Kaufering Death Camps

This website is dedicated to all liberating forces, including my father, James Kleon, of the 12th Armored Division.[5] it is a work in progress. When completed, I believe kaufering.com will be the largest online resource of information on the eleven Kaufering camps. I have thousands of pages of information, photos, and personal accounts, and am finding more almost daily. I want kaufering.com to be a place where people researching these camps can find information. I want it to be a place, where this dark time in history can be remembered, with hopes it will never happen again. I have already been contacted by many, who wish to travel to these sites, but cannot find the exact location of many of the camps. until now, the locations of these forgotten camps were sketchy, at best and all but forgotten.

Episode nine of stepven speilberg's "Band Of Brothers" recreates the liberation of kaufering IV and has generated great interest in these forgotten places.[1]
I am attempting to preserve history, honor and remember those who suffred and died, and celebrate the liberating forces.

This website currently has less than 1% of the Information I have found. I will begin adding a lot of information, after I finish the first stage of my reseach, which should be completed around December, 2008. Updates will be Announced on the website.

LATEST UPDATE: January 2008 - see new maps and photos at the camp links below.

A guestbook has been added, along with 20 minutes of video I copied from The national archives, in College Park, MD. Another video is on the media page, which contains much of the same information and was supposedly the video that inspired Part Nine of "Band Of Brothers."

One of the most important things to know about the Kaufering Camps is that in just ten months of operation, more than 30,000 prisoners, mostly Jews, were imprisoned at the eleven camps, in the general areas of kaufering and landsberg. Half did not live to see liberation. The camps were only in operation for around ten months. 14,500 died. In just 10 months.

31,951 died at Dachau in 12 years.
14,500 were killed at the Kaufering camps in just TEN MONTHS.

The inhumanity, suffering, death, disease, and torture is considered to be among the worst of all Nazi Concentration camps.

If you have any information on these camps, please contact US.

The eleven Kaufering camps were just a few of the 123-200 subcamps (External Bearings or External Kommandos) of Dacahu. There is very little online information on many of these camps.[2]

Here is a list of the eleven camps, the cities where they were located, the dates of operation, and the estimated numbers of prisoners.[3] Maps will be added to this website as I discover the exact locations of the former camps and any memorials that still exist. A Google earth satellite map is also being developed..

The following figures are estimates, based on my research. If you know any of these figures to be in error please contact US. Click the links for approximate maps of the camp locations, photos, and other information.

Camp	Location (City)	Population	Sex	Prisoners Arrive	Liberation Or Abandoned
Kaufering I	Landsberg	3000-5000	M	6/22/44	4/27/45
Kaufering I	Landsberg	200	W	7/29/44	4/27/45
Kaufering II	Stoffersberg	1200	M	8/24/44	4/25/45
Kaufering II	Stoffersberg	?	W	8/1/44	2/17/45
Kaufering III	Kaufering	2000	M	10/1/44 ?	4/27/45
Kaufering III	Kaufering	340	W	10/1/44 ?	4/25/45
Kaufering IV	Hurlach	3000	M	8/25/44	4/25/45
Kaufering IV	Hurlach	?	W	8/1/44	4/25/45
Kaufering V	Utting am Ammersee	500-600	M	8/21/44	4/22/45
Kaufering V	Utting am Ammersee	?	W	12/31/44	4/14/45
Kaufering VI	Türkheim	2500	M	10/44	4/25/45
Kaufering VI	Türkheim	500-1000	W	1/45	4/22/45
Kaufering VII	Erpfting	2000-3000	M	9/1/44	4/14/45
Kaufering VII	Erpfting	118-272	W	9/44	3/45
Kaufering VIII	Seestall	?	M	9/1/44	4/25/45
Kaufering IX	Obermeitingen	2000-3000	M	10/14/44	4/25/45
Kaufering X	Utting am Ammersee	200-400	M	9/26/44	4/26/45
Kaufering XI	Stadtwaldhof	3000	M	10/1/44	4/27/45
Kaufering XI	Stadtwaldhof	?	W	10/44	4/27/45

The Kaufering camps were numbered I-XI, with several camps also known by the name of the city where they were located. Some of the camps also had seperate barracks for women. I have found an amazing story about children being born at one of the Kaufering camps and surviving the holocaust. It will be added as this website continues to be built. Some camps were also known by more than one number. Some knowledge exists that camps I and III exchanged numbers, after some of the additional eleven camps began operation.

Prisoners at many of the Kaufering camps, located near the air base at Penzing, were used as slave labor, in the production of three underground bunkers, intended to build fighter planes.[4] These three locations soon became two. See the map to the right for locations of these sites. prisoners came from Polish and litauischen Ghettos, from Hungary, in addition, from the Netherlands, France, Italy and Czechoslovakia and other locations. The organization Todt, Dornier and Messerschmitt, as well as other organizations, used and directed the slave labor at these locations. Bomb-proof Production of the fighter jet ME262 was the goal. The largest of these locations, Weingut II[6], finds some of the concrete construction in ruins.

If the process of using slave labor in the region would have continued, over 100,000 would have been enslaved, in the region.[7]

On March 18, 1944, Hitler had a second meeting with Admiral Miklos Horthy, the Hungarian leader at Schloss Klessheim, a castle near Salzburg in Austria. An agreement was reached in which Horthy promised to allow 100,000 Jews to be sent to the Greater German Reich to construct underground factories for the manufacture of fighter aircraft. These factories were to be located at Mauthausen, and at the eleven Kaufering subcamps of Dachau.

The first prisoners were shipped to the Kaufering camps in June of 1944, from Auschwitz.[8] The Kaufering camps were specifically created to house slave labor, which would be used to build three huge underground bunkers. These bunkers, andthe slaves who built them, would then be used to produce Messerschmitt jet fighters and other components of the German War machine. See the map in the upper right of this page, for the locations of the facilities, where many kaufering Prisoners worked. I believe at least one bunker is still used today by the German government. Ruins exist of the others. Prisoners from the Kaufering camps still lay entombed in the large cement ruins, after being pushed into huge pools of wet cement, DURING the construction of these bunkers. [6]

Between June 1944 and the liberation of the camps in April 1945, 28,838 prisoners were registered by the concentration camp priest, Jules Jost.[3] Around 14,500 died as a result of insufficient housing, malnourishment, beatings, disease, suicide, and murder. The Kaufering camps came to be known as "cold crematoria." At first, sick prisoners were sent back to Auschwitz and the gas chambers. Towards the end of the war, they died at the Kaufering camps. At Kaufering IV, and at other Kaufering camps, prisoners were locked in their earthen huts and the huts were set on fire, as the American Forces approached. If they tried to escape, they were shot or beaten to death. this was done before MOST prisoners left on the death March. In many of the photos of Kaufering IV, taken shortly ater liberation, ruins of the eathen hovels can still be seen smoldering.

Memorial sites exist at several camp locations.[9] We are still trying to locate many of them. Livinig in the U.S. makes it difficult. Please help, if you have any information. memorials also exist along the path of the death marches, which evacuated kaufering prisoners out of the kaufering camps, towardS Dachau, as the American troops aproached. Figures show around 1,200 prisoners mached from Camp VI (Turkheim) towards München-Pasing. 1,500 were marched from Camp I (Landsberg) towards Dachau,the exact location unknown. 300 were evacuated from Camp IV and another 2,400 by railroad transport. From what I undestand, these trains were mistakenly attacked by the Allies, from the air. Figures estimate that more than 12,000 prisoners were evacuated from the eleven kaufering camps, between April 24-27, 1945.

The KAUFERING VII memorial, in Erpfting,[10] is the largest memorial and the only place where actual prisoner barracks still exist. Five underground hovels were discovered in 1983, at the location of Kaufering VII. A memorial was created using about 1/5 of the actual land where the camp existed. The rest of the area was bulldozed by the German GoverNment.

Documentation of the exact locations and photographs of the KaufeRing memorials is underway. If anyone has pictures of the camps, from any time period, or knows the exact locations of the memorials or cemeteries, please contact US. I live in the USA and have never been to Germany, although I plan on a visit to the camp locations in the next few years.

Several camps appear to have no marking or memorial, some are now developed, some are just plain fields, and some have been paved over. the exact locations are becoming clearer, with each day of research. we arE in the process of mapping the exact locations of all eleven camps. PLEASE HELP US, IF YOU CAN.

Several camps, including Kaufering IV and VII, became camps for the sick. Liberating units from the American and Soviet forces found many thousands of corpses littering the Kaufering camps as well as mass graves. Few survuvors existed. Most were on the death march. The only ones left were either too sick to leave, somehow escaped excution, AND hid when the death march began. Upon the arrival of liberating forces, Some Germans were captured at the Kaufering camps and many were sentanced to death at the Dachau trials. One guard was caught hiding in one of the Kaufering camps, shortly after it's liberation. His picture is here.and information about his capture and murder is Here. He was killed by a survivor of the camp.

Some of those responsible for atrocities at kaufering Camps were executed at the Landsberg prison, the place where Hitler was imprisoned and wrote the famous book that would spawn the murderous Naxi party. Some were jailed for long periods of time. More information coming soon. I am looking for information on the kaufering workers charged at the Dachau trials, or trials from other areas, or times, involving anyone at kaufering. Please contact us, if you have information. We also believe some were found and charged in the 1970's. This is still being researched.

The famous American singer Tony Bennett was involved with (and has written about) liberation of some Kaufering camps, in his autobiography "The Good Life: The Autobiography Of Tony Bennett."

This website is the result of a lot of research. I found out that my father (who died in 1984, when I was 16) was a member of the 12th Armored Division, one of the liberating units of the Kaufering camps. I became very interested in the camps and want to create an online memorial for those who suffered and died and ALSO honor those that liberated these camps.

The reason I am creating this website is that the Kaufering camps are not known by many and I feel they are lost in the memory of the holocaust. I do not want the memories of those who suffered and those who liberated, to be forgotten. This website will become the largest and most compresensive online source of information on the Kaufering camps.

I welcome any information you may have on the camps including photographs, personal stories, and any information whatsoever.

Thank you for your interest and for viewing this website. Please help educate others to the horrors that were experienced by the millions that were tortured and murdered during this dark time of history. We must never forget and never allow it to happen again.