Markt Indersdorf: The Path of Remembrance – Dachau

The “path of remembrance” is not straight, it makes two curves, goes uphill and downhill. It begins not far from the monastery wall in Indersdorf. This is where the toddlers died. And it ends at the cemetery on Maroldstrasse, where the babies were buried in small white coffins.

Hans Holzhaider arrived here at the cemetery on a sunny summer morning. In 1986, the 75-year-old journalist revealed a dark chapter in the history of Indersdorf. At that time he was editor of the Dachau SZ and was the first to report on the so-called children’s barracks in Indersdorf. Holzhaider says: “These are stories that won’t let you go all your life.”

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In the last year of the war, the National Socialists had a wooden barrack built where the Sankt Vinzenz kindergarten stands today to house the babies of forced laborers under inhumane conditions. The background to this was a decree from Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer of the SS. It regulated how pregnant female forced laborers should be dealt with in the future. If the women gave birth to a child, they had to immediately give it to the facilities that Himmler cynically called “foreigner child care facilities”. The mothers often had to toil on farms. Many tried desperately to retrieve their newborns. But often they never saw their children again. At least 35 children died in Indersdorf, most of them only a few days or weeks old.

Nobody talked about it in Indersdorf for more than 40 years. Until Hans Holzhaider started to research. At the end of August 1986, two large articles appeared about the children’s barracks in Indersdorf in the Dachau SZ. Now, another 35 years later, the Indersdorf homeland association is opening the “Path of Remembrance” on September 12th. The dirt road leads from the Sankt Vinzenz kindergarten to today’s district cemetery on Maroldstrasse. Five information boards remind of the fate of the small children who died in the barracks, as well as that of the orphans who were accommodated in the children’s center in the monastery of Indersdorf after the war. Many politicians and representatives of the Polish and Ukrainian Consulate General have announced that they will be opening. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD) has written a greeting. The historian Anna Andlauer is heavily involved in the Heimatverein project. For years she researched the history of the children’s barracks and the children’s center in Indersdorf. “I followed in your footsteps,” Andlauer says to Holzhaider as they both look at one of the information boards. Andlauer is certain: Without Holzhaider’s research and articles, this path would not exist today.

The film director Hanuš Burger, who was supposed to make a film for the US Army in 1945 about the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp and who later lived in Munich, told Holzhaider about the children’s home in the Indersdorf monastery in the eighties. Holzhaider wanted to find out more. An employee of the community of Indersdorf looked for him in old files that were stored in the building yard. Among other things, he found “the civil status book of the children’s barracks”. This contained the names of 63 children and their parents. In addition, it emerged from the booklet that almost every second child died shortly after being admitted to the barrack – the fate of more than 20 children cannot be clarified to this day.

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Holzhaider researched further. He found crucial clues in the community’s death register. Most of the deaths in the children’s barracks were recorded there. The stated causes of death appear cynical: vomiting, diarrhea, stomach and intestinal diseases, heart failure. Rather, the truth is that a large number likely died as a result of massive malnutrition and inhumane housing.

Holzhaider was even able to find a mother whose child had died in the Indersdorfer barracks. She lived in Dachau on a monthly pension of 312 marks, of which she had to pay 108 marks to the health insurance – even though she had worked hard all her life. She told the journalist that she had given birth to a son in 1944. At that time she worked on an estate in Unterweilbach and finally had to bring her child to Indersdorf. A few days later she received a mail: “I have to go to Indersdorf. I went there and there I laid the child dead, wrapped up. It was over and over full of feces,” the mother told Holzhaider at the time. For his articles, he also spoke to farmers from the district, who had to work for slave laborers in the last year of the war, as well as to a former administrative employee who was familiar with the children’s barracks.

Holzhaider ends his second article like this: “There is nothing more to report. Only this: The dead children were buried in the small cemetery next to what is now the Indersdorf hospital. (…) There is no cross, no plaque – there is nothing, the 31 dead children (At that time it was assumed that 31 children were dead, today there are at least 35. Red.) remembered by Indersdorf. “

There was hardly any reaction to the articles. At that time you could write a lot about the Nazi past “without what happened,” says Holzhaider. After all, in 1987, one year after the articles appeared, the community had a stone cross erected at the district cemetery. Among other things, it says: “In memory of 31 children of foreign workers and displaced persons who died in the Indersdorf children’s home during World War II and were buried in this cemetery.” Hans Holzhaider is now standing in front of this cross. That is “pseudo-memory”, nothing is conveyed with it. He likes the three pillars of remembrance that poke into the sky right next to them and on which the names of the 35 killed children are branded. Schoolchildren had made this in 2018. One sees a “clear difference in the quality of remembrance” between the cross and the pillars. And Holzhaider also thinks the “path of remembrance” as a whole is great. He is moved that this came about after all this time due to the “commitment of Anna Andlauer”.

Andlauer and Holzhaider walk from the district cemetery back towards the Sankt Vinzenz kindergarten. Tall maize plants pass them, in front of them countless sunflowers stretch their heads into the summer light. Andlauer tells how many organizations, foundations, but also private people have supported the path of remembrance. An Indersdorf locksmith, for example, manufactured and installed the powder-coated aluminum plates on which the information boards are placed. He gave this to the Indersdorf homeland club for 5,000 euros cheaper because he wanted to contribute “something against racism and anti-Semitism,” says Andlauer. And the farmers who own the corn fields on the side of the road also planted the sunflowers especially so that they can decorate the road on the day of the opening. So that memories bloom.