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.
During heavy air raids in the Second World War, many areas of Hamburg were destroyed, and the Rothenburgsort section was heavily damaged. 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, a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp was established in the school to house prisoners used in clearing the rubble after air raids. The building 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. Later that evening, 24 Soviet prisoners were brought from another subcamp at Spaldingstraße 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.

Neuengamme experimentation

physician Kurt Heissmeyer, to achieve a credentialled professorship, needed to present original research. Although previously disproven, his hypothesis was that the injection of live tuberculosis bacilli into subjects would act as a vaccine. Another component of his experimentation was based on pseudoscientific Nazi racial theory that race played a factor in developing tuberculosis.
He attempted to prove his hypothesis by injecting live tuberculosis bacilli into the lungs and bloodstream of Untermenschen, Jews and Slavs being considered by the Nazis to be racially inferior to Germans.
He was able to have the facilities made available and to test his subjects as a result of his personal connections: his uncle, SS General August Heissmeyer, and his close acquaintance, SS General Oswald Pohl.
The medical experiments on tuberculosis infection were initially carried out on concentration camp prisoners from the Soviet Union and other countries at the Neuengamme concentration camp. The experiments were then extended to Jews. For this Heissmeyer chose to use Jewish children. Twenty Jewish children from Auschwitz concentration camp were chosen by Josef Mengele and sent to Neuengamme. Mengele allegedly asked the children, "Who wants to go and see their mother?"
The children were accompanied to Neuengamme by four women prisoners. Two were Polish nurses and one was a Hungarian pharmacist, and they were killed upon arrival at Neuengamme. The fourth woman, Polish-born Jew Paula Trocki, was a doctor. She survived the war and later gave testimony in Jerusalem about what she had witnessed:
The children were injected with live tuberculosis bacilli, and they all became ill. Heissmeyer then had their axillary lymph nodes surgically removed from their armpits and sent to Hans Klein at the Hohenlychen Hospital for study. All the children were photographed holding up one arm to show the surgical incision. Klein was not prosecuted.
The collapsing western front and imminent approach of British troops prompted the perpetrators to murder the subjects of the experiment to cover up their crimes. The orders for the murders were issued from Berlin.
The children, their four adult caretakers and six Soviet prisoners were taken by truck to the Bullenhuser Damm School in the Hamburg suburb of Rothenburgsort. The school had been taken over by the SS to house prisoners from Neuengamme used to clear rubble from the surrounding area after Allied bombing raids. The SS evacuated the building around April 11, 1945, leaving a skeleton crew of two SS guards: Ewald Jauch and Johann Frahm and a janitor. They were accompanied by three SS guards, as well as the driver, Hans Friedrich Petersen, and SS physician Alfred Trzebinski. The children as well as others were told they were being taken to Theresienstadt. Upon arriving at the school they were led into the basement. According to one of the SS men present, the children "sat down on the benches all around and were cheerful and happy that they had been for once allowed out of Neuengamme. The children were completely unsuspecting."
They were then made to undress and were then injected with morphine by Trzebinski. They were then led into an adjacent room and hanged from hooks set into the wall. The execution was overseen by SS Obersturmführer Arnold Strippel. The first child to be hanged was so light that the noose would not tighten. Frahm grabbed him in a bearhug and used his own weight to pull down and tighten the noose. The adults were hanged from overhead pipes; they were made to stand on a box, which was pulled away from under them. That same night, about 30 additional Soviet prisoners were also brought by lorry to the school to be executed; six escaped, three were shot trying to do so, and the rest were hanged in the basement.

Victims

  • Marek James, a boy aged 6, from Radom, Poland; prisoner no. B 1159.
  • H. Wassermann, a girl aged 8, from Poland. Commemorated with the Wassermann Park in Hamburg-Burgwedel, named after her.
  • Roman Witonski, a boy aged 6, and his sister; prisoner number A-15160.
  • Eleonora Witonska, a girl aged 5, from Radom, Poland; prisoner number A-15159. from the ghetto in Radom, Poland. Their father, Seweryn Witonski, a pediatrician from Radom, was gunned down at an execution in the Szydlowiec cemetery. Ruzca worked in the laboratory of Josef Mengele. In November 1944, the children were separated from their mother when she was sent to the concentration camp in Gebhardsdorf in Lower Silesia. Roman and Eleonora were sent to the "Kinderheim"
  • Roman Zeller, a boy aged 12, from Poland. Roman-Zeller-Platz, in Hamburg Schelsen is named after Roman Zeller.
  • Riwka Herszberg, a girl aged 7, from Zdunska Wola, Poland.
  • Mania Altmann, a girl aged 5, from Radom, Poland.
  • Sara Goldfinger, a girl aged 11, from Poland.
  • Lelka Birnbaum, a girl aged 12, from Poland.
  • Ruchla Zylberberg, a girl aged 8, from Zawichost, Poland.
  • Eduard Reichenbaum, a boy aged 10, from Katowice, Poland.
  • Blumel Mekler, a girl aged 11, from Sandomierz, Poland.
  • Eduard Hornemann, a boy aged 12., he lived with his mother, Elisabeth, his father, Philip, and his brother, Alexander, at 29 Staringstraat in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. His parents worked at the Philips factory. Philip died on February 21, 1945, at Sachsenhausen, where he arrived after a stop at Dachau with the "death march". Elisabeth died of typhus in Auschwitz in October 1944.
  • Alexander Hornemann, a boy aged 8.
  • Georges André Kohn, a boy aged 12, from Paris, France.
  • Jacqueline Morgenstern, a girl aged 12, from Paris.
  • Sergio De Simone, a boy aged 7, from Naples, Italy; prisoner no. 179694.. Son of Italian Eduardo de Simone and his Russian Jewish wife Gisella. Arrested March 21, 1944, in Fiume. First sent to San Sabba then on March 29, 1944, to Auschwitz. His mother survived the war and has visited the memorial.
  • Marek Steinbaum, a boy aged 10, from Radom, Poland.
  • Walter Jungleib, a boy aged 12, from Slovakia. As researched by Bella Reichenbaum, the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial received a letter from Israel in July 2015 noting that the name Jungleib had been recorded on a list of a prisoner transport from Auschwitz to Lippstadt; contact was made with this family near Tel Aviv via the website of the Yad Vashem Memorial; there the 85-year-old Grete Hamburg, born in Hlohovec / Slovakia confirmed that it was her brother: Walter Jacob Jungleib.
  • Lea Klygermann, a girl aged 12, from Poland; prisoner no. A 16959.
The children were in the care of four male prisoners, a French doctor and a chemist and two Dutch prisoners, all of whom had been imprisoned because of their anti-German activities.
The French doctor and the chemist were:
The two Dutch prisoners were:
  • Anton Hölzel, who came from Deventer. He was a driver and a member of the Dutch Communist Party, who joined the Resistance after the German invasion. He became a waiter at the Novotel Den Haag, a hotel in The Hague, to facilitate the transfer of messages. He was arrested on September 11, 1941, and sent to Buchenwald. He was later transferred to Neuengamme.
  • Dirk Deutekom, who was a typographer. A member of the Dutch Resistance, he tried to hinder the deportation of Dutch Jews from the Netherlands. He was arrested in July 1941 and sent to Buchenwald, where he was given a job in the infirmary, owing to his fluency in German. On June 6, 1944, he was transferred to the concentration camp at Neuengamme.