Regensburg subcamp

In 1928, the owner of the Regensburg Carmelite Brewery Hotel (Dachauplatz 1) refused to rent out meeting halls to the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers' Party, aka the Nazi Party) for NSDAP party events because of complaints from Jewish and other hotel guests. The Augustinian Brewery and the Obermünster Brewery (Obermünsterstrasse 10) also joined in the refusal to rent out halls. The city's magistrate also refused to rent out the Neuhaus Hall in the Regensburg City Theater (Bismarckplatz 7).[upper-alpha 1] The magistrate had demanded that signs reading “Jews not allowed to enter” be removed from the posters, but the NSDAP refused to comply. Local NSDAP leaders blamed the Jews, and urged retaliation by calling for a boycott of Jewish shops and the aforementioned restaurants. The NSDAP evaded the refusal to rent out halls, and held their meetings in the restaurants of the Kolosseum and Zur Glocke.[1]

From March 19, 1945, to April 23, 1945, a temporary satellite camp was set up in the Colosseum inn, located in the Stadtamhof district of Regensburg, where around 400 male concentration camp prisoners were forced to repair bomb damage to the railroads (clear debris, fill bomb craters, lay new tracks, etc.) caused by frequent Allied bombing runs.[upper-alpha 2] The work assignments were mainly at the Regensburg Hauptbahnhof (main railway station) and adjacent railway facilities. Among the prisoners were 128 Jews (including 67 Poles and 42 Hungarians), 84 non-Jewish Poles, 63 Russians, 62 Belgians, 25 French, 22 Germans, and the remainder consisted of ten other nationalities. The prisoners were transferred from the Flossenbürg main camp, but by the time they were taken to the Regensburg satellite camp, most of them had already suffered long torturous journeys through various camps, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Gross-Rosen, and their various subcamps.[2][upper-alpha 3]

At night the prisoners were housed in the dance hall on the second floor of the inn, where they slept on the wood shavings and sawdust-covered wood floor, packed in like sardines, and where the hygienic conditions were miserable and deplorable.[3][4][upper-alpha 4] The windows were nailed shut and barb-wired. There was only one toilet and one water tap available. There was no possibility of care for the sick or those unable to work. The food was inadequate and consisted only of bread and soup. The open-air makeshift camp kitchen was located in the inner courtyard of the building directly across the street from the Colosseum, and was staffed by two Polish prisoners, one of whom was Tadeusz Sobolewicz.[5]

By day the completely emaciated prisoners had to repair the damage after bombing raids on the railway station premises. To this end, the prisoners were forced to march over the Stone Bridge and through the old town center of Regensburg every morning and return every evening (with the sounds of wooden clogs on cobblestones clearly audible along the way).[upper-alpha 5] The work was life-threatening, not only from working through the air raids without shelter, but also due to the unexploded ordnance.[upper-alpha 6][upper-alpha 7] The SS guards and kapos regularly harassed and beat the prisoners to get them to work harder and faster. The prisoners were warned at morning roll call that any attempt at escape would result in the shooting of ten fellow inmates. At the end of the march procession back to the Colosseum, the somewhat stronger dragged the completely exhausted and injured, followed by the handcart with the dead and dying. After 12 hours of arduous labor, the prisoners were again forced to assemble for roll call, often for hours, and often subjected to further torment and beatings.[5][upper-alpha 8] According to other information, some of the prisoners also had to do forced labor in the Regensburg factory of Messerschmitt AG.[7]

The guards included 50 SS men (Schutzstaffel “protection squadron” and SS-Totenkopfverbände "death’s head units") housed in the dining room on the ground floor, and also included many so-called ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche).[8] The command leader was SS-Oberscharführer (“senior squad leader”) Ludwig Plagge, a heavy drinker who was considered one of the “most brutal and cruel SS men” and was sentenced to death in the Auschwitz trial in Kraków in January 1947.[9][upper-alpha 9] His deputy was SS-Oberscharführer Erich Liedtke, who often beat and mistreated the prisoners without cause.[10] John Demjanjuk, who was convicted of aiding and abetting murder in 2011, is said to have been among the SS guards.[11]

On the night of April 22–23, 1945, the camp prisoners were evacuated, except for 28 seriously ill and one dead. The prisoners were forced to endure a nine-day death march heading south in the direction of Landshut and Mühldorf (on the Inn). The march was conducted primarily at night, to avoid detection by Allied aircraft, and by day the prisoners slept in roadside barns. Many of the prisoners were shot along the roadside or in nearby forests because they were too exhausted to keep up the pace, or when caught trying to escape, sometimes by hiding in the haylofts of barns where they stopped to rest.[5][upper-alpha 10][upper-alpha 7] It is estimated that only 50 of the prisoners survived this march. The march ended when the survivors were abandoned by their SS guards, and liberated by the U.S. Army, on May 1, 1945, in Laufen (on the Salzach, on the Austrian border, near Salzburg).[upper-alpha 11][upper-alpha 12][upper-alpha 13][upper-alpha 14][upper-alpha 15]

The exact number of fatalities among the Colosseum prisoners is not known. In the Regensburg registry office (Standesamt Regensburg), 35 deaths were recorded for the period between March 23 and April 10 alone, and a grave list of the city contains the names of 44 of the dead.[12] A survivor of the Colosseum estimates the number of dead in the five weeks of its existence at 70 men.[11] It is believed that some corpses were thrown into the Danube without registering them.

The Obertraubling satellite camp (today located in neighboring Neutraubling) was operated by the SS from February 20 to April 16, 1945, as a satellite camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp in the municipality of Obertraubling, a southern suburb of Regensburg, on the premises of Messerschmitt AG. It was located next to a forced labor camp in the Messerschmitt factory. The completely emaciated concentration camp prisoners had to repair damage to the runway of a company airfield that had been bombed, at risk of death.[13] After a regional reform and the incorporation of surrounding communities, the area of one of the former forced labor camps, the so-called Russenlager (Russian camp), now belongs to the city of Regensburg.

The Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes (in Ludwigsburg) investigated the events of the Regensburg subcamp in the 1960s. The proceedings were later taken over by the Munich public prosecutor's office (Staatsanwaltschaft München), and discontinued in the 1970s.

After the end of the war, the Colosseum was used again as a bar with a dance hall and later as a performance location for a peasant theater (Bauerntheater). In the summer of 2006, a new owner had the building gutted and renovated, and built a restaurant and a residential complex in it.

In October 1950, the President of the Bavarian State Compensation Office, Philipp Auerbach, inaugurated a concentration camp memorial for an unknown number of foreign concentration camp prisoners buried in the Evangelical Central Cemetery in Regensburg.[upper-alpha 16] The Lord Mayor (Oberbürgermeister "Burgomaster") of Regensburg, Georg Zitzler, laid a wreath. When the graves of several of the dead were exhumed in the spring of 1955 (and the remains relocated to Flossenbürg), the concentration camp memorial and the associated small stone blocks with the engraved number of dead and their nationality were also removed. The details of the removal and the whereabouts of the memorial have not yet been clarified.[14][upper-alpha 17]

After the student group work at the Regensburg Vocational School for Business (Berufsfachschule für Wirtschaft Regensburg) with its theme of the Colosseum subcamp had won a second prize in the Federal President’s History Competition (Geschichtswettbewerb des Bundespräsidenten) in 1982/83, the question of an appropriate memorial for the victims was raised again.[upper-alpha 18] In the student work, according to the summary, a proper memorial plaque should be placed on the Colosseum building to serve as a reminder that the city should not forget or keep silent about the less pleasant aspects of its history.[15] The city administration initially assured the students, who even donated part of their prize money to implement their demands, that the city would put up a plaque, but to this day, no such plaque has been installed.[16][upper-alpha 19]

In the early 1990s, on a non-partisan initiative, a memorial plaque was made to commemorate the Colosseum subcamp, which was attached to the railing of the Stone Bridge without the support of the city administration.[17][upper-alpha 20] In 1994, this was replaced by a large memorial stone, which was inaugurated by Mayor Christa Meier.[18]

This abstract work of Flossenbürg granite and limestone is located in a free space (combination mini-park and bicycle parking lot) opposite the Colosseum, but offset by approximately 70 meters on the other side of the street.[upper-alpha 21] The carved inscription avoids naming or specifying the exact location of the former Colosseum subcamp.[18] It is worded as follows:

Memorial stone of the Regensburg subcamp of Flossenbürg (2011)

In 2008, an initiative by the Regensburg city council group The Greens for a memorial plaque on the Colosseum was rejected by the CSU and SPD parties.[19][20] In April 2011, a bronze memorial plaque was laid on the sidewalk in front of the Colosseum building on behalf of the city of Regensburg (without public notice or input from local community groups).[21] It was subsequently removed in April 2016.[upper-alpha 22] The plaque's inscription read:

Memorial plaque on the sidewalk in front of the Colosseum (2011)

The plaque's text was created under the auspices of the city's cultural department and, after it became known, was heavily criticized in a public debate as trivializing and misleading.[21][22] The inscription was quite controversial, and there were many protests, due to the protesters feeling that the inscribed words played down the historical facts. The politically responsible culture committee of the Regensburg city council then decided in November 2011 that the technically responsible culture department should invite a non-partisan working group. They were supposed to work out a proposal for an appropriate and politically meaningful inscription text or for an urban memorial concept regarding the Nazi era.[23]

After years of political wrangling and delay, the memorial plaque was removed in April 2016, and replaced by a small information panel (in German and English) placed directly on the Colosseum building, and a two-sided standing information panel (in German and English) was also installed next to the memorial stone down and across the street.[24][25][26][upper-alpha 23][upper-alpha 24][upper-alpha 25][upper-alpha 26]

Since the end of the 1990s, there has been a memorial march in Regensburg on April 23, which is carried out by non-partisan work groups and also commemorates the fate of the prisoners in the Colosseum satellite camp.[27][upper-alpha 27] For many years, official representatives of the city of Regensburg did not take part.[32] The city administration had repeatedly ignored suggestions from the volunteer working groups to commemorate all victims of National Socialism in an event jointly with the city of Regensburg.[upper-alpha 28]

In 2015, for the first time, various city government officials and community groups came together and agreed to join in the commemoration ceremonies. Representatives included Regensburg Mayor Joachim Wolbergs (SPD party), city council members of the left- and center-leaning political parties, representatives of the Catholic and Protestant churches,[upper-alpha 29] Pax Christi,[upper-alpha 30] the VVN-BdA,[upper-alpha 31] the DGB,[upper-alpha 32] the Falcons,[upper-alpha 33] the anti-fascist group anita f., and as always, the ArGe[upper-alpha 34] and the Regensburg Jewish community.[upper-alpha 35] About 500 people joined in the 2015 events. However, as had long been the case, the conservative right-leaning CSU party (the largest party in Regensburg with 25% of the city council seats) continued to boycott the ceremonies.[33] In 2016, for the first time, city council members of the CSU party finally relented and agreed to join with the rest of the city administration and community groups in participating in the annual commemoration events.[34]

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  The Colosseum (2011)
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  From in front of the Colosseum. On the left is the small open space where the memorial stone stands. (2008)
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  The Regensburg subcamp memorial stone (2011)
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  The Stone Bridge (Steinerne Brücke), the Altstadt beyond, looking south (2008)
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  The Stone Bridge in the foreground, Stadtamhof beyond, looking north (2009)
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  Regensburg railroad yards, looking east (from Kumpfmühler Str. overpass) (2006)
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  Regensburg railroad yards, looking west (from Kumpfmühler Str. overpass) (2006)

Much of the content of this article comes from the equivalent German language Wikipedia article. Translation of German language sources was aided by Google Translate, the TU Chemnitz Beolingus Online Dictionary, and Horizonte German Language School in Regensburg.