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RAF photo - Hamburg-Wandsbek bombing
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In June 1944, a transport from Ravensbrück concentration camp brought nearly 500 women to Hamburg-Wandsbek for forced labour. The camp became part of the Neuengamme camp system on 1 September 1944.
Most of the women here came from Poland or the Soviet Union, though there were also women from Slovenia, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Czechoslovakia among them. They were forced to make gas masks for the Drägerwerk in Hamburg. In the last weeks of the war they also carried out clearance work in Hamburg following bomb attacks. Drägerwerk also carried out experiments to determine how long someone could survive in a gas-proof air-raid shelter without a ventilation system and the prisoners from the Wandsbek camp were taken to experimental air-raid shelters throughout Hamburg for these experiments.
In April 1945, another transport of women from the Helmstedt-Beendorf satellite camp reached Hamburg-Wandsbek. Most of the women from the Wandsbek camp were like in other camps at the end of WWII loaded on the trains, often called spoke trains. It is likely that such a train from Hamburg was redirected to Padborg in Denmark on 1 May 1945. From there after Danish Red cross help the inmates continued to Sweden.
Padborg.
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Pictures below from Eli Verdoners photo album: My Time in Sweden, 1945.
Places mentioned: Malmö, Robertshöjd, Hindås, Aspendalen, Mölle. Persons mentioned: Lindhal, Hellman, Hansje Droekhuysen. |
Eli Verdoners photo album: My Time in Sweden, 1945. Linnéskolan Beredskapssjukhus.
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Eli Verdoners photo album: My Time in Sweden, 1945. Linnéskolan Beredskapssjukhus.
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| Eli Verdoners photo album: My Time in Sweden, 1945. Nurses and friends. |
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Eli Verdoners photo album: My Time in Sweden, 1945. Robertshöjd.
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| The history of the Verdoner family can be followed on the Dutch Judenrats Pink Registration Cards that were overtaken by Germans and filled with the information about deportations to different camps- There is also information about their death like on the card of Salomon, father of Esther that was murdered in Auschwitz. After WWII ended the Dutch Red Cross took over Pink cCards and used them to trace Holocaust survivors. |
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| Esther Verdoner worked as slave worker at Philips factory |
Esther Eli Verdoner was born on 25 May 1927 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the daughter of Salomon -Shlomo and Alida (nee Hammel) Verdoner. After the German occupation of the Netherlands, Shlomo and Esther's sister Heintje were fired from their work. Esther describes the establishment of the Jewish Council, the duty to wear a yellow badge, and the roundup of books by Jewish authors to have them burned. In late 1941, Salomon was sent to labor camps in the Netherlands. In May 1942, having received an order to report at the roundup point, Heintje, found shelter in the home the Fejmans family, former neighbors. She later went back home and hide in the attic. Two months later, on 16 July 1943, she and her family were among the last Jews taken from the homes to the roundups point in Amsterdam. Her father held a certificate for being a vital worker as a diamond cutter, and the family was therefore sent after five days to the Vught camp, see big red
V in the top right corner. The girls were separated from the father, their mother was sent to work in a textile factory, and the girls started working at the Philips factory. On 15 November 1943, Alida and the other 1,200 workers were sent to Auschwitz, where she died of typhus on 31 January 1944. Shlomo was sent to the Westerbork transit camp with other men in March 1944. He died one year later, in March 1945, in the Auschwitz camp. In 1944, Esther and Heintje were also sent to Auschwitz, where they managed to stay together. After a few weeks, they were sent to the Reichenbach camp in Germany, where they worked for Telefunken, a business partner of Philips. On 20 January 1945, they were marched to the Sportschule camp. One month later, they were marched once again, this time to Trautenau (Trutnow). From there, they were sent to the Aussenlager Porta camp in Germany, and worked in a Philips factory in Hausberge. In April, they were moved once again from one camp to another and were employed in digging trenches. On 1 May 1945 Esther arrived to Padborg, Denmark. She arrived on a spoke train with other inmates. Six months later, in November 1945, sisters returned to the Netherlands. Heintje found a job and returned to the Fejmans residence. Esther went to nursing school in Santpoort. In 1948, Esther immigrated to Israel, where she married Abraham – Bob Cohen – Ferera and started a family. She died in 2019.
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| Padborg |
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| Padborg |
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| Padborg |
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| Padborg |
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| Padborg |
From August 1944, up to 2,500 mostly German, Soviet, Polish, and French female prisoners also arrived on several transports from Ravensbrück concentration camp to work in Beendorf in the context of the Jägerstab (“Fighter Staff”). The Jägerstab had been established by the Ministry of Armaments and War Production in March 1944 under the leadership of SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler, an architect, to coordinate the relocation of production facilities critical to the war effort in order to protect them from bomb attacks. The female prisoners produced munitions for the Air Force as well as parts (autopilots, controls, steering gears, etc.) for the Me 262 aircraft and the V1 and V2 rockets. The prisoners worked for 12 hours a day on the machines, which were between 425 and 465 meters underground. The women were lowered down the shaft in small cages.The relocation projects for Askania Werke AG from Berlin and the Hakenfelde GmbH aeronautical equipment plant to the “Marie” (Beendorf) and “Bartensleben” (Morsleben) tunnels were given the code names “Bulldogge” and “Iltis”.On 10 April 1945, both men and woman camps in Helmstedt-Beendorf were evacuated, and the women and men were loaded onto cattle wagons and taken via Magdeburg, Stendal and Wittenberg to the Wöbbelin “reception camp”, which they reached on 16 April. The men stayed there but the women continued on. Their train stopped for three days at the railway station in Sülstorf in Mecklenburg, and the many women who died there of starvation and thirst were hastily buried by the inhabitants of the village. On 20 or 21 April, the train reached Hamburg and the prisoners were distributed to the largely empty Hamburg satellite camps of Eidelstedt, Langenhorn, Sasel, and Wandsbek. Most of the prisoners were able to leave Hamburg on the train on 1 May, which took the women to Padborg in Denmark and then to Malmö in Sweden. That was the way some of the women from the Diamantairs group in Bergen-Belsen landed in Sweden.
