25 April 1945: from Dachau Mühldorf to Poing and Seeshaupt

“Those who were still able to move.”

Mühldorf concentration camp was a small subcamp of Dachau. Shortly before the end of the war it had just over five thousand prisoners. Most of them were Hungarian Jews who had previously been held in Auschwitz.

On 25 April 1945, 3,600 prisoners were loaded onto a train, a familiar experience for most of them: “We marched to the cattle wagons that were well-known by now. Everything was the same as usual: straw, cramped, stale air. Again we received a day’s bread ration, again we were herded into the wagons, again the doors were slammed shut, and again the nightmare of a journey into the darkness began. Of the many transports that I survived, this was definitely one of the worst. Several thousand men and women had been crammed into the train separately, as many as they could possibly squeeze in. We were packed like sardines in a tin, without air, without water and without food.”

This quote comes from the former prisoner Jacob Bresler. School students from the Franz Marc High School found it and used it for an exhibition showing at their school about the death train from Mühldorf to Tutzing. The exhibition documents every station of the death train’s journey, of which there were many.

Time and again the train stopped for long intervals. The prisoners had no idea why the journey was being interrupted, why everything was going so slowly. After two days the train finally arrived in Poing. At this stage it had covered a distance of just sixty kilometres.

In Poing something unexpected happened. The guards received the news that the war was over. It was a false report that had probably been prepared by the Bavarian resistance movement “Freiheitsaktion Bayern”.

“All of a sudden it was announced that the war was over and that we were free. I saw some of the guards throwing away their weapons and running away. Then some of the prisoners took off as well. They ran away from the train in all directions without knowing where they were going,” recounts the former prisoner ((Vorname??)) Baer.

Gradually the prisoners left the train. The first thing they did was to break open the provisions wagon. Then they fled in search of salvation. Some of them managed to find refuge with local inhabitants where they stayed hidden until the real end of the war.

Meanwhile it had become clear that the report was a hoax and the war had not ended at all. The SS and an air force unit set off with local civilians to recapture the scattered prisoners.

Then, what has gone down in history as the “Massacre of Poing” took place: the soldiers drove the prisoners back into the train under gunfire. Fifty were shot dead and at least two hundred were injured.

“They rounded us up in groups with their bayonets and drove us back to our wagons. The whole of the road between the village of Poing and the station was strewn with the bodies of our dead and wounded comrades who had fallen as they were hounded back again,” a witness recalls.

The SS forced the prisoners to throw the corpses of their dead comrades onto the train. After an hour almost all of the prisoners were back in the wagons, only a few managed to escape. The train continued in the direction of Munich. There it was separated because of its length, and the two sections departed in different directions. There were numerous attacks from low-flying aircraft. During one such attack near Beuerberg Monastery, some of the prisoners grabbed the chance to escape. Many of the fugitives were shot by the SS.

In both trains there were prisoners wounded during the Massacre of Poing. Naturally, the SS guards refused them any medical assistance and many of them died from their injuries.

Liberation finally came on 20 April 1945, for some in Seeshaupt, for the others in Tutzing: “We heard a rumbling noise, but we didn’t know where it was coming from or what it meant. Then we heard shouts: ‘Americans, Americans!’ Those who were still able to move at all staggered out into the fresh air, into a sunny world with meadows and trees. The scene the American soldiers encountered was horrifying. Hundreds of human wrecks were crawling towards them to kiss or touch the tank tracks or the ground over which they had rolled. The soldiers couldn’t believe their eyes, couldn’t imagine where we had come from or the feelings that were welling up inside us.” This quote was also discovered by the school students in Jacob Bresler’s witness account.

In Seeshaupt the American soldiers made the inhabitants come to the station. They had to see with their own eyes the crimes that had been committed against the prisoners. And they saw the deplorable state of the people being taken from the train. Many of them died soon after their liberation.

The students of Franz Marc High School have gathered all of these documents. They have researched in archives, sifted through trial documents, sought out witnesses of the times and talked with survivors of the death train. It was more difficult to find local inhabitants who were prepared to remember. But now that the exhibition has opened, witnesses have written letters, telling that they too were still children or young people at the time, and how shocked they were at what they had to experience then. But, of course, they were not responsible.

The students regard their work as a very enriching experience. Their involvement went far beyond what is normally required by the school: “I’ve spent my whole life in Markt Schwaben,” says Lisa Brandt, “and yet I had never heard anything about a ‘Massacre in Poing’ until about a year ago. The most interesting aspect for me was working with witnesses of the times. What these people, who are now very old, had to endure, how their experiences have influenced their lives – all this deeply moved me.”

It’s not the first exhibition of this kind to be organized by the Franz Marc High School. Together with his students the teacher Heinrich Mayer has searched for ‘forgotten heroes’ in several projects and has already staged two exhibitions about the events in Poing.

The current exhibition is particularly successful: there has been extensive media coverage and the mayor of Seeshaupt wants to acquire the show as a permanent exhibition. Numerous schools want to show the exhibition. And the students want to continue their work. During the next school year they want to deepen the new findings, especially with the help of the new witnesses. In addition to this, they plan to link up with the old ‘Forgotten Heroes’ project. They want find out more about the resistance movement ‘Freiheitsaktion Bayern’ which supposedly issued the false report about the end of the war. Does anyone know who it was?

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