In Stettin, in what was then the province of Pomerania in the east of the German Reich (today Szczeczin in the West Pomeranian Voivodeship [Województwo Zachodniopomorskie] in Poland), the city set up two detention camps specifically for Sinti in 1938. The camps initially aimed to isolate the people from the city and exclude them from public life. Shortly after their establishment, the camps became places where the perpetrators had easier access for the purposes of racial hygiene research, exploitation through forced labour, physical violence, forced sterilisation and as starting points for deportations to concentration and extermination camps.
Lukasstrasse 2
From March 1938, several families were concentrated in Lukasstraße 2 in a multi-storey house and separately erected residential barracks. In May 1938, Robert Gatzke,1No biographical details can be found in the trial files of the compensation proceedings inspected or in the police files of the Szczecin archives. It is possible that he was the criminal police constable Robert Gatzke, who lived in Gifhorn after 1945. Cf. address book of the town of Gifhorn, 1950/1951 edition, Soltau: Wirtschaftsverlag Wilhelm Rohscheid, 1951, 55. senior officer of the criminal Police in Stettin, ordered the comprehensive registration of potential ‘asocials’ and ‘work-shy people’ on the basis of the Reich Minister of the Interior’s ‘Decree on the Preventive Fight against Crime’. In the course of the subsequent ‘Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich’, Sinti from Stettin and the surrounding area, as well as from Lukasstraße 2, were deported to the Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen concentration camps in June 1938.
From the beginning of November 1939, people living in Lukasstraße were threatened with being sent to a concentration camp if they left their place of residence. Lisbeth Steinbach (1930–unknown) and other survivors equated life in Lukasstraße with the situation in a ghetto. As they remembered it, the neighbourhood was fenced in with boards about two metres high. In addition, there were repeated arbitrary checks, acts of violence and abductions by members of the Gestapo and the criminal police. Lisbeth Steinbach also testifies to this: ‘I still remember a name from the criminal investigation department, one of them was called Nells. He came into our street almost every day and carried out checks. If he didn’t like something, we got a beating.’2Strauß, …weggekommen. Berichte und Zeugnisse von Sinti, 189. The city directory for Stettin from 1942 lists 13 families, with the heads of the families named as Adler, Ernst, Franz, Krause, Kreutzer and Rose. People were only allowed to leave the camp for forced labour. According to numerous survivors, the children concentrated there were excluded from attending school on racial grounds from the end of 1939, long before a Reich-wide order was issued on 24 March 1941. According to several survivors, employees of the Racial Hygiene Research Unit (RHF), including Eva Justin (1909–1966), also entered the camp from the end of 1939 and categorised people as ‘Gypsies’ and ‘Gypsy Mischlinge’ on the basis of the reports they had drawn up. From 1939/1940, children, adolescents and adults were forcibly sterilised by doctors on site or in municipal hospitals under the watchful eye of the criminal investigation department. Only a few were able to escape sterilisation by fleeing. Other people persecuted as ‘Gypsies’ had to undergo forced sterilisation under threat of imprisonment in a concentration camp. Eichwald Rose (1908–unknown), who had been deported from Stettin to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1938, testified in 1947 during the investigations that preceded the Nuremberg trials. He had been promised there that he would be released on the condition of ‘voluntary’ sterilisation and would no longer have to fear internment in a concentration camp in the future. He was released from Sachsenhausen in 1940 and forcibly sterilised in a hospital near Stettin in May 1941 on the orders of Dr Robert Ritter (1901–1951). In September 1942, however, he was arrested again with other family members in Pomerania. He himself was deported to Sachsenhausen again, his father and six siblings to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the spring of 1943.3Nuremberg State Archives, KV prosecution documents, NG-552, affidavit by Eichwald Rose.
The residential buildings and barracks at Lukasstraße 2 had been exposed to Allied bombing raids since 1943. As a result, some of the inmates were temporarily confined to flats in Altdammer Straße, while others were taken directly to the second detention camp ‘Kuhdamm’, which had existed since 1940 at the latest. After the complete destruction of Lukasstraße by Allied bombing raids in August 1944, those who remained in Altdammer Straße were also imprisoned in the ‘Kuhdamm’ detention camp.
‘Kuhdamm’
The ‘Kuhbruch’ housing estate and small-scale industrial units already existed in the interwar period on the south-eastern edge of the Pommerensdorf [Pomorzany] district, on an area bordered by branches of the river Oder and a large swamp. From 1940, the municipal officials responsible for the housing estate, Walter Faust and Erich Rüsch,4No biographical data is available for either of them in the files inspected. planned, built and managed an independent camp there with its own permanent fence and at least seven barracks, which the municipal administration labelled ‘Schwarzer Damm Nr. 13’.
In a surviving report from the Stettin criminal investigation department dated 1 April 1941, ‘Schwarzer Damm’ is referred to as a ‘Zigeunerlager’. A more common name for the camp among the survivors was ‘Kuhdamm’. Today, the size and location of the detention camp are still clearly marked out by the Szczawowia [Black Dam] road, the fencing around the area now occupied by storage facilities and scrap yards, and the surrounding marshy vegetation.
Police officers Robert Gatzke and Willy Sielaff, together with 15 other officers known by name, controlled and guarded5Gatzke and Sielaff were officers in charge of the criminal investigation department in Stettin. The other 15 police officers (Bruno Belling, Bruno Block, Karl Boldt, Hermann Buse, Siegfried Höfs, Friedrich Dassow, Paul Junker, Willi Kemnitz, Emil Lück, Franz Marquardt, Josef Mischnik, Hans Mitzinnek, Robert Rohde, Gotthard Wege and Paul Zierke) were partly subordinate to the criminal investigation department and partly to the police force. No biographical data on these persons has been preserved in the files. See Verband Deutscher Sinti und Roma, Landesverband Bayern, Sammlung, Entschädigungsakten, K_E_71. the detention camp. The camp was under permanent unsupervised control by guards provided by the criminal investigation department and the Ordnungspolizei, who had Alsatian dogs and were heavily armed. The Gestapo was involved in assigning people to forced labour in industrial and agricultural enterprises.
Sinti who were already living under the jurisdiction of the municipal administration in the ‘Kuhbruch’ housing estate, as well as Sinti from Lukasstraße, other parts of the city, the rural surroundings of Stettin and other regions of Pomerania, were concentrated in the camp as families. Leaving the camp was only permitted for shopping in certain shops and forced labour in civil engineering and businesses such as the Teege dyeing company and smaller nearby farms. The camp inmates were issued ‘foreigners’ food ration cards’, which made the food situation much worse than that of the rest of the population. Visiting restaurants, cinemas and theatres, using public transport and leaving the city were prohibited. Violators were threatened with deportation to a concentration camp.
From the summer of 1941 at the latest, the children living in the ‘Kuhdamm’ camp were systematically excluded from the elementary schools in Stettin and also forced to perform forced labour. Officers of the criminal police and Gestapo employees regularly carried out raids in the barracks and physically abused and tortured the inmates. Poor sanitary installations and a lack of medical care were the cause of typhus epidemics in the camp. Survivor Helene Herzberger (1934–2022) was imprisoned in the ‘Kuhdamm’ camp with her parents and siblings in 1940 at the age of six. She lost a sister there due to the inhumane conditions.6Der Zentralrat Deutscher Sinti und Roma trauert um Helene Herzberger, https://zentralrat.sintiundroma.de/der-zentralrat-deutscher-sinti-und-roma-trauert-um-helene-herzberger/ [accessed: 09/01/2025]. Survivors also report that the police prevented women in labour, infants, sick children and elderly people from being taken from the camp to municipal hospitals, and this resulted in the death or permanent damage to the health of these particularly vulnerable people.
On the basis of the Auschwitz Decree of 16 December 1942, the criminal investigation department deported at least 100 people from the ‘Kuhdamm’ camp to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp on 13 March 1943, according to survivors’ estimates. The Auschwitz camp registers list 88 people who were born in Stettin. So far, only four people who had been imprisoned in the ‘Kuhdamm’ camp immediately before their deportation have been identified by name. Because the prisoner records have not survived, it is hardly possible to reconstruct the exact number.
Some of the ‘racially pure and socially adapted gypsies’ who were forcibly sterilised in 1943 and 1944 were excluded from the deportation. Helene Herzberger’s mother was also affected by this. From the end of July 1944 in particular, these people were assigned to forced labour for the Wehrmacht. The Sinti who remained in ‘Kuhdamm’ were often defenceless against the Allied bombing raids on Stettin in 1943/44. During an air raid at the end of 1944, some of the houses and barracks were destroyed. Some Sinti died because they had been denied access to air raid shelters. Only a few barracks were rebuilt after the attack. With the Red Army approaching, the camp was finally disbanded in March 1945.
Stettin-Pölitz
In Pölitz (Polish: Police), which was incorporated into Stettin by the National Socialists in 1939, there was a labour education camp run by the Gestapo since autumn 1941, which served as an independent institution of Gestapo power and terror. The camp is known as ‘Hägerwelle’.7Cf. the memorial plaque erected at the former site, pictured in: https://www.komoot.com/de-de/highlight/4500271 [accessed: 15/01/2025]. Sinti from Lukasstraße and the ‘Kuhdamm’ camp were repeatedly sent there. The survivor Lisbeth Steinbach was sent there twice, the first time because she had been absent from work due to illness, and a second time because she was accused of sabotage.8Strauß, …weggekommen. Berichte und Zeugnisse von Sinti, 191–192. Hunger, hard labour, inadequate hygiene and medical care, arbitrary roll-calls, brutal abuse and sexual assaults were the order of the day in Pölitz.
After 1945
In compensation proceedings and trials from 1950 to the 1990s, lawyers from the compensation authorities and district courts regularly failed to acknowledge the Lukasstraße, ‘Kuhdamm’ and Pölitz camps as genuinely National Socialist places of detention and often rejected compensation payments. In some compensation proceedings, former police officers and municipal administration officials were called as witnesses; their statements were given more credence than those of the survivors. To exonerate themselves, the former perpetrators regularly denied that Lukasstraße 2 and ‘Kuhdamm’ were detention camps.
The camps were never recognised as places of detention in the compensation legislation that was expanded over the decades. At the former sites of the ‘Kuhdamm’ and Lukasstraße 2 camps, nothing commemorates their existence, whether in the form of a memorial or even an information plaque. It was not until 2001 that the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility, Future (EVZ) included Pölitz alone as a ‘camp for Sinti and Roma’ in its register of detention centres.
