Stutthof concentration camp

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Stutthof was a Nazi concentration camp established by Nazi Germany in a secluded, marshy, and wooded area near the village of Stutthof (now Sztutowo, Pomeranian Voivodeship of northern Poland) 34 km (21 mi) east of the city of Danzig (Gdańsk) in the territory of the German-annexed Free City of Danzig. The camp was set up around existing structures after the invasion of Poland in World War II and initially used for the imprisonment of Polish leaders and intelligentsia. The actual barracks were built the following year by prisoners. Most of the infrastructure of the concentration camp was either destroyed or dismantled shortly after the war. In 1962, the former concentration camp with its remaining structures was turned into a memorial museum. Stutthof was the first German concentration camp set up outside German borders in World War II, in operation from 2 September 1939. It was also the last camp liberated by the Allies, on 9 May 1945. It is estimated that between 63,000 and 65,000 prisoners of Stutthof concentration camp and its subcamps died as a result of murder, starvation, epidemics, extreme labour conditions, brutal and forced evacuations, and a lack of medical attention. Some...

The camp was established in connection with the ethnic cleansing project that included the liquidation of Polish elites (members of the intelligentsia, religious and political leaders) in the Danzig area and Western Prussia.

Even before the war began, the German Selbstschutz in Pomerania created lists of people to be arrested, and the Nazi authorities were secretly reviewing suitable places to set up concentration camps in their area.

Originally, Stutthof was a civilian internment camp under the Danzig police chief, before its subsequent massive expansion. In November 1941, it became a "labor education" camp (like Dachau ), administered by the German Security Police. Finally, in January 1942, Stutthof became a regular concentration camp.

The original camp (known as the old camp) was surrounded by the barbed-wire fence. It comprised eight barracks for the inmates and a "Kommandantur" for the SS guards, totaling 120,000 square metres (1,300,000 sq ft). In 1943, the camp was enlarged and a new camp was constructed alongside the earlier one. It was also surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fence and contained thirty new barracks, raising the total area to 1.2 square kilometres (0.46 sq mi). A crematorium and gas chamber were added in 1943, just in time to start mass executions when Stutthof was included in the " Final Solution " in June 1944. Mobile gas wagons were also used to complement the maximum capacity of the gas chamber (150 people per execution) when needed. [ citation needed ]

The camp staff consisted of German SS guards and, after 1943, the Ukrainian auxiliaries brought in by SS- Gruppenführer Fritz Katzmann, the Higher SS and Police Leader of the area.

In 1942, the first German female SS Aufseherinnen guards arrived at Stutthof along with female prisoners. A total of 295 women guards worked as staff in the Stutthof complex of camps.

Among the notable female guard personnel were: Elisabeth Becker, Erna Beilhardt, Ella Bergmann, Ella Blank, Gerda Bork, Herta Bothe, Erna Boettcher, Hermine Boettcher-Brueckner, Steffi Brillowski, Charlotte Graf, Charlotte Gregor, Charlotte Klein, Gerda Steinhoff, Ewa Paradies, and Jenny-Wanda Barkmann. Thirty-four female guards including Becker, Bothe, Steinhoff, Paradies, and Barkmann were identified later as having committed crimes against humanity. The SS in Stutthof began conscripting women from Danzig and the surrounding cities in June 1944, to train as camp guards because of their severe shortage after the women's subcamp of Stutthof called Bromberg-Ost (Konzentrationslager Bromberg-Ost) was set up in the city of Bydgoszcz.

Several Norwegian Waffen SS volunteers worked as guards or as instructors for prisoners from Nordic countries, according to senior researcher at the Norwegian Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities, Terje Emberland.

The first 150 inmates, imprisoned on 2 September 1939, were selected among Poles and Jews arrested in Danzig immediately after the outbreak of war. The inmate population rose to 6,000 in the following two weeks, on 15 September 1939. Until 1942, nearly all of the prisoners were Polish. The number of inmates increased considerably in 1944, with Jews forming a significant proportion of the newcomers. The first contingent of 2,500 Jewish prisoners arrived from Auschwitz in July 1944. In total, 23,566 Jews (including 21,817 women) were transferred to Stutthof from Auschwitz, and 25,053 (including 16,123 women) from camps in the Baltic states. When the Soviet army began its advance through German-occupied Estonia in July and August 1944, the camp staff of Klooga concentration camp evacuated the majority of the inmates by sea and sent them to Stutthof. Other sources say that the camp staff shot most remaining inmates in a mass murder.

Stutthof's registered inmates included citizens of 28 countries, and besides Jews and Poles – Germans, Czechs, Dutch, Belgians, French, Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Lithuanians, Latvians, Belarusians, Russians, and others. There were also those classed and condemned as "vagrants who travel around after the manner of the gypsies", a category that included Romani, Sinti and Yenish people.

Among 110,000 prisoners were Jews from all over Europe, members of the Polish underground, Polish civilians deported from Warsaw during the Warsaw Uprising, Lithuanian and Latvian intelligentsia, Latvian resistance fighters, psychiatric patients, Soviet prisoners of war, and Communists (as an example of Communist deportations to Stutthof, see the Danish Horserød camp ). One prominent inmate and survivor of the Stutthof concentration camp was a member of parliament for the Communist Party of Denmark Martin Nielsen, who detailed his deportation to, experience in and ensuing death march from the camp in his book Rapport fra Stutthof ('Report from Stutthof'). Another prominent inmate was Lithuanian professor and writer Balys Sruoga who also survived since 1943 and detailed his time in camp including death march (ca 60 km 2-day trip during 1945 winter in the snow to Żukowo and then 50 km to Lębork ) writing a book in 1945 Forest of the Gods. It is believed that inmates sent for immediate execution were not registered. [ citation needed ]

Conditions in the camp were extremely harsh; tens of thousands of prisoners succumbed to starvation and disease. Many died in typhus epidemics that swept the camp in the winter of 1942 and again in 1944; those whom the SS guards judged too weak or sick to work were gassed in the camp's small gas chamber. The first executions were carried out on 11 January and 22 March 1940 – 89 Polish activists and government officials were shot. Gassing with Zyklon B began in June 1944. 4,000 prisoners, including Jewish women and children, were killed in a gas chamber before the evacuation of the camp. Another method of execution practiced in Stutthof was lethal injection of phenol. Prisoners were also drowned in mud or clubbed to death. A Yenish survivor recalls that his mother, having given birth in the KZ, was made to witness her newborn being cast into the incinerator. Between 63,000 and 65,000 people died in the camp.

A range of German organisations and individuals used Stutthof prisoners as forced laborers. Many prisoners worked in SS-owned businesses such as DAW ( Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke, literally the 'German Equipment Works'), the heavily guarded armaments factory located inside the camp next to prisoner barracks. Other inmates labored in local brickyards, in private industrial enterprises, in agriculture, or in the camp's own workshops. In 1944, as forced labor by concentration camp prisoners became increasingly important in armaments production, a Focke-Wulf aircraft factory was constructed at Stutthof. Eventually, the Stutthof camp system became a network of forced-labor camps. The Holocaust Encyclopedia estimates that (less officially) some 105 Stutthof subcamps were established throughout northern and central Poland. The major subcamps were in Toruń (Thorn) and in Elbląg (Elbing).

Solidarity and religious observance: memoirs of Helen Lewis

In the recollection of Helena Katz ( Helen Lewis ), who in August 1944 had arrived with a group of three hundred women from the family camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, there was a sharp division among Jewish women in her Kochstädt sub camp outside Praust. Her group, whose ordeal had begun in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, were from German-speaking, broadly assimilationist, backgrounds in the Reich and occupied Czechoslovakia (Katz was a professional dancer from Prague). The group of five hundred women who had preceded them from Poland, the Baltic states, Hungary and Romania, spoke Yiddish, and "bitterly resented" both the newcomers' "lack of religious ardour" and the privilege they had enjoyed in retaining their unshaven hair.

In a devotional act that may have taken different forms elsewhere in the Stutthof camp system, the gulf between the two groups was bridged when together they committed to fast in honour of Yom Kippur (26 September 1944). Notwithstanding the administration's retaliatory threat of no food or drink for 36 hours, the women did not break ranks: food was refused. It was a victory in a "battle of wills" that, perversely, was rewarded by their SS commandant ( Oberaufseherin ) (a woman who had made known her personal involvement in the extermination of children from the Riga Ghetto) with a post-fast meal complete with sweet pudding.

Unexpected rations were again available, two months later, when the Oberaufseherin encouraged Katz and her fellow inmates to stage Christmas and New Year reviews featuring dramatic sketches, music, singing, and (with Katz performing) dancing. The "quirky" indulgences came to an end on 27 January 1945 when, in advance of approaching Soviet forces, all those in a condition to walk out were marched out of the camp. Those left behind in Kochstädt, the sick and the dying, where cared for by a new SS commandant, a former teacher who, from his arrival in camp, had been secretly feeding and protecting prisoners. Once the camp was liberated, his former charges saved him from Soviet retribution.

The camp staff consisted of German SS guards and, after 1943, the Ukrainian auxiliaries brought in by SS- Gruppenführer Fritz Katzmann, the Higher SS and Police Leader of the area.

In 1942, the first German female SS Aufseherinnen guards arrived at Stutthof along with female prisoners. A total of 295 women guards worked as staff in the Stutthof complex of camps.