Edelweiss Pirates – pirates and forced laborers

The area around Cologne’s Ehrenfeld train station is one of the city’s most popular nightlife and party areas. Half a dozen clubs are within walking distance, bars, snack bars and food trucks line the streets. Presenter and comedian Jan Böhmermann had lunch in the “Kebapland” opposite the train station, which gave the shop a hype that continues to this day. In Ehrenfeld, Cologne residents feel particularly close to Berlin’s nightlife, even though, when you look at it, nothing here looks like a big city.

Eighty years ago a Nazi crime took place right at the train station. Here the Gestapo publicly hanged former members of the Cologne Edelweiss Pirates who had organized themselves into an Ehrenfeld gang and had exchanged gunfights with the Gestapo. It took decades for this event to become part of Cologne’s and beyond Germany’s culture of remembrance. Edelweiss pirates and especially the Ehrenfeld group were seen as criminals, not as resistant, rebellious, anti-Nazi youth.

It was only twenty years ago that the tide turned: Not only is the street in front of the train station named after one of the murdered young people – Bartholomäus “Barthel” Schink – but above all it is a huge, colorful mural, motifs from his life and verses Quoting songs of the Edelweiss Pirates, which is an integral part of liberal Cologne folklore and an obligatory destination on district tours. But history is incomplete and widespread historical awareness is shortened. To put it provocatively: In Cologne and far beyond, people are happy to accept the legacy of the Edelweiss Pirates in order not to have to deal with another story.

The legacy of the Edelweiss Pirates

In fact, there was a rebellious – albeit small – youth culture under National Socialism that refused to be defeated, proved immune to the terror of indoctrination by the Hitler Youth and later, especially in the final phase of the war, even resorted to offensive resistance actions . The Cologne Edelweiss Pirates inspired historians to look around in other cities: There were also Edelweiss Pirates in Duisburg and Wuppertal, in Düsseldorf there were Kittelbach Pirates, in the Ruhr area they were called Navajos and in Leipzig there were packs. They were children and young people from the working class, many came from former communist families, and there is also evidence of a connection to the Bündische itinerant youth of the 1920s. The groups emerged spontaneously and independently of one another; the young people organized themselves without a cadre or ringleader structure. There was only a connection to underground communist cells in 1943/44.

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This is a fascinating story, without a doubt, and it still outrages today that the survivors had to fight for so long for recognition as anti-fascists and resistance fighters, and for so long had to fight against the stigma of being petty criminals and neglected homeless people. Of course, the matter is not off the table. In the Bundestag, the AfD has already asked whether ordinary criminals were also imprisoned in the concentration camps – they were probably not victims of the Nazis. This view was firmly rejected by all other factions. But one can confidently assume that a growing AfD, which will also gain greater influence in terms of cultural policy, will ask this question again and again. By the way: In the 1980s and 90s, it was state governments in North Rhine-Westphalia under the leadership of the SPD that refused to recognize the Edelweiss Pirates and stuck to the narrative that they were actually apolitical and criminal.

But what part of history isn’t told? Dirk Lukaßen, who heads the museum service at the Cologne NS Documentation Center and coordinates the many tours and workshops on the Edelweiss Pirates, shows this using an example. To this day, he says, photos from November 10th can be found in publications with captions that refer to the Edelweiss Pirates. You can immediately see that it doesn’t just show young people.

What were you hanged for?

The murder campaign was not directed against the Edelweiss Pirates, who had already been largely destroyed in 1944, but explicitly against the “Ehrenfeld Group” around the escaped concentration camp prisoner Heinz Steinbrück, who gathered deserters, forced laborers, Jews in hiding in the rubble of Cologne – and also scattered Edelweiss Pirates . At first it was a community of survivors that gradually became involved in a real partisan struggle with the Gestapo. To be clear: no one was hanged for being an Edelweiss Pirate. It was only when the young people joined forces with forced laborers and deserters, when they made contact with communist cells and finally shot SA and Gestapo henchmen, that the full terror of the Nazi apparatus also hit them.

It was only when the young people joined forces with forced laborers and deserters that the full terror of the Nazi apparatus hit them too.

The situation of forced laborers in particular, especially in the final phase of the war, is far too little known to the public, says Lukaßen. After the devastating bombings, Cologne depopulated rapidly; in 1944 there were fewer than 200,000 Cologne residents compared to 100,000 forced laborers. The fear of their revenge after all the torment inflicted on them was great. The Gestapo expected uprisings. If they deviated, forced laborers were not threatened with juvenile prison, as was the case with the Edelweiss Pirates, but rather with the death penalty. The public still knows too little about their resistance, their hatred of the Nazis and the Germans, their attempts to break out and their fight for survival. For the Gestapo and the SS, which de facto took over civil administration after the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944, the front also ran internally, i.e. right through Cologne. Forced laborers, homeless young people, escaped camp prisoners, deserters and a communist underground, which the Nazis’ paranoia probably imagined to be larger than it actually was, created an “us or them” atmosphere among the Gestapo. The accelerated disintegration of all social and civil structures acts as its catalyst. The people from the Ehrenfeld group did not shoot at the Gestapo officers for strategic reasons, but because they had nothing left to lose.

The full extent of the terror

The tours that the Nazi Documentation Center is organizing today want to raise awareness of this situation, of the extreme terror that the regime unleashed in its final phase and which primarily affected the forced laborers until the war front collapsed. Of course, the Cologne Volksgarten is still a central location for these tours: the Edelweiss Pirates met in its rose garden until the big raid in December 1942. Around 200 young people, aged between 15 and 18, gathered here every evening, including many girls. They were on their own: their fathers were in the war or had already died, bombed out and homeless. They were on their own – and wanted to stay that way. Instead of waiting for help from the social welfare organizations organized by the Nazis, many of them opted for burglaries and thefts. They regularly fought skirmishes with Hitler Youth members. Even if politics in the classic sense was not the focus, they were interested in fighting for freedom, without Nazi propaganda and without drills. They simply didn’t want to take part. Nevertheless, Edelweiss pirates later volunteered for the Wehrmacht. This is the – today – known side of the story.

But then the tour of the documentation center continues to the former Gestapo headquarters, the “El-De Haus” (after the initials of the client: Leopold Dahmen). There you go to the cells in the basement, narrow, stuffy, a cell like that is too small for two people. In the last year of the war, the Gestapo crammed twenty people or more into these holes: forced laborers, prisoners of war, political – mostly communist – prisoners. From November 1944 a gruesome execution routine began, two prisoners per day simply to empty the cells. The Gestapo people made high-handed decisions about the executions; they improvised the gallows in the inner courtyard.

One has to be careful with general interpretations, simply because the chaos in the last months of the war was too great. What can be said is that the murderous national community remained intact until the end. The Gestapo in Cologne was surprisingly thinly staffed, only a few dozen officers. They depended on denunciations from the population, whose flow never dried up. In view of their destroyed cities, the approaching front and the increasing number of forced laborers, the national community and its executors reacted in panic. The terror they exerted was exorbitant.

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