The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945

The facility that held the WG in Freiburg im Breisgau (map 4f) was commissioned in 1878 as “Grand Duke-Baden State Prison (Landesgefängnis) Freiburg (Central Corrections Facility),” and completed in October of the same year. A star-shaped or radial building with five wings, it was modeled after the so-called Pennsylvania style of modern American prisons of the time. At the beginning of Germany’s war with France in 1939, civilian prisoners in what was then known as Freiburg State Prison were transferred to other prisons in Württemberg, farther from the French border. From February 1940, Freiburg State Prison served almost exclusively as a WG; only a few cells on one floor of one of the facility’s five wings were used for civilian prisoners.

Little archival documentation for WG Freiburg exists. Neither the average occupancy of the prison nor exact counts of incoming and outgoing prisoners and convicts can be determined. There are also few precise records about the guard personnel, and the names of the commandants are unknown. The only available sources concerning the prison are unpublished memoirs of former prisoners and members of the guard and administrative staff.

One of these memoirs was written by a former Luftwaffe noncommissioned officer (NCO) who had been stationed at the air base in Freiburg since 1941. He was arrested in August 1942 for expressing criticisms in letters to his wife and his father, which were discovered by the censor, and charged with undermining the military’s fighting strength (Wehrkraftzersetzung) and violating the treason law. He had been taken to WG Freiburg on remand. He wrote that he

was, as a prisoner on remand, naturally in solitary confinement, in a cell which consisted of a cot with 2 wool blankets and a head wedge, a very small table with stools and a built-in latrine in one corner. The barred window was so high that I couldn’t see even a slice of heaven from it…. Luckily I was permitted to read in Freiburg—newspapers as well as books from the library. These books were then mostly old tomes, but there were nevertheless perhaps interesting works among them. I had a penchant for reading travel literature like that of Sven Hedin and other researchers in the Arctic and Antarctica. The approved periodical holdings furthermore had the advantage of being able to protect me from the increasingly cold nights—in which I spread newspapers under the bed linens and between the blankets…. Since I [was rushed to the prison] after the imprisonment … around mid-morning, “lunch” came a short time afterwards: 2 so-called helpers [Kalfaktoren] went from cell door to cell door with a large bucket full of soup, opened the little flap in the iron door, and handed us through a tin bowl and a spoon. This first “mealtime” has stayed in my memory. It was a soup made of red cabbage with chunks of potato, and if my appetite wasn’t already gone anyway, it was then. I poured the swill in the toilet as not to allow the opinion to develop that I was satisfied. Initially, however, I went hungry for a few days with the exception of the dry army bread in the morning…. As I gradually got my wits about me again, I wrote my brother—who is a lawyer and attorney—a letter and asked him to procure legal aid for me and to explain my fate to my poor parents. Postal transport was granted to prisoners on remand, even if every letter that came and went was also read and stamped by the censor…. After a few days, and before some legal steps had been taken, I was transferred to the WG of Berlin-Tegel.¹

Little other information is available about the daily life of prisoners in the WG or the labor the prisoners had to perform. Residents of the city recalled that the prisoners were used for heavy loading and unloading work in nearby freight yards. It is also reported that the prisoners had to perform punitive physical exercise while burdened with bricks.

Executions are known to have been carried out at WG Freiburg. The above-quoted Luftwaffe NCO had been forced to participate as a rifleman in a firing squad at the prison in 1941, prior to his own imprisonment. He recalled that

[o]n the next morning the whole company was marched at gunpoint to the site of the shooting range and arranged in the prescribed order. We eight riflemen had one live cartridge each and stood in a double column approx. eight meters [26 feet] in [End Page 664] front of the pole, which was generally designated as a stake. Shortly thereafter a truck came: In its bed sat a delinquent shackled with long chains, the Oberfeldwebel from the WG and two other escorts were with him. The poor guy was deathly pale and couldn’t walk anymore. So he was propped up by the two escorts and dragged to the pole, and his chains were rewound around the pole. He clearly would have fallen to the ground without this. This dragging to the pole was a heart-wrenching sight. Now everything went according to plan: The court martial official read the verdict once more, the military priest said a short prayer and crossed himself. Then the poor guy was blindfolded and the troop doctor pinned a paper patch as a target on his canvas jacket, over his heart. An officer stood nearby, pistol drawn, who would have shot the delinquent once more out of mercy [Gnadenschuss] if he was not killed immediately…. On the signal of a whistle we then had to shoot into the patch, and thereby into his heart. After the shooting the guy’s head drooped—he had surely endured no more bodily pain, provided that he still had his senses. Afterwards the chains were taken off again, the patch was checked for the 8 shots—it was previously said to us that he who didn’t shoot would be punished. I had actually played with this idea, but then forgot about it; because the execution would be completed at any rate…. The aftermath was then particularly shameful: before the dead were laid in the coffin that was brought along, someone took off his lace-up shoes—clearly “objects necessary to the war!”²

Residents reported that the executed inmates were buried in a special section of the Freiburg Cemetery (Hauptfriedhof), which is located near the prison. However, because the graves of all soldiers buried at the cemetery were ceremonially adorned during the war on the so-called Hero’s Memorial Day (Heldengedenktag; March 16 or the Sunday preceding March 16), it was possible to determine which graves were for executed prisoners, as they were the only ones not decorated. In this way, they could also discern how many executions there had been in the last year since the last Hero’s Memorial Day. However, these numbers were apparently not recorded, and thus it is not known how many prisoners were executed at WG Freiburg.

In 1942, the military penal system became harsher through the creation of field penal units (Feldstrafgefangenen-Abteilungen, or FStGAs) and field penal camps (Feldstraflager). WG Freiburg was responsible for one FStGA: FStGA 6, which was deployed to the Eighteenth Army (Armeeoberkommando, AOK 18) in the sector of Army Group North (Heeresgruppe Nord) on the eastern front. Convicted soldiers who had been interned in WG Freiburg and received a sentence of at least three years were transferred to FStGA 6. In mid-1944, during the Wehrmacht’s withdrawal to the west, FStGA 6 was deployed to Army Group G on the Upper Rhine, not far from WG Freiburg. Near the end of the war, the remnants of FStGA 6 were deployed to Army Group Center in Silesia.

WG Freiburg was damaged by a large British bombing raid on the city on the evening of November 27, 1944. The southern wing of the prison, pointing in the direction of the inner city, was partially destroyed. Around 120 military prisoners used this opportunity to escape. A number of prisoners who escaped from the burning prison were scattered in the surrounding streets. There they performed rescue and clearing work in the neighborhood particularly affected by the bombing raid. Many of these prisoners were recaptured and brought back to the prison, while others returned voluntarily the next morning. Heinrich Himmler decided to establish a special Auffangsstab from the army’s Secret Field Police (Geheime Feldpolizei) and Field Gendarmerie (Feldgendarmerie) to find the remaining escapees; nonetheless, many succeeded in either making it to the Allied lines in Alsace or hiding in the Black Forest. One of those who fled that night was the Austrian writer H. C. Artmann (1921–2000), who was able to make it all the way to his hometown of Vienna, where he remained until the end of the war. In an interview shortly before his death, he spoke publicly about his escape from WG for the first time:

In the bombardment of Freiburg half the city was destroyed, this was on November 27, [19]44. I was interned there. And in this attack the prison walls actually fell down. It looked like a doll’s house without the wall. So there I jumped down and took off…. No, first I jumped into shit, since the toilet was there, to put it bluntly, and I looked like a hog. And then I was in the private quarters of the prison director, who thank God was about my size, got undressed, washed, dressed, took his stamps, so I basically robbed [him]. The food stamps…. Yeah, you got these stubs there. You definitely needed them, otherwise you didn’t get anything. I stuffed them in my pocket. And then I was out, as a civilian. Then I helped with the rescue efforts a little. The whole city was ablaze. Yeah, and then I [took off] toward … Donaueschingen …. Well, anywhere the Donau flowed. . . I also hid myself there. But there was a son-in-law there, an SS man, and this was very dangerous. But he’d already had it up to here…. Yeah, and so then I took off from there and took a train without a ticket (bin schwarzgefahren).³

After the bombing raid, the remaining prisoners were transferred to Wildflecken. For a short time, the prison was nearly empty, but, in March 1945, a group of civilian prisoners from Alsace were transferred to Freiburg from Wildflecken. As French tanks rolled into the city on April 21, 1945, the last prisoners were released by remaining prison [End Page 665] personnel. Until the summer of 1947, the French occupation authorities used the former WG as a military prison. It was also used to house the local Nazi functionaries in the first months after the war.