Crowded in between an old lime tree and the gatehouse in the cemetery in Langhennersdorf in Saxony is a wooden Star of David: “Here Rest Nine Jews – Victims of Fascism”. The grave marker, which has been renewed again and again over the years, goes back to the parish pastor.

On 12 March 1945, hundreds of exhausted human beings dragged themselves into the village. They were on a death march from Kittlitztreben (Trzebień), a subcamp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Seven inmates died of enfeeblement when the march halted. The SS murdered two others by shooting them in the back of the neck. When the corpses were to be buried in makeshift fashion at the edge of a field, the local pastor Kurt Johann Streubel offered a burial place in the cemetery – in keeping with the wishes of the SS, a group grave.

The death march continued on its way the following day. The SS simply left the bodies of further murdered inmates lying by the roadside. The march arrived in Buchenwald in early April, the last to reach the camp from the east.

(Harry Stein/Christine Schmidt)

 

Reference:

Michael Düsing, “Mein Weg, Herr Oberbürgermeister, ist schon bestimmt”: Judenverfolgung in Freiberg 1933-1945, Dresden 2011.

Hans Brenner, Wolfgang Heidrich, Klaus-Dieter Müller and Dietmar Wendler (eds.), NS-Terror und Verfolgung in Sachsen: Von den frühen Konzentrationslagern bis zu den Todesmärschen, Dresden 2018.