Published on 12 November 2018
Many crimes in which members of Hohenheim Agricultural College participated during the Nazi era remain invisible on campus. The victims are far away: In Poland, Russia, or the Ukraine, for example, where scientifically designed plans for expropriating farms or settling “ethnic German” farmers were implemented. The nearly 250 women, men, and children who were used as forced laborers in Hohenheim during the war are an exception to this. Still, their fate had been largely forgotten. After the capitulation in 1945, the College was not aware of any wrongdoing in regard to the exploited people. Historian Dr. Anja Waller aims to return their history to them.
Was there a cross, a headstone? Nothing indicates that there was. In the University of Hohenheim’s administration, 70 years after they were buried, no one remembered that the remains of Isabella Sikorska and Peter Ralintschenko are located under the narrow green strip on the edge of the University Cemetery. They had been forgotten, and grass had grown over their graves.
Historian Dr. Anja Waller was made aware of the fate of the two forced laborers in the course of her research in the Red Cross’s International Tracing Service’s Archive and in the City Archive’s death records. The files showed that both Sikorska and Ralintschenko had died in Hohenheim in 1945 and were buried on campus. The historian was then able to find the graves on old cemetery maps. In the more recent maps, the graves were no longer shown.
Victims to be Given a Face
In its anniversary year, for the first time the University of Hohenheim took action to remember its past: Both Sikorska and Ralintschenko are to receive a headstone on 20 November 2018 during a memorial event, over 70 years after their anonymous burial. A sculpture at the entrance of the University Cemetery is to inform visitors about the fate of the forced laborers in Hohenheim.
“Almost nothing is known about the biographies of Isabelle Sikorska and Peter Ralintschenko, just as is the case with most of the almost 250 women and men who were forced to work for a pittance between 1940 and 1945 in Hohenheim,” stated Waller. “In my work, it was therefore very important to me to not only name the perpetrators and describe who was responsible, but also to give the victims back their faces and their stories. That is my goal even though this was only possible in bits and pieces for the Hohenheim forced laborers because of the extremely scarce source material.”
Atrocities Increased toward End of War
The Polish woman Isabella Sikorska was 56 years old when she was arrested in September 1944 in Warsaw. Before that, the Polish national army had unsuccessfully fought against the German occupying forces in a 63-day uprising. The Warsaw Uprising was the largest armed resistance during the Second World War. The result was mass murders of the population and deportation. Isabella Sikorska was probably first taken to the concentration camp in Bergen-Belson and then to Ravensbrück.
To prevent them being liberated by the approaching Soviet troops, during the final months of the war the National Socialists successively closed the concentration camps close to the front and forced the prisoners to march toward the center of the Reich or locked them in train cars to be transported. Many of the prisoners who were not able to march were shot. Many others froze or starved to death.
Long Path of Suffering to Hohenheim
One of the locations the female inhabitants of concentration camps were crowded together toward the end of the war was the women’s concentration camp in Ravensbrück. From there, in March 1945 Isabella Sikorska was brought to Stuttgart with a group of 120 women and children - probably because the camp was overcrowded.
The women had apparently originally been intended as forced laborers for a Bosch ammunition factory, but before they arrived it was destroyed in an air raid. The forced laborers were therefore sent to other locations. Hohenheim Agricultural College probably had put in a request - and the request was fulfilled.
Nothing is known about the conditions under which the women were transported from Ravensbrück to Stuttgart. It is only clear that a group of 29 starving, weak, and sick women and children arrived in Hohenheim on 13 March 1945. One woman died shortly after her arrival. Some, such as the 13-year-old Eulalia Grzymna, who was deported first to Auschwitz and then Ravensbrück after the Warsaw Uprising, had a very long road of suffering behind them.
Isabella Sikorska died six days after her arrival in Hohenheim. On her death certificate, the cause of death is given as “cardiac insufficiency, pneumonia.”
No Awareness of Wrongdoing
“It was the final weeks of the war, and only the most blind Nazi followers could have still believed the war could still be won. Still, at Hohenheim Agricultural College, apparently even during this time there was no reflection, no sympathy,” stated Waller. “The University members complained about the poor work and the high rates of sickness among the new arrivals, which in many cases made it impossible to use them for agriculture as had been planned. They were not interested in the unfathomable suffering that the women from the concentration camp had endured. Even after Germany’s capitulation, those at the College had no sense of wrongdoing when it came to the forced laborers. After all, they had only made use of what had been a legal option.”
Lured, Kidnapped, Deported
In all, Hohenheim Agricultural College used at least 242 forced laborers between 1940 and 1945, almost two-thirds of whom were women. For the most part they were young adults, but children and adolescents were also forced to work. There were also five toddlers between the ages of 0 and 3 who were brought to Hohenheim together with their mothers or who were born during their time in Germany. The oldest forced laborer in Hohenheim was 69 years old.
The ways in which the people became forced laborers differed greatly. They included prisoners of war and people who were abducted in broad daylight. Many of their stories are completely unknown. Especially at the beginning of the war, however, many people were lured to Germany under false pretenses.
“The terms ‘recruit’ and ‘voluntary’ really need to be put in quotation marks when it comes to this matter,” emphasized Waller. “The National-Socialist occupation policies meant that many people lost their livelihood, e.g. in Poland. In many cases, they would have had to become forced laborers there, as well. Many were therefore lured to Germany with promises of better working conditions. But as word slowly spread about the reality in Germany, the Nazi occupation forces were no longer able to find any ‘volunteers.’”
Personal Contact Prevented
Forced laborers also came to Hohenheim through unofficial channels. For example, the Hohenheim Professor Gustav Rösch, who was drafted to the Waffen-SS at the time and assigned to the SS Settlement Department in Posen, brought the Polish woman Marianne Skowronska back with him when he returned from his foreign assignment in 1940. Until the end of the war, she worked as his personal maid.
“The Nazi regime tried at any cost to avoid personal contact between Germans and forced laborers. They passed many regulations and took precautions. That was why using forced laborers in private households was prohibited at first,” explained Waller. “However, Rösch’s behavior was probably not an isolated case, and so in 1942 loyal party members were retroactively permitted to use foreign maids.”
“Ordering” from the Employment Office
Normally, the “orders” for cheap laborers were placed by sending a form to the city’s employment office.
Depending on their heritage, they were kept in records with harmless sounding designations such as “foreign civilian worker,” “Eastern worker,” or “Western worker.” For each group, there were different, precisely defined regulations for how they were to be treated and paid that were oriented on the Nazi racial hierarchy. Forced laborers with “Germanic ethnicity” were treated better than “foreign ethnicities.”
Hohenheim’s forced laborers came from at least 12 different countries. Most of them came from Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, others from France, Czechia, and Armenia. They were primarily used for agricultural work but also in institutes, the Palace, or in the Horticultural School and later in private households.
Agriculture Becomes Experimental Field
The system of placing forced laborers was planned long in advance. Years before the war started, the Nazi regime worked out comprehensive plans to use prisoners of war in order to mitigate anticipated labor shortages in agriculture. Starting in 1940, these plans were efficiently implemented without delay.
“When it became clear that the agricultural sector would need more laborers than originally planned - and that workers were also urgently needed in the industrial sector, the model was systematically expanded and new recruitment paths were established. The early phase of agricultural forced labor can be seen as a kind of experiment that was used to gather experience for other areas,” said Waller.
Hohenheim Allocated Many Laborers
The institutes at Hohenheim Agricultural College took advantage of this opportunity right from the start.
As an up and coming National-Socialist model institute, they apparently had close connections with the respective agencies. Hohenheim presidents in part went to the employment office in person to explain Hohenheim’s needs and present their particular wishes. In fact, many of the Hohenheim forced laborers had an agricultural background or had even been educated in the area of agriculture.
Not all of the nearly 250 forced laborers who were used in Hohenheim during the war were there at the same time. Some only stayed for one harvest season, other stayed for several years until the end of the war. In many cases, the exact duration of their stay cannot be pinpointed. It can be assumed that the locations in which they worked changed according to the seasonal needs of agriculture.
“When we realize that in the summer semester 1942 only 51 students were enrolled and 8 out of 12 professors had been drafted to the Wehrmacht, it becomes clear how much of a presence the forced laborers must have been in Hohenheim,” commented Waller. “Their comparatively large number can be seen as further proof of the importance placed on the College and agriculture by the Nazi regime until the very end.”
Living Conditions Remain a Mystery
The forced laborers in large companies, for example Daimler-Benz-AG, usually left in close quarters in mass housing and received insufficient medical care from doctors who happened to live among them. In contrast, at Hohenheim Agricultural College things were different.
Depending on where the laborers were used, their housing was distributed across the campus or by distant experimental fields. Buildings such as the “Roman Tavern” in the Exotic Garden were converted just as were simple barns, storage areas, or unoccupied rooms in institutes. There was a discussion about opening a central housing facility at the College, but the decision was made not to do it because they were worried it would take too much time to build it.
“The living conditions of the forced laborers in Hohenheim can be reconstructed only in fragments due to the scarcity of source material. Especially the provision of heating fuel seems to have been a serious problem in the housing, however,” reported Waller. “For example, an incident in a housing unit on Garbe street created an annoyance, as the Ukrainian forced laborers used parts of their bedframes and straw sacks for fuel.”
Medical Care
Because there was no doctor among the Hohenheim forced laborers, medical care that was absolutely necessary was done by the general physician in Plieningen.
“However, the health of the forced laborers was only a concern if it endangered productivity,” emphasized Waller. “In a way, the forced laborers were a kind of ‘equipment’ for the College that only needed to be maintained like they made sure that the tractors and greenhouses were functioning.”
The way in which the death of the Russian forced laborer Peter Ralintschenko was handed was characteristic of this attitude. Ralintschenko had a fatal accident on 22 February 1945 in the Animal Breeding Institute.
“At the time of the accident, Peter Ralintschenko had been in Hohenheim for one year. Just as was the case with the former concentration camp prisoner Isabella Sikorska, four days after his death he was buried without a grave marker in the College’s cemetery. The University Archive does not contain any further records, documents, or information about his death,” stated Waller.
Resistance and Escape
Only a few isolated cases of uprisings or resistance are documented among the Hohenheim forced laborers. For example, one documented case if of two Croatian workers in the Dairy for Research and Training. They repeatedly dumped cream down the drain and stole butter. Their behavior was punished with beatings. Because they were desperately needed as laborers, however, there were no further consequences.
What could happen to forced laborers who did not follow the rules in extreme cases can be seen with an incident that occurred in direct proximity to the College: Two Polish forced laborers who were used on local forms were arrested by the Gestapo and hanged in Remsbachtal between Birkach and Hoftal. Apparently, they had met with women on the Garbe without permission and gave them presents of stolen laundry.
Despite all the possible consequences, three forced laborers in Hohenheim attempted to escape.
The details of their stories remain a mystery. At least two of them were recaptured later by the National Socialists, however: The French prisoner of war Alfred Meger, who had worked in the Hohenheim Horticultural School for 17 months, turned up again only a few months later as a forced laborer at the Wieland factories in Ulm. The Croatian Marco Varenina, who worked for four months in Hohenheim’s Dairy for Research and Training, was an inmate of the concentration camp Dachau’s Starnberger camp in 1945.
Nothing is known about what happened to the third escapee, Marko Ratkovic, who had also previously worked in the Dairy.
From Forced Laborers to Displaced Persons
After the French troops marched into Hohenheim and Germany’s capitulation shortly thereafter, only some of the former forced laborers returned to their home countries.
“Besides those who were sick and had previously been inmates of concentration camps, in the post-war years especially people from Ukraine and Armenia stayed in Hohenheim, as their states had lost their sovereignty. In the Soviet Union, some of them might have once again faced imprisonment,” explained Waller. “Even though they lost their home and self-determination, the abducted men and women sometimes found partners during the war years and had children. After the war, some of them hoped for a better life and prepared to emigrate to the USA or Australia.”
The US military administration required the College to provide room and board for the former forced laborers. The lack of a sense of wrongdoing becomes very obvious here, as the numerous letters of complaint from the Transitional President Adolf Münzinger to the responsible commander in 1945 show.
The commander’s response was very clear, however:
“This office is absolutely aware of the difficulties arising from the presence of abducted persons in the city of Stuttgart. However, since these people were brought against their will to Germany by Germans and were then overworked, underfed, mistreated and in many cases tortured, their families torn apart, their houses destroyed, were demoralized, etc., we are of the opinion that any hardship arising for the German population is insignificant in comparison.”
In the following decades, the chapter “forced laborers” was not brought up at the College.
