Marianne Taus
* 1930

Marianne Taus, born around 1930 in Hungary, died on 17.6.1945 in Hamburg

Memorial stone opposite Randowstraße 14 (today Hamburg-Lurup)
Former Eidelstedt subcamp - Friedrichshulder Weg

Marianne Taus was born in Hungary around 1930.
She was about 14 years old when she was deported from her native Hungary and forced to perform hard labour in Hamburg-Eidelstedt. The fate of her parents is not known.

Marianne Taus was housed in the Eidelstedt "labour camp", presumably the satellite camp of the Neuengamme Eidelstedt concentration camp (today Friedrichshulder Weg). Together with a group of Jewish Czechoslovakian and Hungarian women from the Auschwitz concentration camp, she had to do hard labour: clearing bomb rubble, building dykes, hauling bags of cement and bricks and erecting makeshift buildings for bombed-out Hamburg residents. Their camp commander was the notorious SS man Walter Kümmel. He is said to have always carried a rubber whip with him and beat the women.

On May 4, 1945, one day after the capitulation and liberation of Hamburg by the British army, Marianne was admitted to Langenhorn General Hospital with a diagnosis of "pulmonary tuberculosis" (consumption of the lungs, chronic infectious pneumonia).

After six weeks and two days, she died there on June 17, 1945 at 8:30 am. In the hospital's death notice, the cause of death is given as "pulmonary and intestinal TB and circulatory insufficiency", with Kallas as the signatory doctor.

Marianne was about 15 years old.

Three days after her death, she was buried on June 20, 1945 in the Ohlsdorf cemetery, grave site for the "Victims of various nations", Bp 73, row 25, no. 19. A gravestone slab with her name engraved on it and her date of birth and death still commemorates her today.

Former forced labourers who testified in May 1981 as witnesses against the camp director and SS man Walter Kümmel, who was charged with the murder of two newborn children, also reported on a Hungarian girl called Bella or Flämmchen, "a petite creature, black-eyed". She is said to have come from Ravensbrück concentration camp in the summer or autumn of 1944, after her mother had been shot in the neck there. “Flämmchen” was housed in Barrack 12 with many young female forced labourers, the oldest about 18 years old. Flämmchen, at 14 the youngest in the barracks, is said to have been liked by everyone. She was suffering from tuberculosis and is said to have been murdered by injection at the behest of Kümmel. It could be that Bella or Flämmchen and Marianne were one and the same person.

Companies profiting from forced labour:
City of Hamburg
Saar-Bauindustrie AG Saarlautern, Hamburg branch, Schauenburgerstraße 15
Large company for all building construction and civil engineering, concrete and reinforced concrete construction, mining and metallurgical buildings.