Bullenhuser Damm

53°32′31″N 10°2′53″E / 53.54194°N 10.04806°E / 53.54194; 10.04806

The school at Bullenhuser Damm

The Bullenhuser Damm School is located at 92–94 Bullenhuser Damm in the Rothenburgsort section of Hamburg, Germany – the site of the Bullenhuser Damm Massacre, the murder of 20 children and their adult caretakers at the very end of World War II's Holocaust – to hide evidence they were used as human subjects in brutal medical experimentation.[1][2]

During heavy air raids in the Second World War, many areas of Hamburg were destroyed, and the Rothenburgsort section was heavily damaged.[3] The school was only slightly damaged. By 1943, the surrounding area was largely obliterated so the building was no longer needed as a school. In October 1944,[4] a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp was established in the school to house prisoners used in clearing the rubble after air raids. The Bullenhauser Damm School was evacuated on April 11, 1945. Two SS men were left to guard the school: SS Unterscharführer Johann Frahm and SS Oberscharführer Ewald Jauch, and the janitor Wilhelm Wede.

On the night of April 20, 1945, 20 Jewish children, who had been used as human subjects in medical experiments at Neuengamme, along with their four adult caretakers and six Soviet prisoners, were injected with morphine and suspended from their necks to die on the basement walls of the school.[5] Later that evening, 24 Soviet prisoners were brought to the school to be murdered.

The names, ages and countries of origin of the victims, who'd transited through the Neuengamme concentration camp, were recorded by Hans Meyer, one of the thousands of Scandinavian prisoners released to the custody of Sweden in the closing months of the war.[6]

  1. ^ "Chi vuole vedere la mamma faccia un passo avanti (Whoever wants to see their mother, take one step forward)". historyfilesnetwork.com. 27 January 2021.
  2. ^ Katja Iken (April 20, 2020). ""Like pictures hung on the wall"". Der Spiegel. The closer the Allies got, the greater the pressure on the SS to make the evidence of their horrific human experiments disappear. Probably on April 20, 1945, the order came from an SS office in Berlin: "The Heissmeyer department is to be dissolved." In plain language: The 20 boys and girls must be murdered, along with their four carers. An SS commando pulled the children out of bed in the evening and took them to school on Bullenhuser Damm, a satellite camp of Neuengamme concentration camp in East Hamburg.
  3. ^ Beck, Earl R. (1999) Under the Bombs: The German Home Front, 1942–1945 University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-0977-9 ISBN 978-0-8131-0977-0
  4. ^ "6. DV-BEG - Einzelnorm". Archived from the original on 2009-04-23. Retrieved 2009-04-14. Official list (in German)
  5. ^ "Die Schule am Bullenhuser Damm" (in German). Retrieved 2008-04-20.
  6. ^ Cesarani, David and Levine, Paul A. (2002) Bystanders to the Holocaust: a Re-evaluation Routledge. p.246. ISBN 0-7146-8243-8 ISBN 978-0-7146-8243-3