The fate of the "Agfa women" is largely unknown.
Now a Dietramszell historian has set out on the trail of forced laborers.
Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen
- Anyone who hears the term “death march” today thinks first and foremost of the Dachau concentration camp prisoners who appeared to the left of the Isar in the last days of the war, in Icking, Dorfen, Wolfratshausen and elsewhere.
What is largely unknown is that people on the other side of the Isar were also driven southwards at the same time.
They were forced laborers from the Riem airport, from the Hohenbrunn ammunition factory and a group of women.
The so-called Agfa women.
Also read: The death march film by Max Kronawitter
Her fate is currently preoccupying the Dietramszeller historian Susanne Meinl, known as one of the initiators of the Dietramszeller Hindenburg Symposium.
On behalf of the municipality, she is working on the Nazi history of the Grünwald municipality through which the entourage may have come.
In order to track down the women as precisely as possible, she studies original documents from archives at home and abroad, such as the National Archives in Washington.
You have to have most of them sent to you, in times of a pandemic there is no other way.
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The Agfa camera works, a satellite camp of the Dachau concentration camp, are a dark chapter in Giesing's history. Behind the Grünwalder Stadium, on Weißenseestrasse, the women who were unpopular had to toil to build bombs. Most of them were resistance fighters from Holland, but also Polish women who were abducted as punishment for the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. They installed time fuses and telescopic sights, fearing that the hated Nazis could win the war with them. They were also involved in the manufacture of the notorious "retribution weapons" V1 and V2.
If you dig a little deeper into the subject, you will find that every now and then a spotlight fell on the fate of these women.
First in the Dachau trials that the Americans carried out from 1945 to 1948 in the former concentration camp.
Then in 2017, when the artist Alexander Steig set up a camera in front of the Agfa works as a souvenir and published a famous book of the same name.
It contains, among other things, the memories of Kiky Gerritsen-Heinsius, who Jews hid in their apartment.
Not to forget Jan von Ommen, son of the resistance fighter Renny van Ommen, who researched his mother's experiences.
And yet there are still many unanswered questions.
Also read: Föhrenwald's 75th anniversary: a ceremony dedicated to contemporary witnesses
The route of the approximately 500 women is still unclear.
They themselves did not know the area and had no idea where they were.
The only thing that is clear is that they must have crossed the Isar at some point, and some women remembered that this bridge was blown up shortly afterwards.
The Großhesseloher Bridge, for example, is out of the question; its demolition prevented Bavaria's freedom campaign.
Maybe it was the Isar bridge at Schäftlarn monastery.
It was blown up on April 30th at 5:35 a.m., as the Abbot Sigisbert noted in his diary.
That could fit.
But it is not certain.
Willemijn Petroff-van Gurp: Farewell to the last eyewitness
As the last witness of the Agfa women, Willemijn Petroff-van Gurp died in March of this year at the age of 102 in her home town of Baarn near Utrecht. Emanuel Rüff, Vice Chairman of the Badehausverein, spoke to her in the Netherlands in 2015. Interested parties can watch parts of the interview in the Waldram bathhouse.
Willemijn Petroff-van Gurp was born on November 7, 1918 in The Hague as one of 15 children of a strictly Protestant family. During the German occupation she joins the resistance. So she gets food cards and forged papers for people in hiding. In June 1944 she was arrested by the SS and finally came to Giesing. At the end of April 1945, she was forced on the death march south with around 500 other forced laborers. Once in Wolfratshausen, the women can spend the night in the barn of the Walser farm and are supplied with soup.
There they were liberated by American troops on May 1, 1945 and were the first “Displaced Persons” to come to Föhrenwald. At the end of May 1945, Petroff-van Gurp left today's Waldram. After working in England and Italy, she returns to the Netherlands. She was awarded the Dutch Resistance Memorial Cross for her services in the resistance and shortly before her death was appointed a knight in the Order of Orange Nassau.
One thing is certain: the women were lucky. The head of the satellite camp, Kurt Stirnweis, turned out to be comparatively humane. While on the other side of the Isar SS men shot exhausted prisoners unceremoniously if they lost touch, the Obermenzinger native promised to bring the women alive to a safe place. On horseback, he accompanied the train. "Forehead is an interesting figure," said Meinl. Maybe his humanity was honest, or maybe he was just hoping to reap goodwill from the Allies after the war.
The Ascholdingen historian is hoping for more information from the ruling chamber file, i.e. the result of the denazification process in which Stirnweis was exonerated.
He argued that he had bought a pig in Wolfratshausen at his own expense, so that the soup, with which the women should regain their strength, would be as nutritious as possible.
The women confirmed this. Apparently the soup was so thick that many felt sick.
They were actually way too weak for that.
Also read: Memorial plaque for the “Savior of Wolfratshausen”?
The journey into the unknown ended for the women at the Walserhof on Geltinger Straße.
The farmer meant well to them: he not only provided them with food, but apparently also convinced the guards that the situation was hopeless.
On May 1, the Americans discovered the women in the barn and they were taken to the Föhrenwald camp.
In 1966 some of the Agfa women returned to the place of their liberation.
Knowing full well that it could have ended differently.
Appeal:
Any clue is important in researching the fate of Agfa women.
If you know something, send an email to info@gemeinde-gruenwald.de or Susanne-Meinl@web.de
