Schießplatz Hebertshausen

About

Hebertshausen shooting range (German: Schießplatz Hebertshausen) was a shooting range at Dachau concentration camp, located two kilometres north of the Dachau main camp for SS guards that used Soviet live prisoners of war as targets. It was built in 1937-38 as an expansion to Dachau concentration camp. Between 1941 and 1942, more than 4,000 Soviet prisoners were murdered on the site. These were mainly officers, communist officials, and Jews. The victims were “singled out” according to ideological and racist criteria by Gestapo Einsatzkommandos in the POW camps of the military districts of Munich, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Wiesbaden and Salzburg. After World War II, American troops assumed control of the site and continued to use it as a firing range. It is now a memorial to Nazi victims.

In the 1950s, the land was handed over to the Free State of Bavaria and administered by the Bavarian Ministry of Finance. Since 1997, the site has been in the care of the Foundation of Bavarian Memorial Places (German: Stiftung Bayerische Gedenkstätten), and in 2014, the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site opened a redesigned memorial site upon the grounds.

According to Colonel General Franz Halder, Chief of Staff of the German Army High Command, Germany’s military campaign against Russia aimed, among other things, at the “destruction of the Bolshevik commissars and the Communist intelligence.” Fearing that the Soviet POWs held in camps on German territory could infiltrate the local population and spread communist propaganda, the SS, rather than the Wehrmacht, assumed control of Soviet POWs, in defiance of international law.

The “ Commissar Order ” (Einsatzbefehle) nos. 8 and 9—the so-called Commissar Order—issued by Reinhard Heydrich on 17 and 21 July 1941 to the Einsatzkommandos of the security police and the security service reveal the Nazi leadership’s intentions for Soviet POWs.

As stated in the Commissar Order no. 8, the aim was the “political review of all camp inmates (i.e., Soviet prisoners of war ) and further treatment. Among the prisoners of war are all the important functionaries of the state and the party, especially the functionaries of the Comintern, all the authoritative party functionaries of the CPSU... all people’s commissars... all former political commissars in the Red Army,... the leading personalities of economic life, the Soviet Russian intelligentsia, all Jews, all persons identified as agitators or fanatical communists.”

The Commissar Order no. 9 states, among other things, that the executions of the Russians who have been singled out in POW camps on Reich territory were to be carried out “inconspicuously in the nearest concentration camp.”

The mass executions of Soviet POWs began in August and September 1941, after the Stapostelle Regensburg, among others, initiated the “selection” (Aussonderung) process in the weeks prior. This “selection” was based on the principle of denunciation, which was repeatedly “helped along” by torture. Soviet prisoners of war from the POW camps Hammelburg in the Rhön Mountains (higher officers and enlisted men), Nuremberg-Langwasser, Memmingen, Moosburg and the Stuttgart military districts were “selected” and taken to the Dachau concentration camp.

Gestapo agents accompanied these irregular transports to Dachau. About these transports, Paul Ohlers, head of one of the Einsatzkommandos, recounted that “the Russian prisoners of war were bound together with metal shackles, two men each, during the transport. The transports usually took place at night in the winter of 1941/42 and lasted an average of 12-18 hours. The cars were not heated.”

1 100 officers were brought to Dachau from the officer camp and approximately 2 000 from the enlisted men’s camps in Hammelburg and Nuremberg-Langwasser. Of those “selected” in the POW camps, none survived after being taken to Dachau. According to the instructions stipulated by the SS leadership in Dachau, the names of these POWs were not allowed to be registered in the camp list. Only the numbers of their identification tags could be noted. This procedure was designed to render it impossible to trace and identify these men. In order to keep the shootings secret, the prisoners working in the maintenance building and elsewhere in the vicinity were ordered back to the barracks during the executions which took place in the courtyard of the camp’s prison. The dead were cremated in the camp’s crematorium and in a crematorium in Munich.

Shootings at the SS Shooting Range near Hebertshausen

The SS feared it would be impossible to maintain the secrecy of the executions if they continued within the grounds of the concentration camp and thus transferred the executions to the practice shooting range near Hebertshausen, which lies approximately one and a half kilometers away from the concentration camp. The first executions at the shooting range took place on 4 September 1941 and the last in May and June 1942. Thereafter, additional executions were carried out near the camp’s crematorium. In total, approximately 4,000 Soviet POWs were executed in Dachau, the majority of them at the SS shooting range near Hebertshausen.

The actual location of the mass shootings was the pistol shooting range, which was surrounded by a high wooden fence to prevent observations from the surrounding fields.

According to the testimony of eye witness Joseph Thora, the prisoners were told beforehand that they were about to be murdered, which prompted diverse reactions amongst the prisoners. Some showed practically no reaction and “stood there as if paralyzed; others resisted, began to cry and scream... that they were opponents of Bolshevism, that they were members of the Russian Church.”

While executions are normally aimed at a victim’s chest, the SS in some cases aimed at the victims’ heads, causing the heads to practically “explode.”

Coffins that were used to transport the bodies were stored in a shed built on the eastern edge of the shooting range. These coffins were used to transport the bodies to the camp crematorium and then brought back to the shooting range for reuse. The simple coffins were later lined with zinc sheets to prevent the leakage of blood.

Over the years after the war, human remains were found during the excavations on site in Hebertshausen. It is assumed that the triple number of excavated human skull parts is still in the ground today. The findings shocked and surprised the archaeologists at the same time. Because "typical" executions were usually aimed at the chest. But even the head would only have been pierced with the high-speed projectiles used at that time, but not splintered. An investigation in the Anthropological State Collection in Munich by Olav Röhrer-Ertl then showed "that at least part of the shootings were carried out with increased cruelty."

The mass executions of Soviet POWs began in August and September 1941, after the Stapostelle Regensburg, among others, initiated the “selection” (Aussonderung) process in the weeks prior. This “selection” was based on the principle of denunciation, which was repeatedly “helped along” by torture. Soviet prisoners of war from the POW camps Hammelburg in the Rhön Mountains (higher officers and enlisted men), Nuremberg-Langwasser, Memmingen, Moosburg and the Stuttgart military districts were “selected” and taken to the Dachau concentration camp.

Gestapo agents accompanied these irregular transports to Dachau. About these transports, Paul Ohlers, head of one of the Einsatzkommandos, recounted that “the Russian prisoners of war were bound together with metal shackles, two men each, during the transport. The transports usually took place at night in the winter of 1941/42 and lasted an average of 12-18 hours. The cars were not heated.”

1 100 officers were brought to Dachau from the officer camp and approximately 2 000 from the enlisted men’s camps in Hammelburg and Nuremberg-Langwasser. Of those “selected” in the POW camps, none survived after being taken to Dachau. According to the instructions stipulated by the SS leadership in Dachau, the names of these POWs were not allowed to be registered in the camp list. Only the numbers of their identification tags could be noted. This procedure was designed to render it impossible to trace and identify these men. In order to keep the shootings secret, the prisoners working in the maintenance building and elsewhere in the vicinity were ordered back to the barracks during the executions which took place in the courtyard of the camp’s prison. The dead were cremated in the camp’s crematorium and in a crematorium in Munich.

The SS feared it would be impossible to maintain the secrecy of the executions if they continued within the grounds of the concentration camp and thus transferred the executions to the practice shooting range near Hebertshausen, which lies approximately one and a half kilometers away from the concentration camp. The first executions at the shooting range took place on 4 September 1941 and the last in May and June 1942. Thereafter, additional executions were carried out near the camp’s crematorium. In total, approximately 4,000 Soviet POWs were executed in Dachau, the majority of them at the SS shooting range near Hebertshausen.