Kratzau subcamp, Mengele came from Auschwitz in October 1944 to conduct a selection, and returned on January 20 and March 20, 1945. I found no record of a Mengele visit to Hundsfeld. At Grünberg, another Gross-Rosen subcamp, selections were held every three months and sick women were probably sent back to Auschwitz. Hundsfeld may have followed a similar routine, though I could not confirm it.

October to January: life at Hundsfeld

Historians of this camp system describe a paradox that frames this phase. Andrea Rudorff’s study found that in the women’s subcamps the long-pursued annihilation of Jewish prisoners was suspended, at least temporarily. She describes them as places of survival rather than places of death. Yad Vashem’s overview likewise says the women’s subcamps were governed less harshly than the main camp. This does not mean they were gentle. Hunger, twelve-hour days and beatings by German civilians and guards are well attested across the system. But the material differences she describes against Birkenau were real features of the subcamp world. Women in these camps typically had beds, bowls and a measure of regular supply, because the firm wanted workers who could stand at machines.

Rudorff has also written specifically on the female prisoner functionaries in the Gross-Rosen subcamps, a “gray zone” study. The block elders and other functionaries in a camp like Hundsfeld held real power over rations and discipline, and the scholarship treats that role as ambiguous rather than simply abusive or protective.

Several other survivors passed through the same camp, which lets her account be read alongside theirs. Clara Dan, interviewed in the same University of Michigan-Dearborn archive, was sent from Auschwitz to a bullet factory in Hundsfeld and later marched to Gross-Rosen and on to Bergen-Belsen, where the British liberated her. A memoir by Frida Rabenstein at the Holocaust Museum describes arriving at “Lager C” in Auschwitz in June 1944 and being sent to an ammunition factory at Hundsfeld. She then went on the January 1945 death march to Gross-Rosen and on to Bergen-Belsen, liberated April 15, 1945. The same portal lists oral histories with Chana Birnbaum, Jocheved Kasher, Joseph Schein and Siegfried Wulkan connected to Hundsfeld, which I did not read. A Holocaust Museum interview summary for Charlotte Rudner describes forced labor at a Krupp factory and a January 1945 march to Gross-Rosen from Breslau-Hundsfeld, followed by Mauthausen, with liberation at Bergen-Belsen. Her routing resembles Rudner’s, while Dan and Rabenstein went from Gross-Rosen directly to Bergen-Belsen. These accounts show that survivors of this camp ended up on at least two different routes after Gross-Rosen.

November 1944 to mid-January 1945: the front closes in

Her three months at the factory coincided with the collapse of the German eastern front. The Red Army captured Ungvar, the city where her family had been held in the brick factory, on October 27, 1944. Her home region was occupied while she was working in Breslau.

Breslau itself had been designated a fortress. Hitler declared Breslau a Festung in September 1944, part of the planned Oder defensive line. Hundsfeld’s workers were in a city being prepared for siege.

The Soviet blow fell in January. The 1st Ukrainian Front under Konev opened the Sandomierz-Silesian operation, part of the Vistula-Oder offensive, on January 12. The advance took Kielce on January 15, Warsaw on January 17, Kraków on January 18 and Łódź on January 19. On January 18 the Auschwitz death marches began. Roughly 65,000 prisoners were sent west by mid-January, many to open freight cars of the kind used for coal or sand.

January 19 to 27: Breslau empties and the Hundsfeld column leaves

Civilians were forced out of Breslau starting January 19. The sudden evacuation order hit hundreds of thousands in temperatures around minus twenty. About 700,000 people left Breslau in January and February, and an estimated 100,000 did not survive the journey west. The roads her column used were crowded with the same fleeing civilians, in the same cold.

The Soviet 5th Guards Army reached the Oder on January 22, and the 52nd Army on January 23. Hundsfeld was evacuated on January 24 and the column reached Gross-Rosen three days later. The men from the two Breslau subcamps left on or about January 25 and arrived in early February. The Museum’s account says subcamps east of the Oder were dissolved in the last ten days of January. Counting from the Museum’s dates, her column would have reached Gross-Rosen on or about January 27. That was the day the Red Army liberated the roughly 7,500 prisoners left at Auschwitz.

The geography explains why the column’s route mattered. Hundsfeld is on the north-eastern side of the city, while Gross-Rosen lies about sixty kilometers south-west of Wrocław. A column going from one to the other had to pass through or around the city and cross the Oder, so the march ran through the area where the fighting was gathering. I did not find a source documenting the specific bridge incident she describes, so I cannot place it historically.

As for the experience of such marches, the documented range is wide. At Kurzbach, SS escorts killed those who could not keep up. At Birnbäumel about twenty women left the column and stayed behind, where they were liberated. At least 104 women died on the Grünberg evacuation. One leg of the march from Schlesiersee cost 479 women their lives. One male prisoner from Blechhammer recorded reaching Gross-Rosen in the third week of January after walking over 120 miles. Rudorff notes that death rates in the women’s subcamps jumped once the evacuation started in January 1945. The Museum entry for Hundsfeld does not record a death toll for this column.

January 27 to February 8: Gross-Rosen

The main camp was not set up for these women. All of the roughly 25,000 women sent to Gross-Rosen had been dispatched onward to subcamps, and conditions in the main camp worsened that winter as evacuation transports from the east swelled the population. On January 1, 1945, the complex held 76,728 prisoners, 25,524 of them women. One column from the Auschwitz area reached Gross-Rosen after four days, was turned away because of overcrowding, and was redirected to Sachsenhausen. Himmler ordered the camp’s evacuation in January 1945, when it had 3,222 SS personnel. The sources record the order rather than an explicit rationale, so I leave that question open.

The evacuation began in stages on February 8 or 9, and the first transport went by train toward Mauthausen. The main camp’s prisoners were moved by rail in cars that normally carried coal, and many died of the cold and lack of food after a few days. The Red Army liberated Gross-Rosen on February 13. If she was on one of the earliest trains, her time at Gross-Rosen was roughly two weeks, which fits her sense that it was not long.

Her destination was less typical than the others. Of the Jews moved out of Gross-Rosen and its subcamps, about 3,500 went to Bergen-Belsen, mostly women from Birnbäumel, Christianstadt, Hochweiler and Kurzbach, while 2,249 went to Mauthausen, mostly from the Riese network. Women taken to Mauthausen were thus a minority.