examples – 25 – Deportations, torture, murder, and looting

Deportations, torture, murder, and looting

I spoke with J. on the phone today and told her about my research in the archives and the looting by Schneider documented there during the German occupation. He looted the homes of neighbors who had been deported. He is said to have used vicious dogs to do so. She listened to me in silence and then said, in a clear, bell-like, and slightly breathless girl’s voice, that she now remembered her father once coming home with a dog that had been beaten half to death, and that they had to have it put down.

Photo: drawing of the SS and Gestapo torture camp at Fort Queuleu in the city of Metz. Source: FORT DE METZ-QUEULEU ASSOCIATION in memory of the internees and deportees and for the preservation of the site – https://www.fort-queuleu.com/de/

Everyday life in this torture camp, hidden inside the fortress, began something like this: Someone would pound on the iron gate with a fist; the guards would open the gate, and the prisoners—blindfolded and with their hands bound—would be kicked and shouted at as they were forced down the steep staircase, where the SS waited with their German shepherds. The German SS camp commander, Georg Hempen, had a German shepherd that had been trained to attack people. Her name was Alma.

Drawing from a Soviet gulag

German shepherds are actually herding dogs.

Photo on the right: Fort Queuleu Memorial—Interrogation Room—Georg Hempen, the administrator of the SS special camp, was notorious for his brutality. He was charged with six counts of murder but escaped conviction, which sparked fierce protests in France.

Bader, Uwe: Persecution and Torture in Metz 1943/1944. Georg Hempen and the Special Camp at the Goeben Fortress, *Informationen* No. 72 (2010), p. 24ff.
Moisel, Claudia: France and the German War Criminals. Politics and Practice of Prosecution after World War II, Göttingen 2004, p. 203ff., 213ff.
Judgments of the Oldenburg Regional Court dated September 17, 1964, and May 13, 1969, and decision of the Federal Court of Justice dated February 14, 1966, in: Justice and Nazi Crimes, Vol. XXXII, pp. 149ff.