Stutthof concentration camp

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Stutthof Concentration Camp (Europe)
Stutthof concentration camp
Stutthof concentration camp
Localization of Poles in Poland
Stutthof concentration camp
Stutthof concentration camp in Poland
Entrance to the old camp, called Death Gate (2008)
Barracks for the prisoners, in the background the commandant's office
Sleeping camp
Letter from a prisoner in Stutthof, November 1944
Letter from a prisoner in Stutthof, December 1944
Plan of the "New Camp"
Gas chamber (building left), crematorium (right)
The two ovens of the crematorium
Watchtower with barriers

The Stutthof concentration camp was a German concentration camp , 37 kilometers east of Danzig near Stutthof in the Danziger Niederung district in the area of ​​the annexed Free City of Danzig . After preparatory work in July and August, the camp existed from September 2, 1939 to May 9, 1945. After the German attack on the Free City of Danzig and the attack on Poland, it was initially a civilian prison camp . On October 1, 1941, the status of the camp was changed, and as the Stutthof special camp, it was now under the Danzig Gestapo. On January 29, 1942, Stutthof received the status as a level I concentration camp , which it would retain until the end of the war .

history

Emergence

The creation of the Stutthof concentration camp was part of the National Socialist movement in the Free City of Danzig . In 1936, index cards were made of undesirable Poles who were expected to be arrested. On July 3, 1939, an SS unit called the “ Guard Tower Eimann ” was formed, whose task, among other things, was to find the appropriate locations for internment camps and to prepare them. In mid-August 1939, the site for the later concentration camp on the other side of the Vistula was selected before the Fresh Spit . The SS troop began with a group of around 500 prison inmates in Gdańsk to convert the evacuated old people's home into a camp. They built barracks and fenced off the area. Because of its early establishment, Stutthof is considered to be the first concentration camp outside the German borders on August 31, 1939.

Second World War

Organization and expansion

Shortly after the attack on Poland , it was used to intern Polish intellectuals such as teachers, members of parliament and academics from Gdansk. Immediately after the attack on Poland began, mass arrests began in the city. From the 1,500 arrested on the first day of the war, around 150 to 200 people were selected who were brought from the Viktoriaschule camp to Stutthof on September 2, 1939 . The day after, the actual work on the camp buildings began. The prisoners had to carry out the construction work themselves. Of the several hundred Jews from Danzig who were imprisoned here until around mid-September 1939, most died within a few weeks. A small camp with an area of ​​12 hectares (ha), intended for approx. 3,500 prisoners, became a 120 hectare camp for 57,000 prisoners after 1939 (in 1944; e.g. with 21 prisoner barracks in the new camp ).

After several organizational changes, it was subordinate to the "SS Upper Section Vistula" until the end of September 1941. It served the Danzig Gestapo mainly as a civil prisoner camp or as a transit camp. In October 1941, the camp was organizationally subordinated to the Danzig Gestapo as the Stutthof special camp and partly managed as the Stutthof labor education camp.

With the visit of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler to Stutthof on November 23, 1941, the integration of the camp into the inspection of the concentration camps was initiated and completed on January 7, 1942. This created the prerequisites for including the prisoners of the Stutthof concentration camp in the war economy of the German Reich. The SS then settled the workshops of the German equipment works and the German earthworks and stone works in Stutthof. In addition, aircraft parts for the Focke-Wulf Group were manufactured in its own assembly hall . The economic profit that the SS drew from the exploitation or "leasing" of prisoners to private companies and farms amounted to an estimated 10 million Reichsmarks for the years 1942 to 1944.

At the beginning of 1943, the new concentration camp, secured with an electric fence, was built right next to the old camp . It was supposed to hold 25,000 prisoners and was never completely finished. Names that were used for the camp over the years were: "Stutthof forest camp", "Stutthof transit camp", "Stutthof special camp", "Stutthof labor education camp".

The camp had a total of 39 external camps . The largest satellite camps were in Thorn (Toruń) and Elbing (Elbląg), each with around 5000 Jewish women as prisoners.

Extermination camp

The Israeli historian Leni Yahil and the Central Office in Ludwigsburg classify the camp as an extermination camp for the period from July 1944 to the liberation in early May 1945 because of the organized mass killing of Jews . According to the indictment, around 5,000 people died in the so-called Jewish camp from October 1944 , in which completely exhausted prisoners were forced to do hard labor. Many fell victim to a typhus epidemic , which occurred as a result of the deliberately catastrophic living conditions and the denial of medical help.

In the spring of 1944 a gas chamber was built, which was initially used for delousing clothing, but was later also used for a short time to gas people. The gassings in the Stutthofer gas chamber were soon discontinued, however, although a fire that had started or the spread of knowledge and feared acts of resistance by the victims could have played a role. Later, some prisoners were gassed in a sealed train carriage of the small train leading to the camp . The total number of people murdered by Zyklon B is estimated at up to 1,300, including 1,150 Jews. There was also a shot in the neck where inmates were led into who had been fooled into measuring their height.

In 1942, two ovens were built in the crematorium to burn the corpses, but more and more corpses were burned openly in the open air.

According to the autobiographical novel by Balys Sruoga , hundreds of prisoners were murdered in the hospitals with lethal injections. The doctors and nurses responsible were never called to account in Germany.

Towards the end of 1944 the number of prisoners skyrocketed; Transports with 20,000 to 30,000 Hungarian Jewish women arrived. More and more were driven across the Baltic Sea from camps that were about to be liberated by the advance of the Red Army, especially from the Baltic States from Riga , Kaunas and Schaulen . Transports also kept arriving from Auschwitz. At the end of 1944, at least 70% of the prisoners were Jews.

Inhuman attempts

Memorial plaque in Gdansk

According to witness statements at the Nuremberg trials , corpses from the Stutthof concentration camp were experimentally processed into soap . From 1939 to 1945 Rudolf Spanner was a professor at the Medical Academy in Danzig and a doctor at the anatomical institute. From 1943–1944 he developed a process for making soap from human bodies on his own initiative. Several dozen kilograms of soap are said to have been produced in this way and used for cleaning purposes inside the autopsy rooms . On the other hand, industrial soap production from body fat has not been proven. A marble plaque in four languages ​​at the institute in Aleja Zwyciestwa 41/42 reminds us of these experiments . The original bronze plaque from 1975 was stolen in 2005 and replaced in 2007.

Final phase and external camp

On January 25, 1945, the camp commandant ordered the evacuation of the camp. Around 11,600 prisoners had to leave the Stutthof main camp in the first evacuation section and set out on a death march west. After that, a total of 33,948 people were still imprisoned, 11,863 of them in Stutthof and 22,085 in the satellite camps.

According to reports, marching columns of 1,000 to 1,500 prisoners each were formed and marched through Kashubian Switzerland towards Lauenburg . There were seven kilometers between the columns. Each column was supervised by around 40 guards. Those who remained were killed by them. Almost without food, the march for the survivors lasted ten days instead of seven days in the snow and the cutting cold. On January 31, around 3,000 Jewish prisoners were chased or shot by the SS with machine gun fire in the Palmnicken massacre , others shot in the courtyard of the amber factory. Only 15 people are said to have survived this massacre .

More than 2000 prisoners were brought to Neustadt in Holstein in unsuitable barges for this trip and were supposed to come on board the Cap Arcona from there . The crew of the Cap Arcona refused to take the ship on board. After the SS had left with the smugglers to take quarters in Neustadt, the barges drifted ashore during the night. On the morning of May 3, 1945, they were discovered on the beach and murdered during a death march towards the port.

About 110,000 people in total were imprisoned in this concentration camp, of whom about 65,000 were killed. After further "evacuations", Soviet soldiers of the 48th Army of the 3rd Belarusian Front marched into the camp on May 9, 1945 .

Camp commanders and staff

The SS provided camp personnel and guards. 3,000 SS men were stationed in Stutthof over the course of five years; in addition there were Ukrainian auxiliary police . The core of the guards came from the Danzig SS troop, which had set up the camp in the summer of 1939. The former staff leader of the guard tower ban Eimann , sturmbannführer Max Pauly , was born on April 1, 1940 camp commander and remained until 1942. He was after the Second World War, along with thirteen other persons responsible for the Neuengamme concentration camp , his immediate commander place in Neuengamme main process before before a British court martial in Hamburg , sentenced to death and hanged in 1946 .

Pauly's successor was Paul Werner Hoppe on September 1, 1942 . Hoppe was sentenced in 1957 in Bochum to nine years imprisonment for complicity in the murder of several hundred people, of which he only served three years and was released in 1960. He led an inconspicuous life in Bochum until his death in 1974.

Adjutant Hoppes was Hauptsturmführer Theodor Meyer . In the second Stutthof process Meyer was sentenced on 31 October 1947 death, and on October 22, 1948 by hanging in Gdansk (Danzig) executed .

Hoppe, Adjutant Meyer, the administrative leader SS-Hauptsturmführer Engelbrecht von Bonin and part of the guards formed the core team of the Wöbbelin concentration camp after the dissolution of the Stutthof concentration camp .

Follow-up processes

The central office of the state justice administrations for the investigation of National Socialist crimes in Ludwigsburg announced on August 8, 2016 that it had now handed over preliminary investigations against four men and four women of the concentration camp to the responsible public prosecutor's offices.

On June 1, 2018, the public prosecutor announced that two men - one from Wuppertal, one from the Borken district - had limited negotiating ability. On November 6, 2018, the oral hearing against the 94-year-old former SS guard Johann R. began in front of a youth chamber of the Münster regional court . Because of his service in the concentration camp between June 1942 and September 1944, Johann R. is accused of assisting murder in several hundred cases .

On July 13, 2020, the central office announced that charges had been brought against another 94-year-old at the Wuppertal district court and that the accused was currently being examined for his ability to stand trial.

On July 24, 2020, the 94-year-old Bruno D. was sentenced to two years suspended prison sentence. The juvenile criminal chamber found him - the then 17-year-old SS guard - guilty of aiding and abetting murder in 5,232 cases and of aiding and abetting attempted murder. The judgment became final on August 10, 2020.

On February 5, 2021, the Itzehoe public prosecutor's office announced the indictment in the youth chamber of the regional court against a 95-year-old former secretary who was accused of complicity in murder in at least 10,000 cases and complicity in attempted murder in the period from 1943 to 1945 in other cases .

Memorial and Polish Museum

Memorial (2008)

Today there is a Polish state memorial on the site of the former concentration camp . The museum was established in 1962. There are preserved documents in the archive that contain data on around 110,000 former prisoners. The area of ​​the old and new camp can be visited as a whole. Documentaries showing the martyrdom of the victims are also shown in the exhibitions:

  • "Ambulance" (10 min.)
  • "The gallows of Stutthof" (15 min.)
  • "Stutthof Concentration Camp near Danzig" (30 min.)
  • "Albert Forster" (20 min.)
  • "Stutthof" (12 min.)
  • "Requiem for 500,000 victims" (20 min.)

The cinema is located in the building of the former commandant's office.

Prominent prisoners, priests and the beatified

Perpetrator

Camp commanders

Officers and NCOs

Overseers

Convicted prisoners

Six of the Kapos and functionary prisoners were sentenced to death and executed.

  • Jan Breit, executed in 1946
  • Tadeusz Kopczynski, executed in 1946
  • Kazimierz Kowalski
  • Alfred Nicolaysen, executed in 1947
  • Józef Reiter, executed in 1946
  • Wacław Kozłowski, executed in 1946
  • Franciszek Szopiński, executed in 1946

See also

literature

Movies

  • The Forest of the Gods (Dievu Miskas), 2005, film adaptation of the autobiographical novel by Balys Sruoga, actors: Valentinas Masalskis, Steven Berghoff, Liubomiras Laucevicius, directed by Aligmantas Puipas, online
  • The girl with the purple triangle. How 18-year-old Hermi survived the concentration camp . Documentation by Fritz Poppenberg , 2003
  • Julia Bourgett (Director): Bernsteinland. A death march in East Prussia. ( Memento from October 24, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) The documentary tells the fate of the victims of the death march on the East Prussian Amber Coast in January 1945. The documentary about the commemoration day January 31, Jantarnyj, the Anna shaft, the locksmith's shop of the amber factory, interview with the survivor Maria Blitz

Web links

Commons : Stutthof concentration camp  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Marek Orski: organization and organizing principles of the Stutthof camp , in: Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth, Christoph Dieckmann (ed.): The Nazi concentration camps: Development and Structure , 1998, p.295.
  2. ↑ Marek Orski: organization and organizing principles of the camp Stutthof , 1998, p 302nd
  3. ↑ Marek Orski: organization and organizing principles of the camp Stutthof , 1998, p 304th
  4. ↑ Leni Yahil: The Holocaust. The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945 . Oxford University Press, New York / Oxford 1991, p. 532; Sven Felix Kellerhoff : Nazi crimes: Why suddenly so many aged concentration camp perpetrators are being charged . In: welt.de , June 10, 2016.
  5. ↑ Bettina Mittelacher: Trial against SS men: "Back then on the wrong side". In: Hamburger Abendblatt . October 18, 2019, accessed October 20, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth, Christoph Dieckmann: The National Socialist Concentration Camps. Fischer (Tb.), Frankfurt 2002, ISBN 3-596-15516-9 , p. 770.
  7. ↑ Marek Josef Orski: The Destruction of prisoners of the concentration camp Stutthof. In: Günther Morsch, Bertrand Perz: New studies on National Socialist mass killings by poison gas. Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-940938-99-2 , pp. 294–303, here p. 301.
  8. ↑ Klaus Hillenbrand: Trial of concentration camp guard begins - accessory to murder in 5,230 cases. In: taz . October 16, 2019, accessed January 31, 2020 .
  9. ↑ Victims of National Socialism - corpses processed into soap? In: Der Tagesspiegel . October 6, 2006, accessed January 31, 2020 .
  10. ↑ Martin Bergau : Death March to the Amber Coast. The massacre of Jews in Palmnicken, East Prussia, in January 1945. Contemporary witnesses remember. Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2006. p. 220 ISBN 3-8253-5201-3 .
  11. ↑ Sebastian Rosenkötter: The murder of 208 Jews in Neustadt remains unpunished. In: Lübecker Nachrichten , May 3, 2018, p. 15.
  12. ↑ Concentration camp staff: Investigators find suspected Nazi criminals. In: Spiegel Online. August 9, 2016. Retrieved January 21, 2017 .
  13. ↑ Elmar Ries: Nazi proceedings: the accused have limited negotiating power. In: Westfälische Nachrichten . June 1, 2018, accessed June 1, 2018 .
  14. ↑ Klaus Hillenbrand: Trials against 94-year-old Nazi - the forgetful concentration camp guard. In: taz . November 6, 2018, accessed January 31, 2020 .
  15. ↑ https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/justiz-wuppertal-94-jaehriger-ehemaliger-kz-wachmann-angeklagt-dpa.urn-newsml-dpa-com-20090101-200713-99-775845
  16. ↑ https://www.rnd.de/politik/ns-zentrationslager-stutthof-mit-95-jahren-ehemaliger-kz-wachmann-in-wuppertal-angeklagt-3T5X6QVOVMIQASVF7AA476EESI.html
  17. ^ Stutthof trial: suspended sentence for former NDR concentration camp guard from July 24, 2020
  18. ↑ https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/hamburg/Hamburger-Urteil-gegen-frueheren-KZ-Wachmann-rechtskraeftig,stutthof200.html
  19. ↑ https://www.zeit.de/news/2021-02/05/staatsanwaltschaft-itzehoe-klagt-ehemalige-kz-sekretaerin-an
  20. ↑ https://www.welt.de/regionales/hamburg/article225791563/Staatsanwaltschaft-Itzehoe-klagt-ehemalige-KZ-Sekretaerin-an.html
  21. ↑ https://www.bnr.de/artikel/aktuelle-meldung/anklage-gegen-kz-schreibkraft?fbclid=IwAR1vi8EHa79RW2hlYCWqqNrEdzFaOgNFFKVAZNWVIdJixPl-f0RDSH3ftBo
  22. ↑ Aleksandra Matelska: The Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in Poland: A Phenomenon of the Struggle for Religious Freedom. in: Gerhard Besier, Katarzyna Stokłosa (Ed.): Jehovah's Witnesses in Europe - Past and Present 03. Berlin 2018.

Coordinates: 54 ° 19 '44.5 "  N , 19 ° 9' 14.3"  E