History of Europe

April 1945:Murderous hunt for concentration camp prisoners in Celle

Since 1992, a simple memorial in the Triftanlagen near the Celle train station has commemorated the massacre.

Celle on the afternoon of April 8, 1945:A freight train with open wagons pulls into the station, on board around 3,400 prisoners from the Salzgitter-Drütte and Holzen concentration camps. Most of them are forced laborers from the Soviet Union and Poland. The destination is Bergen-Belsen. The train has to stop in Celle due to technical problems. Allied bombers suddenly appear. An American bomber squadron attacks the freight yard to interrupt supplies for the German troops.

500 prisoners die in the attack

The concentration camp prisoners try to escape the bombs and flee. Among them was Karl Tucht, who recalled in a television interview 40 years later:"The wagons were open a bit. Then I jumped out. And the SS men all got down and lay down in the ditch." The attack lasted 50 minutes and 500 prisoners died in the hail of bombs. There are also dead among the civilian population of Celle.

Wehrmacht orders hunt for escapees

In the late evening the SS rounded up the majority of those who had fled. But many are still hiding, including in the Neustädter Holz, a wooded area near the train station. For the next morning, the city commander of the Wehrmacht, Paul Tzschökell, orders the hunt for the escapees. On April 9, SS men, police officers, firefighters, Volkssturm men, Hitler Youth, but also civilians like the boxer Otto Amelung comb the area near the railway line.

Prisoners are released for firing

It is the beginning of an unprecedented massacre. The SS let it be known to the population that the prisoners were looting and some were armed - and thus declared the escaped prisoners to be a threat that had been cleared to be shot down. Many of Celle's population became eyewitnesses. Adolf Völker, who was a teenager in 1945, recalled in a television report on NDR in 1985:"Soldiers built up a line of riflemen in our front gardens. This chain of riflemen drove the prisoners before them, who were hiding in the gardens and they were shot at with carbines from both sides if they tried to run away to the side."

Bodies are being collected from the street

The perpetrators act mercilessly. Defenseless prisoners are literally executed with shots in the head. 170 prisoners are murdered. The then 13-year-old Wilhelm Sommer from Celle was presented with a frightening picture, as he reported on NDR television in 1985:"The next day, that is on April 9th, the rail freight forwarder drove through the streets with a trolley, two horses in front, escorted of SS men and prisoners who threw the corpses like sacks onto this wagon."

Some perpetrators are later regarded as respected citizens

On April 12, three days after the manhunt, British troops take the city. The Allies began investigating as early as May 1945. It was not until December 1947 that a military court accused 14 men of murder. Most of them deny the allegations. The verdicts:seven acquittals, four prison terms and three death sentences, which were later commuted to prison terms. The men are free again by 1952 at the latest. And some lead a life as well-respected citizens afterwards.

Bodies are being dug up again

The city pushed the dark chapter aside for years. In 1949 a "resting place for the victims of the Second World War" was set up in the forest cemetery in Celle. The bodies of the murdered prisoners were buried after the war. The bodies are dug up and buried in the cemetery as part of the British military court's investigation. Stones are added later with the names of those killed.

Emergence of the cynical term "hare hunt"

It was not until the 1980s that critical voices were raised that the city should work through the incidents and remember them. Local historian Reinhard Rohde explains that there is now talk of the "Cell rabbit hunt" because some eyewitnesses claim to have seen that the concentration camp prisoners fled like rabbits zigzag across the open field into the forest and were shot by their pursuers. This is how the cynical term "Celler rabbit hunt" came about. Since 1992, a simple memorial has commemorated the massacre in the farmstead near the train station.