Murder at Bullenhuser Damm
The murder of twenty Jewish children in the former school building located at Bullenhuser Damm street in Hamburg on 20 April 1945 is one of the many despicable crimes committed during Nazi reign. Aged between five and twelve, the twenty children, split evenly between boys and girls, were from Poland, France, Italy, Slovakia and the Netherlands.
Dragged from their homes and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, the children were then separated from their families and sent to the Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg to be subjected to medical experiments for five months. With the impending end of World War II, the medical experiments were concluded and the children sent to a former school at Bullenhuser Damm, used as a satellite camp of Neuengamme. In the basement, the SS murdered the children in an attempt to erase their crimes.
Medical Experiments in the Neuengamme Concentration Camp
Ordinary doctors used the opportunities afforded them by the Nazi tyranny to perform medical experiments on people who had been stripped of all basic human rights. SS Reich Leader Heinrich Himmler actively supported this kind of experimentation in the concentration camps. In June 1944, a special department was set up at the Neuengamme concentration camp to enable doctor Kurt Heißmeyer to experiment on prisoners.
Heißmeyer was looking for new treatment methods for Tuberculosis (TB), an infectious disease caused by bacteria. He assumed that TB, which mostly affects the lungs, could be cured by artificially creating a second centre for the infection in the body. At the time of his experiments, this theory had already been disproved by science. Heißmeyer also believed that “racially inferior” people were more susceptible to TB than “racially superior” people. In the course of his experiments, Heißmeyer infected up to 100 adult prisoners of Neuengamme concentration camp with highly virulent, i.e. infectious TB bacteria. Even though the health of his subjects had deteriorated considerably by the autumn of 1944 and most of them had even died from the experiments, Heißmeyer wrote to the Auschwitz concentration camp and asked for 20 children for more experiments.
The children arrived in Neuengamme on 28 November 1944, and a section of sick-bay IV was divided off to house them. The children were also injected with TB bacteria, either subcutaneously or directly into the lungs. They soon began to suffer from fever and coughing fits and became apathetic and weak. Although the children's presence at the camp was to be kept secret, many prisoners knew about them. They were forbidden to speak to the children under penalty of death. Late at night on 20 April 1945 a lorry from Neuengamme carrying the 20 children, their four carers and six Soviet prisoners arrived at Bullenhuser Damm.
The SS men first took the adult prisoners into the building and hung them in the boiler room adjacent to this room. The children were led down the stairs into the first basement room, where they had to undress. In another room SS doctor Alfred Trzebinski injected the children with morphine. Those children who still showed signs of life after the injections were hung by SS man Johann Frahm, probably with the help of other SS men, in the room at the very back of the basement.
Following these first murders, another group of Soviet prisoners were brought here from the Spaldingstraße satellite camp. SS men shot several of them who were trying to escape, but some of them also managed to get away. All other prisoners were also hung in the boiler room.
Remember the children
For decades, the story of the children was almost completely forgotten. It was only at the close of the 1970s when a journalist began searching for traces of these children and any relatives who survived the Shoah. Together with the childrens’ relatives and Hamburg locals, he founded an association.
In 1980, this association inaugurated a small memorial at the Bullenhuser Damm school and ran it privately for almost 20 years before merging with the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial. Today, the memorial is one of Hamburg's most important commemorative sites.