Qualla: Bullenhuser Damm

Bullenhuser Damm: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC0. Mania Altmann was five years old, from Radom in Poland. So was Eleonora Witonska, deported from the same city with her six-year-old brother Roman and their mother. Sergio De Simone was seven, from Naples. Georges-Andre Kohn and Jacqueline Morgenstern were both twelve, both from Paris. There were twenty children in all, ten boys and ten girls, and the entire purpose of the memorial at 92-94 Bullenhuser Damm is that they are remembered this way - by name, one at a time - rather than folded into a number in a sentence about the last days of the war.

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Image: CC0

Bullenhuser Damm: Radom, Naples, Eindhoven, Paris

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SHGL Hamburg, CC BY-SA 4.0. They came from across occupied Europe. Riwka Herszberg, aged seven, was from Zdunska Wola; Ruchla Zylberberg, eight, from Zawichost; Blumel Mekler, eleven, from Sandomierz; Marek James, six, and Marek Steinbaum, ten, from Radom. Walter Jungleib, twelve, was Slovak. Eduard Hornema...

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Image: SHGL Hamburg | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bullenhuser Damm: Chosen on a Ramp at Auschwitz

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit flamenc, CC BY-SA 3.0. Kurt Heissmeyer was an SS physician who wanted a professorship, and a professorship required original research. His hypothesis - that injecting live tuberculosis bacilli would work as a vaccine - had already been disproven, and he layered onto it the pseudoscience of Nazi racial ...

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Image: flamenc | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bullenhuser Damm: The Night of 20 April 1945

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit flamenc, CC BY-SA 3.0. The school at Bullenhuser Damm, in the bombed-out district of Rothenburgsort, had stopped being a school in 1943; the neighbourhood around it was rubble. In October 1944 the SS turned it into a subcamp of Neuengamme, housing prisoners sent out to clear the debris. It was evacuate...

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Image: flamenc | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bullenhuser Damm: Verdicts, and the Ones That Never Came

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Minderbinder, CC BY-SA 4.0. Most of those involved were tried by a British military court in Hamburg in 1946. Neuengamme's commandant Max Pauly, the camp doctor Alfred Trzebinski, and the guards Wilhelm Dreimann, Adolf Speck, Ewald Jauch and Johann Frahm were sentenced to death and hanged at Hamelin Prison ...

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Image: Minderbinder | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bullenhuser Damm: The Rose Garden

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roland.h.bueb, CC BY 3.0. Survivors of Neuengamme asked for a plaque in the school in 1959. It took until 1963 to agree on wording, and the wording that emerged said nothing about the children being Jewish, gave no names, and left out the Soviet victims entirely. The real recovery of the story belongs lar...

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Image: Roland.h.bueb | CC BY 3.0