Fort Breendonk was built in the early 1900s to protect Antwerp, Belgium, from possible German invasion. Damaged at the start of World War I, it fell into disrepair... until the Nazis took it over after their invasion of Belgium in 1940. Never designated an official concentration camp by the SS and instead labeled a "reception" camp where prisoners were held until they were either released or transported, Breendonk was no less brutal. About 3, 600 prisoners were held thereâjust over half of them survived. As one prisoner put it, "I would prefer to spend nineteen months at Buchenwald than nineteen days at Breendonk." With access to the camp and its archives and with rare photos and artwork, James M. Deem pieces together the story of the camp by telling the stories of its victimsâJews, communists, resistance fighters, and common criminalsâfor the first time in an English-language publication. Leon Nolis's haunting photography of the camp today accompanies the wide range of archival images. The story of Breendonk is one you will never forget.
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In the weeks before Israel Neumann arrived at Breendonk, only about twenty other prisoners had been sent there. By the end of December, some sixty-five prisoners had been registered. The exact number of prisoners and their dates of arrival and release are not all known, however, since some of the records were lost or destroyed near the end of the German occupation. This was a slow start for a camp that would, for a short time, eventually house as many as 660 prisoners.
During the first ten months, about two-thirds of the prisoners at Breendonk were Jews, almost all of whom had emigrated from other European countries to Belgium. Most were arrested simply because they were Jewish or because they were common criminals already incarcerated when the Germans invaded.
All the early prisoners were initially placed together in Room 1, but as more arrived Schmitt and Prauss made a change. Since every prisoner was classified as either Jew or Aryan, Schmitt decided to split up the two groups and place them in separate barracks that first December. Jewish prisoners remained in Room 1; non-Jews were transferred to Room 6.
Even prisoner numbers reflected the classification system. Before the two groups of prisoners were divided, all incoming prisoners seem to have been given sequential numbers starting with 1. After the prisoners were separated, the numbering system was reconfigured: with few exceptions, Jews were given numbers from 1 to 160, while non-Jews were reallocated numbers over 160. Their original numbers were then reassigned to incoming Jews.
If there was any doubt whether a prisoner was Jewish, Schmitt or Prauss would ask the prisoner on arrival. It didnât matter if the prisoner had been baptized in or had converted to another faith; if he had Jewish parents or grandparents, he was assigned to Room 1.
By the end of December 1940, Room 1 was filling up.
Israel Steinberg, prisoner number 26, was most likely taken to Breendonk the same day as Israel Neumann. Born in Poland and a tailor by trade, he was a petty thief who had been arrested and convicted for pickpocketing in Austria in 1930, with subsequent arrests for the same crime in Germany and Belgium. After he was expelled from Belgium in 1937, he returned home to Poland, where he claimed to have a wife and five children. In 1938, he tried to make his way to Palestine. On the way, he was arrested in Vienna, expelled from Italy, and ended up in Belgium once again, where he was arrested in July 1939. Police officers had observed him watching people withdraw cash from the bank in a Brussels post office, as if he were planning to rob them. When he was taken into custody, the police found that he did not have a passport, only a Polish identity card. Although he claimed to have arrived in the country seven days earlier, he could not provide officers with an address. Escorted to within a few miles of the border, he was told to cross into Germany and not return. Instead, he traveled to another Belgium town, where he was again caught in the act of robbery. This time, he was sentenced to ten months in jail and placed in the Saint-Gilles Prison in Brussels. After the Nazis took control, they transferred him to Breendonk, where he was told to take care of the pigs, a job that was intended to humiliate him as a Jew.
He came to be called âthe pig-man.â
âŠ
Ludwig Juliusberger was taken to Breendonk on November 11.
Born in Berlin, he informed the other prisoners in Room 1 that he had studied law and worked as a journalist publishing anti-Nazi pamphlets before fleeing to Austria and then France. He also told them that once he arrived in Belgium, a background check by immigration officials revealed that he had fought in the German army during World War I. Because Belgian authorities suspected him of being pro-Nazi, he, like many other native Germans living in Belgium, was arrested and placed in prison.
Of course, an inmate could tell other prisoners anything; the truth of any story could not be verified. Although Juliusberger claimed to be a journalist, his police records suggested another story. When Belgian authorities checked his background in Germany, they discovered that before 1932 he had been charged twelve times for forgery, fraud, gambling, and embezzlement. On September 1, 1939, five days after he arrived in Belgium, he was arrested for fraud. He had checked in to a series of Brussels hotels using false names and then left without paying his bill. A Belgian court had sentenced him to fourteen months in jail for fraudânot for being a former soldier in the German army.
By the time his sentence was completed, Belgium was controlled by the German military government, and because Juliusberger was a Jew, Breendonk was his next stop.
Oskar Hoffman, who arrived on December 5, was assigned to be the first blacksmith at the camp. An Austrian citizen, he and his wife fled to Belgium a few months after the Anschluss. When the German invasion began, Hoffman was arrested by Belgian police for fear that he might be an enemy agent and he was deported to an internment camp in southern France. When he eventually returned to Belgium, an acquaintance from the French camp, perhaps trying to garner favor, informed authorities that Hoffman held anti-Nazi sentiments.
As a result, Hoffman was arrested and sent to Breendonk, where he became prisoner number 17.
âŠ
Abraham Feldberg arrived on December 7. Feldberg was a Polish immigrant who had a popular shop in Arlon, a small town in southeast Belgium near the Luxembourg border, where he sold suspenders and other items made from elastic. Sometimes he dressed in a clown costume with a large bowler hat and acted like a buffoon to attract shoppers to his store.
On October 28, the MilitĂ€rverwaltung enacted a law that required Jewish merchants to display a poster indicating their store was a Jewish business. To comply with this regulation, Feldberg decided to poke fun at it by posting three signs on his front windows. In a report written after the war, an inspector for the town of Arlon noted that not only did Feldbergâs large signs irritate the Germans, but his gestures toward the signs also were ânot to the Germansâ taste.â
Not long after, he was arrested and sent to Breendonk, where he became prisoner number 53 and the campâs first shoemaker.
âŠ
No matter which color ribbon the prisoner was made to wear, the inmates at the fort had a common confusion. They were almost always never told why they had been arrested. They were almost never tried for a crime. They were almost never given a specific sentence to serve.
They were simply locked up and kept in a terrible limbo, waiting for whatever would happe...
Table of contents
Title Page
Contents
Frontispiece
Dedication
Copyright
Map of Belgium during World War II
Plan of Breendonk, c. 1943
Definitions of Terms Used in This Book
Introduction
The First Prisoners
SeptemberâDecember 1940
The Arrest of Israel Neumann
Building Breendonk
Facing the Wall
The First Prisoners of Room 1
The Artist of Room 1
Watching the Prisoners
The ZugfĂŒhrer of Room 1
A Day at Breendonk
The First Deaths
JanuaryâJune 1941
Changes
The First Escape
Despair
A Picture-Perfect Camp
Camp of the Creeping Death
June 1941âJune 1942
Operation Solstice
Prisoner Number 59
A Substitution
The Rivals
The Plant Eaters
July 24, 1941
The Hell of Breendonk
The First Transport
A Temporary Lull
A Second Camp
JulyâAugust 1942
The Sammellager in Mechelen
Transport II to Auschwitz-Birkenau
Camp of Terror
September 1942âApril 1944
The Postal Workers of Brussels
The First Executions
The Arrestanten
The Bunker
January 6, 1943
The Winter of 1942â43
Transport XX
The Chaplain of the Executions
Two Heroes of Breendonk
The Twelve from Senzeilles
The Many Endings of Auffanglager Breendonk
May 1944âMay 1945