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Forgotten Horrors

The Nazi sub-camp system

Kaufbeuren and Riederloh

Kaufbeuren  and Riederloh

Kaufbeuren was the location of two sub-camps named Riederloh I and Riederloh II. The camps provided forced labour for the Dynamit AG gunpowder and ammunition facility in Kaufbeuren, Bavaria, 80 kilometres to the southwest of Munich. Riederloh I was an accommodation camp operated directly by Dynamit AG (DAG) during the whole course of the war from 1939 to 1945. It was located at the southern end of the DAG main site and accommodated German labourers during 1939-41, joined by non-Germans 1941-45, mostly from Poland and Russia alongside Italian military prisoners. 

Riederloh II was the Dachau sub-camp, operated by the SS. It operated in 1944 and 1945 and was located approximately 2 kilometres to the east of the DAG main site. It was a work camp with approximately 1,000 Jewish inmates, 472 of whom died from malnutrition, poor physical condition and brutal treatment by the SS guards. The surviving inmates were marched off to Dachau in 1945 where they were fed and subsequently transported to other Dachau sub-camps. At this point, Riederloh II was occupied by Ukrainian forced labourers. 

In 1946, the DAG site and the Riederloh I camp were used to house Sudeten Germans who had been expelled from Jablonec in Czechoslovakia. Their community later became Neugablonz. A smaller settlement of Czech Germans grew on and around the Riederloh II camp site, evolving into the present day community of Steinholz, a settlement of the village of Mauerstetten.

There is a cemetery at Mauerstetten which contains a memorial stone commemorating the death of the 472 Jewish victims of Riederloh II. Another memorial stone in the Roman Catholic church of Neugablonz recalls the deaths of labourers at Riederloh I.

Kaufbeuren

Dachau KZ blog mentions what appears to be a third camp at Kaufbeuren, located on the fourth floor of a spinning mill. This was surrounded by a two-metre high fence and accommodated prisoners in two rooms containing wooden bunks, three bunks high, with four prisoners in each bunk. There was a medical ward with a male nurse and, for a while, a prison physician. Most of the prisoners were Germans. Some of them had been imprisoned in Allach or were subsequently sent back there. The prisoners worked day and night shifts at BMW producing crank shafts for aircraft engines. Around 30 of the prisoners also worked at the Swabian timber company in Kaufbeuren and 20 prisoners worked in the camp kitchens and administration. The commander was SS-Untersturmführer Wilhelm Becker.

There do not appear to have been any deaths in this camp, but thefts were punishable by beatings. The building in which this sub-camp was located is still in use as a factory.

Source: Dachau KZ blog and Wikipedia

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