Kathreinfeld 

From the diary of a nursing sister: 

  “Kathreinfeld used to be a completely Danube Swabian community in the Banat whose prosperity and beauty was due to the industriousness and expertise of its inhabitants. 

  The German troops left our village at 9:00am on October 3, 1944.  We were told to quickly evacuate to ensure our safety.  But we hesitated, because of the arrival of the Russian troops in neighboring villages.  Old men and teenage boys we formed into a local defense formation, whose purpose was only known to us later.  They were to make a stand against the Russians at neighboring village to cover the German retreat.  Many of the young boys lost their lives there.  Since we had done nothing to merit any kind of retribution we did not think we had anything to fear. 

  My daughter and her three small children lived in a neighboring village.  My husband and I agreed that he would join our daughter and I would remain at home with our seventy-eight year old mother.  We thought it would be better this way, with my husband providing some protection to our daughter in such perilous times.  He left and I remained alone with my mother.  On that same night the first advance guard scouts of the Russian army reached our village.  They began to shoot indiscriminately, even though the streets were empty and everyone was hiding in the back of their houses.  I, myself had climbed up into the loft of the pig sty with my aged mother.  They banged at the doors and windows, and if the house was not opened to them, they broke in and took whatever they wanted. In this first night, countless girls and women were raped. 

  The next day the radios and all motors had to be turned in.  Those who did not comply would be shot.  The troops roamed about the village in groups confiscating proscribed items and raping women and girls for the next five days.  On the sixth day some Serbs from the Banat arrived to bring in a civilian government of sorts.  These young Partisan thugs who were heavily armed, wildly shot up the village outdoing the Russians by far.  At night they broke into our homes and whoever objected in any way was knocked down and beaten.  If anyone came to their aid they had worse to contend with.  At night I made my way through the gardens into the houses to provide first aid, to those with wounds and those almost beaten to death.  For those who needed more help than I could provide, I told the doctor who like myself provided medical help even though it was forbidden for him to do so.  When night came, no one knew if they would live to see the next day.  To a great extent most the people did not sleep in their own homes, but rather in the smaller and poorer homes.  Usually twenty persons assembled in such a home to spend the night together and not risk being alone in their own homes.  One night twenty-five women and girls assembled in the house next door to us, to sleep there overnight.  They became aware that one of the women was breathing heavily as if she were dieing.  They put the light on.  One of the women saw that she had slashed her wrists and was bloody all over.  She wanted to die because they would be killed anyway.  “They will drag off my daughter.  I would rather not live to see that…” 

  The nightly visits of the Partisans continued on end.  The cruelties they inflicted on our people are hard to describe.  Of the satanic thinking and actions of the Partisans and the sufferings of their victims through torture and killings I will record in only as a few examples of what we had to endure. 

  Our village Richter (local community leader) Josef Topka was called out of his home into his yard at night.  His wife had to remain in bed.  For half of an hour they thrashed and beat him into unconsciousness and then tossed him into the room where his wife was forced to remain in bed.  When they left, she put on a light and he was still able to say the words, “And now I must die.”  Then he died.  His whole body was a mass of lash and whip marks and his neck bore deep cuts from wire.  They had choked him with the wire to prevent him from screaming.  In the same night, two other houses had visitors like that.  In one home they beat a man to death, at another they threw the man to the earth and knelt on top of him and hit him until he was dead.  Then they also brought out his wife.  Tore off all of her clothes and whipped her with ox hide whips and bashed her with their rifle butts.  When here back was black and blue they turned her around and proceeded to do the same to the front of her body. 

  Among all of the concentration camps in Yugoslavia, the camp in Kathreinfeld would be among the most notorious.  At first the camp was for the sick, elderly and others who were unable to work and prisoners of war who were in the same condition.  Several thousand Danube Swabians mostly from the area around Betscherek were brought here.  They were treated very badly here, and those who were able to work were sent to forced labor.  In a very short time over six hundred Swabian inmates died.  Many, many others died as a result of gruesome beatings, torture and shootings and all kinds of other cruel deaths after much suffering by their victims. 

  In November 1944 the Partisans brought one thousand two hundred of the elderly and the children from Betscherek to Kathreinfeld.  They had to come on foot and were driven like cattle by the guards using whips on them.  Those unable to keep on moving were beaten and thrown in a ditch.  They were locked up in the school and after two days they were quartered in the houses of the village and were fed and looked after by the people of Kathreinfeld until April 18^th in 1945.  They were elderly and sickly people who could no longer take the rigors of slave labor.  Kathreinfeld was now an internment camp for those unable to work.  But later some of those who had regained their health somewhat were reclassified and sent off to forced labor elsewhere.  Mothers who had still managed to be with their children, as well as younger grandmothers were taken away and torn from their children and they had leave them behind to find their own destiny.  Those chosen to do labor had to work out in the fields all winter.  All of their good clothing had been taken from them and they were now clothed in rags.  They wrapped their feet in these rags as well.  In the evenings they walked home in their wet or frozen rags and spent the night in unheated rooms or cellars.  Those who were sick in other camps were also brought to Kathreinfeld.  As a further result Kathreinfeld became an Internment Camp for the sick.  There was only one doctor in the village but he was strictly forbidden to provide care for them in any way. 

  Most of the sick came from the camps in Betscherek and the airport camp in Etschka.  They were filled with lice and their bodies were emaciated from dysentery.  Many of them had frozen fingers and toes, while others had suffered frozen limbs.  Their skin just hung from their bones.  Among the sick there were countless men and women who were simply suffering from the after effects of the brutal treatment they had received.  Nikolaus Schneider from Pardanj had escaped from his camp because he had been gruesomely tortured and headed back to his home village.  There he was captured again and sent to Kathreinfeld.  They had tied his hands and feet behind his back and left him on a wagon for the whole trip and would not let him down to stretch but often hit him with lead pipes and canes.  When they arrived with him in Kathreinfeld, he was beyond recognition.  The upper part of his head was terribly swollen with blood streaming down his cheeks, his eyes were swollen shut and black and blue like the rest of his face.  His hands and feet were the same as well as all of the bruises on his body. 

  On December 26^th an order was issued at 10:00pm.  Orders always came at night.  All women from the ages of eighteen to thirty-five years and all men up to the age of forty-five were ordered to report in two hours at the community center.  They were then deported to Russia.  As a result only the elderly and the children remained in the village.  Many of the children including the very young were left alone.  Many small children no longer had a grandmother to rely on either.  Those men who were not taken to Russia because they were too old, were now driven into the camp. 

  The Partisans under the leadership of their political commissars were unbelievably bestial as the year 1945 began.  Long after the war had ended in our area a group of old and sick Swabian men were brought to Kathreinfeld from the camp in Cernje because they were no longer of any use as slave labor.  They were not in as bad shape as were others who had arrived here.  They could still sit upright in the wagons.   The military commander of Kathreinfeld had been informed of their coming and their arrival.  He then immediately made arrangements so that these new inmates would not have any contact with the other prisoners.  He had them locked up in one of the rooms in the school.  It was soon clear to everyone in the camp that his group of people would be part of some kind of Partisan experiment.  A group of Partisans headed up to the school where the prisoners awaited an unknown fate.  The political commissar of the Partisans hurried away to get a concertina.  As he returned with his musical instrument the Partisans roamed around the room where the Swabian men were imprisoned.  The political commissar began to play the concertina and his Partisan cohorts began to beat the men, and a lesson in murdering human beings began.  The men screamed terribly in great pain and the commissar simply played louder on the concertina so that they could not be heard. 

  The political commissar wanted to give his men the opportunity to once and for all get their blood lust out of their system and satisfied by killing these poor defenseless human beings.  Experiments were made on how to kill a person without a knife or gun for instance.  Each of the Swabian men in turn was thrown to the floor so that their face and stomach was on the floor and their backs faced upwards.  Then the Partisans took their rifles and used the butt to smash the men in their backs around their kidneys in order to injure them.  Those who became unconscious were picked up by the head and feet and were tossed into the air and then crashed to the floor.  Then they jumped on them in their heavy boots.  For this purpose they dragged in a table.  They climbed up on it and then jumped down on the bodies of the men in their heavy work boots with the object of breaking their ribs.  Some of the men had their genitals torn off.  This torture lasted for several hours.  A few of them who still showed signs of life were smashed in the head with rifle butts or pieces of timber.  But during it all, the commissar played the concertina and egged the Partisans on.  When none of the Swabians were alive and the Partisans had become weary, they finally left.  But they left the bodies of the Swabians in the school. 

  However, not all of them were dead, Nikolaus Schirado was only unconscious.  He had broken ribs, a fractured skull and severe internal injuries.  Close to evening he regained consciousness and was able to escape. 

  In the same night the Partisans also beat and abused women in various houses.  They also tore off the genitals of Georg Bisching.  He still had enough strength to drag himself to the attic and hang himself to end his pain and suffering.  His wife was beaten with steel rods and whips and was unable to walk.  Another woman in the neighborhood who heard the screams opened a window to look out on the street.  Unfortunately for her the Partisans noticed and they proceeded to beat her unmercifully, so that she never walked again.  Her husband was still in their house and lay dieing.  He was tortured terribly and his genitals were trampled.  He was unconscious and died after three days.  In this way and manner under the leadership of the political commissars countless Swabian men and women met a gruesome end.  But the above examples demonstrate and describe their favorite methods.  

  But many Swabian women were murdered and put to death in the camp.  These too met their deaths in the above manner having their stomachs trampled, their ribs broken and rifle butt blows to their kidneys.  Exceptionally gruesome were the tortures inflicted on Magdalena Lisching and her death.  The teacher from the neighboring village of Ernsthausen Anna Dinjer was dragged off with several other women and thirty-four Swabian men to the Guesthouse of Georg Schlitter where they were all slaughtered and butchered with axes and hatchets by the Partisans at one of their celebrations. 

  The remaining population of Kathreinfeld was driven into the camp on April 18^th 1945.  Up until this time, for the past six months, the elderly, children and the sick and those who were unable to work were brought from other camps to Kathreinfeld, but most of us villagers were still in our own homes.  Now it was our turn.  At 6:00am on April 18^th the drumbeats were heard throughout our village and all of us were ordered to meet in the churchyard.  Later in the afternoon all of us were brought to the school.  The benches were gone and the rooms were empty.  In each of the classrooms they stuffed up to one and fifty persons for an overnight stay.  The children were terrified and screamed all night.  We received watery soup as our only nourishment.  Our houses were being emptied and all of our possessions were being piled up and sorted.  As a group of homes was emptied the former occupants returned along with countless others designated by the Partisans.  Straw was scattered on the floors to serve as a sleeping place.  All of those who were able to work were sent to slave labor or to a forced labor camp in the vicinity.  Mothers and grandmothers were separated from the children once again leaving the poor children to their own devices.  Later, “settlers” from Serbia arrived in our village and took over our homes and chose whatever furnishings happened to take their fancy. 

  On October 30, 1945 all of the elderly, sick, children and those unable to work were driven to the school late at night and the next morning were taken to the railway station and packed into cattle cars.  At noon the train left the station with none of the passengers having any idea of where they were going.  That night the train came to a halt at Knicanin (Rudolfsgnad).  Here everyone had to detrain and were housed in various houses of the community.  In former days the local population was three thousand.  The houses had now stood empty for a whole year and were in disrepair.  Every day new transports of Danube Swabians arrived, so that eventually there were twenty-four thousand people in the camp.  The houses were packed with people and straw covered the floors where they slept.  From among all of those who were brought to Kathreinfeld until it was closed and the surviving inmates sent to Rudolfsgnad seven hundred and seventy in all had perished. 

(Following the First World War the Banat was divided between Yugoslavia & Romania, with two thirds going to Romania & one third annexed to Yugoslavia)

Österreichische Historiker-Arbeitsgemeinschaft Für Kärnten und Steiermark 
(Austrian Historian Working Group for Kärnten and Steiermark)

Translated & contributed by Henry Fischer