Gedenk- und Dokumentationsstätte Konzentrationslager Welzheim

Description

At the centre of the culture of remembrance stands the Schutzhaftlager Welzheim, a detention site operated by the Gestapo in the Württemberg town of Welzheim east of Stuttgart.

In 1935 the Gestapo Stuttgart took over the former district court prison; the four-sided, three-storey building dating from around 1820 stood behind the old district court at the Upper Market Square. The associated grounds of roughly 1,500 m² between today’s Schillerstraße and Murrhardter Straße were enclosed by a five‑metre‑high wall. The former district court building served as the command headquarters and as the residence of the camp leadership.

The camp fulfilled different functions: with the outbreak of the war foreign‑language prisoners were added; earlier, after the Reichspogromnacht many of the approximately 2,000 Jewish men arrested in Baden, Württemberg and Hohenzollern were brought to Welzheim. At times the Schutzhaftlager functioned as a transit station to concentration camps such as Dachau or Buchenwald; at other times it served for the “disciplining” or the targeted destruction of individual inmates. Polish prisoners accused of “forbidden” contacts with German women were hanged in their home localities or in the Welzheimer Steinbruch; at least six Russian prisoners were brought there to be shot. Prisoners performed forced labour in factories, in fields, in forestry work and on farms. A small carpentry group produced furniture and carried out construction work for a women’s labour‑education camp erected in Rudersberg in 1942; the camp carpentry shop also produced devices for executions, and a portable gallows was built in the prison yard. Executions took place in the so‑called Henkersteinbruch; at least 65 people were killed there.

The founder and first commandant (1935–1940) was Karl Buck; he was described as a “desk perpetrator” (Schreibtischtäter), since he instigated mistreatment by guards through humiliations. His deputy and camp administrator from 1940 to 1945 was Hermann Eberle, who committed suicide in 1949 during a Spruchkammer hearing.

On 25 April 1945 the camp was evacuated; the prisoners were driven on forced marches toward the Bodensee with the aim of not leaving them alive to the advancing Allied troops. In early May the last guards fled after first burning documents; similar destructions in the Gestapo Stuttgart have severely limited the source material. A former prisoner summed it up: “The whole camp was nothing but a chamber of torture.”

During the demolition of the former camp building a scratched wooden board was found bearing the words: “The lock will soon give way / however heavily barred it may be / go your way / upright and unshaken.” On 15 April 2020 the square in front of the former command headquarters was named Hermann‑Schlotterbeck‑Platz; on 27 April 2025 a memorial and documentation centre on the history of the Schutzhaftlager Welzheim was opened in a preserved outbuilding there.