Poniatowa camp

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The Poniatowa camp , located in the Polish town of Poniatowa , was initially a German prisoner of war camp (Stalag 359) and then a Nazi forced labor camp during the Second World War .

POW camp

In the late 1930s, an equipment factory for the Polish army was built in Poniatowa . The facility consisted of factory buildings and 21 apartment blocks and had a railway connection. After the end of the attack on Poland , the German Wehrmacht initially used the factory that had not yet been opened until September 1941. The area was then converted into a prisoner of war camp ( Stalag 359) by fencing it in and surrounding it with 16 watchtowers. Up to 24,000 Soviet prisoners of war were admitted to the newly built camp by the end of 1941. Due to the inhumane working and living conditions, around 22,000 of the prisoners of war who were buried in 32 mass graves on the camp grounds died by spring 1942. Around 500 survivors, including many ethnic Germans , were transferred to the Trawniki training camp as so-called volunteers.

Forced labor camp

The Wehrmacht then handed the camp over to the SS and Police Leader in the Lublin District , SS Group Leader and Lieutenant General of the Police Odilo Globocnik . The SS intended to expose Jewish prisoners to " extermination through work " as part of the Reinhardt campaign . From October 1942 the camp was turned into a labor camp for Jewish forced laborers by SS leader Göth .

The labor camp was originally designed for 9,000 Jewish prisoners. The first Jews from the Opole Lubelskie ghetto were admitted to the camp as early as October 1942 . From the beginning of 1943, prisoners from the Warsaw ghetto were deported to Poniatowa ; Over 15,000 came to Poniatowa in April / May 1943 alone during the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto . Of these, 10,000 had previously performed forced labor at the Walter Többens factory in the Warsaw ghetto and, according to an agreement between Walter Többens and Odilo Globocnik, were brought to Poniatowa for the relocation of Ostindustrie GmbH's production there. 807 previously selected Jews also arrived from the Treblinka labor camp in May 1943 .

Storage structure and conditions

The SS labor camp Poniatowa was divided into the areas of factory, administration and prison camp. The camp later had a crematorium. Around 3,000 privileged prisoners, mostly of Austrian and Slovak origin, lived in the so-called settlement under better living conditions. The other inmates were housed in 30 inmate barracks under inhumane conditions near the factory. About 10,000 prisoners worked for the Walter-Többens-Werke and made mostly uniforms for the Wehrmacht out of textiles from the victims of Aktion Reinhardt . The other prisoners were employed in building roads, barracks and horticulture. After a visit to the camp by Odilo Globocnik in August 1943, the supply and living conditions deteriorated considerably, resulting in increased deaths. Camp penalties were introduced, executions carried out, and abuse increased. There was also a resistance organization in the camp, consisting mainly of resistance fighters from the Warsaw ghetto. Conspiratorial contacts with Warsaw resistance fighters enabled those willing to flee to be supported and, among other things, money and medicine to be smuggled into the camp. However, there were no major campaigns due to a lack of equipment.

Organizational matters

Camp commandant was Gottlieb Hering , who was previously the commandant of the Belzec extermination camp . Heinrich Gley from Belzec came to Poniatowa with him . The entire SS crew consisted of only 40 SS men, supported by 600 so-called Trawniki men .

Liquidation of the camp

On November 4, 1943, around 15,000 Jews from the labor camp were shot as part of the harvest festival after they had to undress. The Jewish victims had previously dug their own mass graves under false pretenses. Members of the camp resistance movement who had few weapons at their disposal were briefly entrenched in a barrack on November 4, 1943. After a brief exchange of fire, the barracks were set on fire and burned with the resistance fighters. Subsequently, a Jewish work detail from the Majdanek concentration camp burned the bodies of the murdered in the following weeks. The camp was used as a training camp for SS and police units until the summer of 1944, when it was closed.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Poniatowa on www.deathcamps.org
  2. ↑ a b c See Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. 3 vol., Munich: Piper 1998, vol. 2, p. 1156f.
  3. ↑ Ernst Klee : Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. , Frankfurt am Main 2007. P. 247, 186.
  4. ↑ Angelika Benz: Trawniki. In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 9: Labor education camps, ghettos, youth protection camps, police detention camps, special camps, gypsy camps, forced labor camps. CH Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-57238-8 , pp. 608f.
  5. ↑ Dieter Pohl : The large forced labor camps of the SS and police leaders in the Generalgouvernement 1942–1945 , In Ulrich Herbert , Karin Orth , Christoph Dieckmann (ed.): The National Socialist Concentration Camps: Development and Structure , Volume 1, Wallstein Verlag 1998, ISBN 978- 3-89244-289-9 ; P. 428ff.
  6. ^ Bruno Wasser: Himmler's spatial planning in the east , Birkhäuser 1993, ISBN 978-3-7643-2852-8 ; P. 131f. and p. 270 footnote 349

literature

Coordinates: 51 ° 11 ′ 14 "  N , 22 ° 4 ′ 15"  E