"The Rose Garden" is based on a crime allegedly committed near the end of World War II. If you look up "Bullenhuser Damm" you'll likely find several places on the internet where the story is told with varying details and characters. This story is also mentioned by the American prosecutor played by Richard Widmark in the movie "Judgment at Nuremberg".
The basic story is that in the last days of the war a group of Jewish children who had allegedly been used in medical experiments were murdered along with a number of adult prisoners in the basement of a school in Hamburg. These secret killings were carried out we are told because the Nazis wanted to hide the evidence of experimentation on prisoners and therefore could not allow these prisoners to be discovered by the Allies.
So according to the story the children and the adults to be disposed of were brought by truck from a camp about ten miles away to the Bullenhuser Damm school to be killed.
I've known about this story for about 20 years and in that time come across several versions on the internet. I haven't yet found a version that tells what happened after the killings - that is, what was done with the bodies.
Before posting this I checked the "Children of Bullenhuser Damm association" website and while it tells us what happened after the war regarding prosecution of the accused perpetrators nothing is mentioned or explained about the disposal of the bodies of the victims. I've also tried to find a transcript of the court proceedings of the original trial in 1946. One might exist as it is mentioned on the association's website that in 1986 "extracts from the transcript of proceedings of the "Curio-Haus trials" were read out...". But that's all we're told and without the transcript of the trial this story simply is not believable.
According to the story the victims were killed (and presumably disposed of), the perpetrators left the scene of the crime and the war ended. So there were no witnesses left behind and no evidence that a crime had even occurred.
The first question should be: How was this crime discovered?
One of the versions of this story tells us the killing of the children happened this way:
"The children were told that they had to be vaccinated against typhoid fever before their return journey. Then they were injected with morphine. They were hanged from hooks on the wall, but the SS men found it difficult to kill the mutilated children. The first child to be strung up was so light - due to disease and malnutrition - that the rope wouldn't strangle him. SS untersturmführer Frahm had to use all of his own weight to tighten the noose. Then he hanged the others, two at a time, from different hooks. 'Just like pictures on the wall', he would recall later. He added that none of the children had cried.
At five o' clock in the morning on April 21st, 1945, the Nazis had finished with their work and drank hard-earned coffee ..."
This sounds monstrous, doesn't it. It would also be at least somewhat more believable if a full and credible transcript of the trial could be found which explained the problematic details of the story . And the very first question were satisfactorily answered.
The second question would be: Why did the Germans bother to go to all this trouble?
Rather than transporting all these victims miles away from what we are told was a "death" camp, why didn't they just gas or shoot them right there in the camp and dispose of them - the evidence, that is- in the camp's crematory ovens?
The camp at which the prisoners had been held - Neuengamme - has been described this way: "Thousands of inmates were hanged, shot, gassed, killed by lethal injection or transferred to (other) death camps". In view of this description why did the Germans need to transport these victims to a special location instead of just dumping them onto the alleged conveyor belt of death that we are told Germany had been remorselessly operating for 12 years?
If these questions - after 75 years - still have not been answered then why was this movie made? And why is this story still being told to school children in Germany today? Doesn't it matter whether the story is even true?
I would add that anyone with questions about this story or others like it see the documentary
One Third of the Holocaust (2008)
