The Children of Bullenhuser Damm

 Holocaust Memorial Site at Bullenhuser Damm

B”H

Auschwitz or Treblinka, those names sound very familiar to us. Names of places where the Germans killed millions of people. Especially Jews. One of the most abnormal crimes in German Nazi history, however, took place at the Bullenhuser Damm School in Hamburg. An abnormal crime due to two reasons:

• It took Germany many years taking the responsible SS - Doctor Kurt Heissmeyer to court.
• Because it shows how much the Germans were into their mass extermination. The Nazis even ordered to let more trains filled with Jews into the death camps but, on the other hand, German Wehrmacht soldiers had to wait for their connection trains. Until the last minute of the Third Reich, the killing of the Jews was more important than anything else.

Only a few days before the end of World War II., twenty children were brutally murdered at the Bullenhuser Damm School in Hamburg. Those twenty children originally came from different countries. They were Jewish, had been in Auschwitz but chosen by the SS - Doctor  Joseph Mengele and sent to the Neuengamme concentration camp where they became the victims of medical humans experiments. Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer intended using those children as guinea pigs for his totally insane tuberculosis experiments.  After undergoing all kinds of experiments, the children and their caretakers were put to death. All of them were taken to the school in Hamburg and hung. Starvation had been so bad that the children almost had no weight at all. Hanging the bodies didn't work because the bodies were too light. Then SS - men put the children's head into the rope and pulled them the bodies down themselves.

Further Links on the subject:

Auschwitz - Bullenhuser Damm

Hamburg - Gedenkstaetten

Anne Frank Site