Hungarian Jewish Women Transferred from the Gelsenberg Work
Camp to the Essen Krupp AG Subcamp

BACKGROUND

The Gelsenberg camp was a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Gelsenkirchen-Horst , where Jewish women from Eastern Europe were held from July to September 1944. They were forced to perform forced labor in the Ruhr industry. At least 150 of them were killed in bombing raids on September 11, 1944, because they were not allowed to use shelters.

The camp, established in the summer of 1944, was located in an open field east of the hydrogenation plant of Gelsenberg Benzin AG, near the freight yard of the Hugo mine in Sutum . It consisted of army tents and was surrounded by a barbed wire fence and watchtowers.

In July 1944, approximately 2,000 Hungarian and Transylvanian Jewish women from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp were housed in the Gelsenberg camp . The forced laborers were to be used to clear rubble and rebuild the hydrogenation plant, which had recently been severely damaged in Allied air raids and was no longer operational. They also performed forced labor for the Organisation Todt in Essen-Kupferdreh and in the Gelsenkirchen harbor . In August 1944, 520 women were transferred to the Humboldtstrasse subcamp of the concentration camp in Essen, where they worked for the Friedrich Krupp AG company.

This data set named “List of Jewish women who were transferred from the Gelsenberg Benzin AG concentration camp subcamp to the Krupp company Humboldtsrasse concentration camp subcamp in Essen on August 24, 1944” includes the August 1944 women that were transferred to the subcamp in Essen. (Part of Background from Wikipedia (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelsenberg-Lager)

DATABASE

This database includes 528 records of those transferred from the Gelsenberg camp to the Essen subcamp. The fields for this database are as follows:

• List number
• Prisoner Number
• Surname
• Alternate surname (some of these names were handwritten on the margins)
• Given name
• Date of birth
• Place of birth in Hungary
• Last residence in Hungary 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The origins of the source documents is uncertain but probably from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. (https://www.ushmm.org/) or Yad Vashem (https://www.yadvashem.org/).  Marne Platt, a JewishGen volunteer, did the data entry from the source documents.

Thank you to Nolan Altman, Director of Data Acquisition and Coordinator of Holocaust Database, for his continued devotion and dedication to JewishGen's important work.  

This database can be searched via the JewishGen Holocaust Database or the JewishGen Unified Search

August 2025