History of reprocessing
The school was used as such again after the end of the war. The pupils studying there were not informed about the events that took place in the basement of the building. There was no search for the parents and siblings of the victims, and the perpetrators were soon forgotten. Only a few fellow prisoners from Neuengamme concentration camp came to Bullenhuser Damm every year with flowers to commemorate them.
During the Curio-Haus trials in 1946, accomplices accused the former base manager of the Hamburg satellite camps of Neuengamme concentration camp, Arnold Strippel, of involvement in the murders at Bullenhuser Damm. Strippel was sentenced to several life sentences in 1949 for murders committed in Buchenwald concentration camp, but was released in 1969 and financially compensated. In 1967, the public prosecutor's office in Hamburg closed an investigation against Strippel in the Bullenhuser Damm case "for lack of evidence".
Some of the children's relatives had survived ghettos, concentration camps or extermination camps. But despite decades of painstaking searching, they remained in the dark as to what had happened to the children. Many of the survivors had also lost their possessions and thus their personal mementos as a result of the deportation. The only memories of the children were the few photos that relatives who had emigrated or gone into hiding were able to keep.
33 years after the gruesome events, the journalist Günther Schwarberg became aware of the story. He published the series "The SS doctor and the children" in stern magazine. Through years of research in many countries, Schwarberg had tracked down the relatives of the children. The book of the same title (see Publications) records the story of the 20 children for posterity and helped to trace the relatives of 17 children.
After the publication in Stern, relatives of the twenty children and adult prisoners came to Bullenhuser Damm for the first time in 1979. The association Kinder vom Bullenhuser Damm e.V. was founded by the relatives. The founding members were Günther Schwarberg and Barbara Hüsing as well as other Hamburg residents.
In 1979, the lawyer Barbara Hüsing filed criminal charges against Arnold Strippel for murder on behalf of his relatives, whereupon the public prosecutor's office reopened the investigation. The case was dropped in 1987. To demonstrate the failure of the German justice system in the Arnold Strippel case, the "Children of Bullenhuser Damm" association staged an "International Tribunal" in 1986. Relatives, former prisoners of the Neuengamme concentration camp and lawyers took part.
Under this link you can find a report from the NDR format "Panorama" on the crimes at Bullenhuser Damm and on one of the perpetrators, Arnold Strippel. The report appeared on 20.12.1983.