Lager Lindele

The barracks on the hill

Biberach became a garrison town in June 1939, a few months before the war, and the Wehrmacht put up a barracks camp north of the town at the Lindele. Its first occupants were the soldiers of a replacement battalion of Infantry Regiment 56, moved there from Weinsberg; they marched out again at the beginning of September, and the camp stood largely empty until the first prisoners arrived in August 1940.

Through the war it was an isolated run of huts with no greenery inside the wire, far from the edge of the town, surrounded by fields and meadows with a dark line of fir wood on the horizon that the inmates took to calling the Black Forest. A main building with a small clock tower in the middle of it is the thing former internees remembered best. Those huts were still standing when the riot police moved in and were used well into the 1970s.

Garrison, prisoners and deportees

The first prisoners were British officers taken around Dunkirk and later in Greece, who arrived from August 1940; the camp was guarded as Oflag VB, the second officers’ camp in the Stuttgart military district. In December 1940 nine hundred French prisoners were held there, and the British followed at Easter 1941. Shortly before the British were moved on, twenty-six of them escaped in September 1941 through a tunnel more than forty metres long, dug from under the stove plate of a hut close to the wire. Four reached the Swiss border near Schaffhausen and returned to England by way of France, Spain and Gibraltar.

From November 1941 several transports brought an estimated five to six hundred Soviet prisoners of war, exhausted and close to starvation, driven up from Biberach station by back streets under guard from the base camp at Ludwigsburg. In the first weeks after their arrival 146 of them died. Until February 1942 the Lindele was a shadow camp, meaning that it had no guard unit of its own and was administered from Ludwigsburg. Between March and September 1942 the camp held Serbo-Croat officers, more than forty of whom got out through a hole in the fence during a football match on the parade ground; all were recaptured.

At the end of September 1942 the transports from the station were no longer of soldiers but of older men, women and whole families, and the change was noticed in the town. The Lindele became the civilian internment camp Ilag VB, holding around a thousand people deported from the occupied Channel Islands; about nine hundred of them came from Guernsey, while those from Jersey went to the castle at Wurzach and the young men to Laufen near Salzburg. An account of the Jersey internees records that on 30 October 1942 some six hundred civilian prisoners, men, women and children, were transferred out of the Lindele to the former prisoner-of-war camp Oflag VC at Wurzach Castle. In December 1942 the Wehrmacht declined to go on guarding women and children and handed the camp to the Schutzpolizei.

Responsibility for the camp lay with the Württemberg interior ministry in Stuttgart, which paid the German staff of the camp administration through the district office at Biberach, while the Wehrmacht provided only the buildings, the basic rations and a paymaster. Representatives of the foreign ministry visited regularly, the Gestapo kept sight of what went on, and all incoming and outgoing mail for Biberach and for the neighbouring camps at Wurzach and Liebenau was censored at Biberach. The internee report forms filled in at the camp carried two annotations: whether the person was willing to be exchanged, and whether they were counted as Aryan.

Life inside the wire

The internees’ complaint was first of all of crowding: as many as nineteen people to a room. The Lindele was laid out as a family camp, but men and women slept in separate huts, which bore hardest on younger couples; twenty-six children were nonetheless born there. The climate was unfamiliar to people from the Channel Islands — washing froze stiff on the line in the winter of 1942 to 1943 — and wood and coal were rationed, so the huts were cold. They were locked at night, and guards patrolled outside with dogs running loose.

Against that, the internees were fed better than the German population around them, through the International Red Cross. Parcels came from India, Canada and later America, some of them addressed to individuals, and all were taken to a hut of their own where the contents were stored, portioned and distributed. The German guards are said to have joked that the wire was there to keep the people of Biberach off the food.

In August 1943, once the first difficulties had settled, the internees held a British summer carnival, dressing up and parading, dancing, and putting on entertainments for children and adults. The people of Biberach thought the British were keeping Shrovetide in August. Photographs and a sixteen-millimetre film were made of it as German propaganda, to show how well the civilians were being treated; the internees did not object, taking it as a demonstration that they were not being ground down. The Lindele was, in that sense, a camp meant to be shown.

The exchange Jews

Towards the end of the war the Lindele served the SS and the foreign ministry as a kind of exchange camp. The German authorities had found that Britain would release a limited number of Germans abroad in return for Jews allowed into Palestine, and that the United States would admit a limited number of named Jews from the occupied territories. Many of those named had already been killed, so from 1943 the SS gathered other Jews — people who had fled to the Netherlands, people held by the Italians in North Africa and in Italy, people with family ties to Britain or America, and holders of provisional South American papers — in particular sections of Bergen-Belsen. In the language of the time they were exchange Jews.

In November 1944 a transport brought 149 North African Jews to Biberach, arrested by the Italians in Tripoli and Benghazi, interned in camps in Italy and taken to Bergen-Belsen when Italy changed sides in 1943; among them were 29 children, 56 women and 64 men. All of them suffered from an infectious eye disease and from ulcers. In January 1945 a second group arrived when an exchange train bound for Switzerland stopped at Biberach and again at Meckenbeuren, the station for the camp at Liebenau, taking on internees holding valid American passports and putting off an equal number of Jews from Bergen-Belsen. Alemannia Judaica gives that January group as 133 people, mostly Dutch Jews, of them 26 children, 39 men and 68 women; Reinhold Adler, writing from the camp records, puts the number set down at the Lindele at 92. Both accounts describe the arrivals as half starved and lice-ridden.

A camp designed for eight or nine hundred people now held more than 1,300, its highest occupancy of the whole war. The permanent exhibition on the site counts more than three hundred Jews brought from Bergen-Belsen in 1944, of whom seven died, and at least nine deaths among the exchange Jews altogether.

Seven of the dead of those transports lie in the Jewish cemetery at Laupheim: Arthur Nathan, born in Trieste in 1891, who reached Biberach on 17 November 1944 and died in the camp hospital eight days later; Franz Lassally, born in Hamburg in 1901, and John Hasenberg, born in Neumünster in 1892, both of whom died on the January transport on 23 January 1945; Leon Julius Redner, a Hamburg hide merchant born in 1916, who died at the end of January; Hermann Feinstein, born in 1876; Elazar Schönberg, born in Auschwitz in 1885; and Dierck Simon Langedyk, born in Groningen in 1891, blind, and president of the league of blind Jews in Amsterdam. Several were first buried in the Catholic or Protestant cemeteries in Biberach and moved to Laupheim in December 1945 and January 1946. Leopold Caspary, whose arrival at the Lindele the British camp register recorded on 17 November 1944, died at the Jordanbad in 1947 and was buried at Laupheim too.

Liberation and the DP camp of 1945

French troops liberated the camp on 23 April 1945. The end of the camp did not come at once: the Channel Islanders were flown to England only at the beginning of June, and the Jewish families, who could not return to the Netherlands, were treated as stateless and cared for by UNRRA at the Jordanbad, the spa outside the town, where they stayed until they had recovered and were released. It is this interval that the Arolsen inventory records as DP-Camp Lindele, with Jewish and Ukrainian people among those held and a closing date of 1 June 1945.

The Lindele was one entry in a whole town’s worth of displaced persons accommodation. In the French zone Biberach lay in district Süd, under UNRRA Team 209 with Mr J. J. de Marnhac as team director, Area Team AT 5 at Ravensburg from 1 June 1947, Area A 3 Württemberg, and a field supervisor at Waldsee, Mr R. Rodie. Besides the Lindele the inventory lists the Gaisental camp in the former Reich Labour Service huts, predominantly Polish, closing on 1 March 1947; DP-Camp No. 1 at Karlstraße 9–11 in the former district command; DP-Camp No. 7 in the Ulmer Straße; DP-Camp No. 10 at the Jordanbad, the former spa, closing on 1 July 1950; DP-Camp No. 13 at Laupheim; a former girls’ school at Wielandstraße 30; the former Ottenbacher huts in the Freiburger Straße; a private house at Dinglingerstraße 24; and the Schussenried asylum, queried as No. 6.

A further entry covers displaced persons living free in the town rather than in a camp, lodged in the former municipal inn in the Gymnasiumstraße, the Drei Könige, the old Schlee factory, the Café Müller, the former agricultural school, a former party welfare kindergarten, the Gasthaus Rössle, the Hotel Biber and the Goldener Adler at Aufhofen. Anyone tracing a family through Biberach is therefore looking not at one camp but at a network of addresses, and the inventory points at the papers that record them: the occupancy and change reports for the town and district in the ITS collections, document IDs 81970458 to 81970734, and the district administration’s displaced persons files of 1945 to 1951 in the Kreisarchiv Biberach.

Refugee camp, hospital and police school

After the liberation the site became a refugee camp and a hospital for returning German prisoners of war, a use the police university’s chronology runs to 1962; the published excerpt from the 2002 camp history adds that German prisoners of war were held there first and that the camp later served as a reception camp for expellees and refugees. In 1951 the riot police of Württemberg-Hohenzollern moved in. The wartime huts were cleared only gradually: they were still in use in the 1970s, with the administration in the old main building under its clock tower, and the site was rebuilt between 1970 and 1976. Since 2014 it has been part of the Hochschule für Polizei Baden-Württemberg.

The town of Biberach published Reinhold Adler’s history of the camp in 2002, and a permanent exhibition built on panels from the Museum Biberach now stands on the police campus. On 23 April 2023 a sculpture by Robert Schad, Der Schrei, was set up outside the former camp at the town’s commission in memory of the victims of the Lindele.

The connections made in the camp outlasted it. Guernsey and Biberach are partner towns because of the deportees, and the Jewish families who passed through wrote about it afterwards: Marietta Moskin, born in Vienna in 1928, who told the story of her group in a book for American schoolchildren that Biberach pupils translated in 2002 and 2003, and Irene Hasenberg-Butter, whose father died on the January 1945 transport and whose body was unloaded at Biberach station.

The deportees kept returning. In September 2002 a group of around thirty people, including the Bailiff and members of the Deportees’ Association and the Council of Churches, travelled from Guernsey to Biberach for the dedication of a new memorial commemorating by name those who died at the Lindele.