As a Nazi concentration camp for forced labor, Helmbrechts concentration camp was a women's subcamp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp founded near Helmbrechts near Hof, Germany in the summer of 1944. The first prisoners who came to the camp were political prisoners from the Ravensbrück camp in northern Germany. Later Jewish prisoners were brought. History In the beginning, no barracks were completed so the women slept in the factory hall. Eventually twelve barracks were completed, but only four were for prisoners living quarters. Fifty-four guards served at the camp; twenty-seven men and twenty-seven women. Most of the women guards served at other camps; many trained at Flossenburg, two at Gross Rosen and some in Ravensbrück concentration camp before they arrived at Helmbrechts. The male guards were mostly older Germans or ethnic Germans who were no longer combat worthy. Herta Haase, Erna Achtenberg, Ellia Mains, Ingeborg Schimming-Assmuss, and Ruth Hildner were some of the female SS troops stationed in the camp. The male guards profiles however are unknown by the most part. According to a postwar testimony of overseer Elli Mains, relations between the male and female guards were "very good." The camps population was mainly non-Jews, but in March 1945, a group of over 500 Jewish women arrived on foot from the Grünberg subcamp in Poland. Conditions for the Jewish prisoners at Helmbrechts were brutal with vicious guards and primitive facilities. One prisoner who stayed there a month on the Volary death march writes of sleeping on dirt floors with no blankets. Nor was there access to toilets; only two barrels in the corner of the barracks served 400 women in the barracks, many of whom suffered from dysentery. The guards regularly beat them in the morning for the mess. Weissman Klein reports that each morning the guards came by with a wheelbarrow to haul away the bodies of those who died in the night. Many also died as a result of beatings. Evacuation (death march) In early April 1945 the front closed in on Germany. Commandant Doerr ordered the women and a few men, one being a rabbi, to depart on a death march to the Dachau concentration camp. The extra clothing in the camp was given to the non-Jewish prisoners. Along the way the Nazi guards learned that the US Army liberated the camp and turned the march into (then still occupied) Czechoslovakia. The Germans left all the