Members of the Boys were slave labourers in the Barth labour camp, a subcamp of the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Ravensbrück concentration camp was operated by Nazi Germany. The camp had 70 subcamps.
The Boys were teenage and child-Holocaust survivors, who were brought to the UK after the war for rest and rehabilitation.
Barth was a slave labour camp for aviation parts located on the Baltic Sea between Rostock and Stralsund.
The camp was a large subcamp of the Ravensbrück concentration camp and consisted of one section for men and one for women.
History
At the end of April 1942, Rostock had become the target of massive air raids by the Royal Air Force. A quarter of the air raids had been aimed at the Heinkel factory, located on the edge of the city. As a result, Ernst Heinkel AG, Rostock, transferred a part of its aircraft production from its main Rostock factory to Barth in order to protect it from Allied air raids. Force.
Heinkel was one of the first private companies to enter into arrangements with the SS, and as early as the end of 1941 to relied on male prisoners from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in a nearby factory at Oranienburg.
In November 1943, the first 200 prisoners arrived from the Buchenwald concentration camp. They were followed by 300 more from Dachau. In the course of 1944, they were supplemented by around 2,700 forced labourers from the Ravensbrück, Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. A group of 770 arrived in the spring of 1945.
Structure
In 1943, six barracks were separated from the existing barracks there, fenced in and used as accommodation for concentration camp prisoners. Twenty prisoners were housed in a 15sqm room, where they had to sleep on three-story bunk beds. Each prisoner was given only a cotton blanket, a straw mattress and a small pillow.
Men and women from more than 20 nations worked twelve-hour shifts every two weeks. A large number of those persecuted as Jews, Sinti and Roma, and homosexuals were interned in the camp.
The prisoners’ food was extremely poor, and the clothing was inadequate offering little protection from the cold. Many prisoners fell ill with tuberculosis while many starved to death or were shot.
Dissolution & Liberation
On 30 April the prisoners who were strong enough were sent on a death march towards Rostok among them was Davis Eckstein:
“We were told to get into those rows of five and start leaving the camp. Out! A we left the camp everybody got a loaf of bread … we started going and going out of the camp. A lot of us decided they could not make it and stayed in the camp. They were too weak, too sick and as we were marching into the night forming again those rows of five I remember hearing some whoosh. Some of us just leaving and running away into the woods and nobody was shooting but it was too dangerous. But there were always those that dared.”
The march continued for two days and three nights. Five kilometres before Rostok retreating German soldiers on bicycles warned the SS guards that the Russians had taken the city.
“They took all their machine guns and rifles and smashed them on the highway … and we were left without the SS … Just like magic!”
The male prisoners left the camp in three columns. A group of female prisoners left the camp shortly afterwards.
Around 800 female prisoners remained in the camp when the SS guards fled, they were able to escape to the neighbouring town.
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