german Nazi Concentration camps
1933–1939
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he Great Depression (1929–1933), which affected virtually all countries in the world, led to a rapid slump in Germany’s economy and radicalisation of the public mood. The NSDAP, Adolf Hitler’s political party which advanced the idea of opposing the Versailles Diktat and the Weimar system, was becoming increasingly stronger. In the elections to the Reichstag of July 1932, the Nazis won the majority of votes, and on 30 January 1933 president Paul von Hindenburg appointed a coalition cabinet with Hitler as the chancellor. After the Reichstag building burnt down on 27 February 1933, the blame for setting it on fire was put on the communists, and the following day the president issued a decree “on the protection of the nation and state.” It opened the way to dictatorship for the Nazi party. After president Hindenburg’s death in 1934, Hitler seized unlimited power as “the Reich’s leader and chancellor.” Those who opposed the NSDAP would be ruthlessly persecuted and taken en masse into “protective custody” (Schutzhaft), which actually meant deportations to camps, later to be called concentration camps (Konzentrationslager). The first concentration camp for those in protective custody was set up on Heinrich Himmler’s order as early as 21 March 1933 in Dachau near Munich. It became a model for other concentration camps across the whole of Germany, including Sachsenhausen on the outskirts of Oranienburg near Berlin (July 1936), Buchenwald near Weimar (July 1937), Flossenbürg in Bayern (May 1938), Mauthausen in annexed Austria (August 1938), and Neuengamme near Hamburg (December 1938).
Adolf Hitler seizes power in Germany.
Originally, concentration camps were controlled by the police; the deportees posed a “threat to the nation and state.” The procedure would take place without a court order, with the deportation warrant issued by the political police (Gestapo). Until the outbreak of the Second
Himmler takes over control of concentration camp network in Germany.
First concentration camps.
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Concentration camp prisoners at a roll call. Dachau, juni 1938.
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World War concentration camps were places of isolation, rather than mass extermination, of the inmates. According to the national socialist propaganda, they were to be “re-educated” – hard labour and tough discipline were supposed to bring them back to the bosom of the German national community. In effect, the camps served as means of eliminating people considered enemies, who were forced into slave labour and tortured physically and mentally. In 1934 the network of German camps was brought under the control of SS Reichsführer (supreme commander) Heinrich Himmler, who beginning in 1936 also served as head of the German police. That gave Himmler authority over a gigantic apparatus whose aim was to protect the Reich from external enemies, whom the regime saw in political opponents. Thus, the first prisoners of the camps were German communists, social democrats, unionists, Catholic and Protestant clergy, and—after Crystal Night (9 and 10 November 1938)—German Jews. The camps were filled with “undesirable elements,” a category which included common criminals, tramps, beggars, prostitutes, homosexuals, and even members of the Bible Students Association religious group (Jehovah’s Witnesses), Roma and Sinti (Gypsies). An estimated 170,000 people had passed through Germany’s concentration camps until the outbreak of the war. In September 1939, the reorganisation of the SS supreme command established the Reich Security Central Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), one of twelve so-called SS Central Offices. From that time on, all warrants of imprisonment in concentration camps and decisions on prisoners’ fate, including their release, would be passed solely by the RSHA. On the eve of WWII, Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Security Police and Security Service, issued a memo ordering that the Poles on proscription lists should be taken into “protective custody.”
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German policy on occupied Polish soil during world war II
Outbreak of WWII.
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On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland, triggering the Second World War. Although United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany on 3 September, they undertook no military action. Poland was left to its own devices. The situation was exacerbated by the USSR’s aggression of 17 September and the occupation of eastern Poland by the Red Army. Despite the aggressors’ overwhelming military advantage and the necessity of defending against attacks on two fronts, the Polish Army fought for 35 days. Poland’s capital, Warsaw, held out until 28 September. The Polish regular army fought their last battle at Kock between 2 and 5 October. Poland went down to defeat alone. Europe was full of recognition for the Poles’ heroic resistance.
Poland in the Second World War After the USSR invaded Poland, its authorities went into exile. General Władysław Sikorski’s government was sworn in on 1 October 1939 in Paris (it moved to Angers in November); as of June 1940 it operated from London. After Marshal Rydz-Śmigły’s resignation, Prime Minister Sikorski was also nominated commander-in-chief of the Polish Army that was formed in France and, from the summer of 1940, in England. The Polish Armed Forces in the West fought in the Battle of Britain, as well as in Norway, France, and Libya. In 1944 they were part of the Normandy operation, then participated in the liberation of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy, and fought in Germany1. In 1943, Polish military formations were created in the USSR under communist command. They fought alongside the Red Army on the Eastern Front and in 1945 joined in combat in Germany, including the conquest of Berlin.
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General Władysław Sikorski with Polish soldiers in France. Source: Public Domain
The name “Polish Underground State” was coined by the legendary courier Jan Karski. On 15 December 1943, the Londonbased Ministry of Information published a bulletin featuring Karski’s article titled “The Polish Underground State,” in which he described the Polish resistance’s organisation, objectives and methods. Source: From collection of Robert Szuchta
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The population of occupied Poland recognized the new government-inexile as the constitutional continuation of the pre-war Polish Second Republic and so did the Allies. From the first months of the war, clandestine state institutions loyal to the government-in-exile arose in the occupied Polish territory. They are known, collectively, as the Polish Underground State. The Polish Underground State had parallel military and civilian structures, with the latter active in areas of public life banned by the occupying power, such as education, culture, science, social welfare, and the judiciary. The underground military—initially comprising the Poland Victory Service, and next the Union of Armed Struggle, transformed in February 1942 into the Home Army—counted approximately 350,000 soldiers by the summer of 1944. Its task was the combat against the occupation forces. An armed uprising broke out in Warsaw in August 1944, as a result of which 150,000 people perished and the Germans razed the city to the ground.
View of the ruins of Warsaw’s Old Town (1945 photo) Source: Public Domain
The underground military was also responsible for the security of the civilian structures of the Polish Underground State—protecting its personnel and maintaining contact between Poland and the government-in-exile. The underground military also ran intelligence operations vital to the Allies.
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On 28 September 1939, Wehrmacht and Red Army forces met in the town of Brzesc on the Bug River. German and Soviet commanders reviewed a parade of troops. On the same day in Moscow, a Soviet-German treaty on borders and friendly relations was signed, which modified the borderlines originally demarcated between Germany and the USSR. The aggressors divided Poland’s territory between themselves. The USSR seized eastern Poland (about 51% of the land and 14.3 million people)
Third Reich and USSR divide Polish territory.
German and Soviet soldiers celebrate joint victory over Poland at a parade in the town of Brzesc on the Bug River. Source: Public Domain
while Germany took the western regions of Pomerania, Silesia and Wielkopolska, along with the central region, Mazovia (49% of the land and about 22 million people). The areas occupied by the German army were divided into various administrative categories. Regions most to the west were annexed to the Reich as Warta Land (Wartegau); other lands constituted—pursuant to Hitler’s decree of 12 October 1939— the “General Governorate for occupied Polish regions” (Das Generalgouvernement für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete) with a civilian German g e r m a n N a z i C o n c e n t r at i o n c a m p s
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administration. Its ruler was Hans Frank, who chose Cracow as his headquarters and, thus, the capital of the General Governorate. After attacking the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Germans annexed a part of Polish land previously occupied by the USSR to the General Governorate as the Galicia District, and incorporated the rest into the Reich Commissariat of Ukraine (Reichskommissariat Ukraine) and the Reich Commissariat East (Reichskommissariat Ostland). Expulsions of Poles from Polish lands annexed to Reich.
From the very start of the war territory annexed to the Reich was subjected to intensive Germanisation. It included, among others, expulsions and expropriations. Thousands of Poles and Jews were put in transit and displacement camps. Landowners, merchants, craftsmen, landed farmers and the intelligentsia were the first to be expelled. All of their wealth was confiscated by the German Reich. Those people—thrown out of their own homes, robbed of all their possessions, and subjected to various forms of persecution—were to be replaced by German colonists brought in from the Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) and southeast Europe (Romania). By the end of 1941, around 200,000 Germans were settled in. The German sources and historians’ assessments put the figure of people expelled or displaced from the Polish lands occupied by the German Reich in 1939–1944 at close to 1,672,000, of whom 365,000 were deported to the General Governorate, and more than 37,000 transported to the Reich to be Germanised.
Occupier’s anti-Polish policy in General Governorate.
The German occupation authorities applied a policy of ruthless terror against the civilian population in the General Governorate. Seeking to paralyse Polish society with fear, intimidate it and pre-empt any resistance, throughout the war the occupier conducted a systematic campaign to exterminate the Polish intellectuals and leadership.
Hans Frank on the principles of German policy towards Polish civilians, and the use of terror against Poles: “It can be said in general that we will have to count on increasing resistance from the intellectuals, the Church, and ex-officers. Organizational forms directed against our control of this country already exist. We need not be intimidated by this, and can calmly await further developments. The slightest attempt at any action by the Poles will lead to terrible, destructive expeditions against them. Then I will not hesitate to use the most brutal terror and its consequences.”
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As early as 1940 the German police ran an “extraordinary pacification action,” code named “action AB” (Ausserordentliche Befriedungsaktion). As a result of action AB, a total of 6,500 people were murdered, including 3,500 members of elites and 3,000 of those considered by the Germans as “criminals.”
The cemetery in Palmiry, where victims of mass executions were buried. This small village at the edge of the Kampinos Forest near Warsaw came to symbolize Nazi crimes at the very early stages of the occupation. The executions in a forest clearing started in December 1939 and continued until July 1941. Over 2,000 people, regarded by the Germans as belonging to the Polish elite, were murdered here. Source: From collection of Robert Szuchta
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German soldiers murdered community activists, civil servants, artists and sports figures. They destroyed cultural heritage: churches, palaces, manor houses. Museum and library collections, private art collections, and archives were taken away to the Reich. Institutions of culture were liquidated. The Germans’ aim was to completely destroy Polish cultural life. Public executions in towns and cities.
Breaking the occupation law was punishable by harsh consequences; what is more, the Germans applied the principle of collective responsibility. Public mass executions in the cities were symbols of terror policy. The Germans drew up posters with lists of executed hostages and stuck them up in the streets of Polish cities. Everybody, not only resistance movement members, was living under constant threat.
Bochnia, 18 December 1939. One of the first executions of Polish civilian population in occupied Poland. Source: Public Domain
People caught at random in street roundups were deported to concentration camps or sent to forced labour in the Reich. Village population were equally subjected to repression, execution and pacification actions. For supporting the Polish resistance, the Germans burned 12
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down whole villages and murdered their inhabitants. It is estimated that over 1.5 million ethnic Poles died at the German hands during World War II. The USSR also applied a policy of terror in the land it occupied. Polish citizens died in camps, were murdered in prisons and deported into the depths of the USSR. It is estimated that more than 600,000 Polish people suffered repression. The Jewish community had suffered from extremely cruel persecution ever since the occupation started. The Jews were deprived of all rights, expelled from their homes and dispossessed; German soldiers savagely harassed them and ridiculed their faith and customs. One of the first acts of repression against the Jewish population was to isolate
Occupier’s anti-Jewish policy. Ghettos on occupied Polish soil.
A wall is being erected to separate the ghetto from the “Aryan” part of city, Warsaw, August 1940. Source: Public Domain
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them from the Christian communities and confine it in designated sections of cities and towns, the so-called ghettoes; the Germans set up around 600 of them in the General Governorate. The Germans started organising ghettoes as early as autumn 1939, with the largest one established in Warsaw in the autumn of 1940. Located in the city’s northern part, the Warsaw ghetto was surrounded with a three-metre brick wall. Over 450,000 Jewish children, women and men were crowded into a 307 hectare site. The Jews had no right to live outside the ghetto. Ghettoes were part of the German policy to exterminate the Jewish people. Isolated from the outside world, the Jews were forced to perform slave labour for Germany. Great overcrowding, disease, hunger and the sense of being cut off all contributed to the high death rate among ghetto residents. “Final solution of the Jewish question.”
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The Germans called their programme to murder all European Jewry the “final solution of the Jewish question.” Historians think that the decision on the “final solution of the Jewish question” was a sum of individual decisions and measures taken between July and October 1941 by the Third Reich’s party and state leadership as well as individual commanders and German administrators in occupied Europe. Such decisions affected Jews living in Eastern Europe, Polish lands annexed to Germany and occupied as the General Governorate, Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, occupied countries of Western and Southern Europe, and in the states allied to the Third Reich. The Germans started murdering the Jews on a mass scale in the summer of 1941 shortly after they invaded the Soviet Union, in what were the territories occupied two years before by the USSR (pursuant to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). The Jews were killed in mass shootings there, carried out by Einsatzgruppen, Ordnungspolizei and KdS units. Once a new, more efficient killing technology had appeared— a stationary gas chamber—the extermination of Jews in death camps across the General Governorate was performed in, so to speak, an industrial manner. As Eastern Europe, especially the territories of Poland and western Soviet Union, was home to the largest Jewish population, purely technical considerations (logistics) determined the Germans’ choice of this region as the site for putting their plan into practice. They reckoned the West would never learn about the grim reality behind the “final solution.” The Germans also assumed that local communities would not take any action in defence of the Jews—out of aversion to them or fear.
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The “final solution of the Jewish question” in the General Governorate and the Bialystok District was code named “Operation Reinhardt” (Aktion Reinhardt). The plan of that “operation” involved liquidating ghettoes, deporting Jewish population to extermination camps and taking over the property left by the murdered. The action was entrusted to a special staff based in Lublin, under the supervision of Odilo Globocnik, the local SS and police (SSPF). “Operation Reinhardt” staff and personnel numbered 453 officers and non-commissioned SS officers and around 350 guards serving in extermination camps. The operation began in mid-March 1942, when the Jews from the liquidated Lublin ghetto were transported to the camp in Belzec.
“Operation Reinhardt.”
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Concentration and extermination camps as an element of German occupation policy on Polish soil
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New tasks for concentration camps.
s the Second World War broke out, the Germans set about expanding the network of concentration camps. Not only did their number rise; their purpose and ethnic composition of prisoners also changed. The camps were no longer only places of detention, isolation and “re-education” of prisoners but, above all, tools in the fight against political opponents and members of resistance movement from the countries occupied by Germany.
German concentration camps on occupied Polish soil.
In accordance with the tenets of Nazi ideology, the Polish lands would be “cleansed of the racially superfluous element,” which meant the displacing of Poles and Germanisation of Poland’s territory by German colonisers. From 1939 to 1945, the Germans set up several central concentration camps in occupied Poland, among others, at Sztutowo (KL Stutthof) near Gdansk, Oswiecim (KL Auschwitz) in Upper Silesia, Majdanek in Lublin (KL Lublin), and Cracow (KL Plaszow). Each of these camps had numerous sub-camps.
Categories of prisoners.
Political prisoners made up the largest category of concentration camp prisoners. On their outer garments, the “stripes,” they wore a red triangle. In Auschwitz, prisoners had identification numbers tattooed on their left forearms; in Majdanek they had metal tags with imprinted identification numbers.
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German Nazi concentration camps in occupied Europe during the Second World War.
Categories of prisoners in KL Auschwitz and their insignia: Jews (two triangles forming a six-cornered star) Political prisoners (red triangle)—arrested in repressive actions or for resistance movement activity, the majority were Poles Asocial prisoners (black triangle)—this category included Gypsies and prostitutes Prisoners of war (marked with the letters SU—Sowiet Union)—in Auschwitz, this category was reserved exclusively for Soviet POWs Re-education prisoners (marked with the letters EH— Erziehungshäftling)—imprisoned in the camp for actual or alleged violations of work discipline Criminals (green triangle) Jehovah’s witnesses (purple triangle) Homosexuals (pink triangle)
The original prisoner category notices in German Nazi concentration camps. Source: Public Domain
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Almost all the concentration camps either had their own factories or farms, or were located near large plants belonging to German companies whose production was usually connected with the armaments industry. Prisoners were forced into slave work in those factories; death from exhaustion was the order of the day. Sickness, hunger, physical and mental exhaustion, and the lawlessness of the SS guards decimated the prisoners. They lived in overcrowded barracks that remained unheated even in subfreezing temperatures.
Organization of German concentration camps.
The interior of a camp barrack with wooden bunks for prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Such a barrack held several hundred prisoners. Source: From collection of Robert Szuchta
Prisoners were subjected to pseudo-medical experiments which left them dead or maimed for the rest of their lives. All the camps were established by the German authorities to carry out Nazi German policy. Germans or Austrians were camp directors, and administrative and service personnel. The income of the camps, derived in part from plundering the property that the victims brought with them, went into the Nazi state treasury, which financed the German war effort. g e r m a n N a z i C o n c e n t r at i o n c a m p s
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Setting up of KL Auschwitz.
On April 27, 1940, Auschwitz Concentration Camp was founded, on Himmler’s orders, in the outskirts of Oswiecim, a Polish town annexed to the Reich in 1939. It was the largest camp that the Germans created, not only in occupied Poland, but also in all of occupied Europe. Army barracks buildings were chosen for the location of the camp. Auschwitz was intended for Poles from Upper Silesia and the General Governorate who were active in the resistance movement. The German authorities feared the overcrowded prisons would not have sufficient capacity to hold such prisoners. The camp commandants were, in turn, Rudolf Höss (until November 1943), Arthur Liebehenschel (until May 1944) and Richard Baer (until January 1945).
On 14 June 1940, the Nazis sent the first transport of 728 political prisoners to the newly founded Auschwitz concentration camp. They were Poles, including several Polish Jews, transported from the prison in Tarnow. Most of them were young members of clandestine independence organizations and soldiers from the September 1939 campaign who had been attempting to reach Hungary, in order to travel onwards to France and join the Polish army forming there. Source: Public Domain
Prisoners from various occupied European countries were also sent to the camp. Alongside Poles, Jews, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war, the Nazis deported around 25,000 people of other nationalities to KL Auschwitz, with Czechs as the most numerous group, followed by Belarusians, Germans, French, Russians, Yugoslavians (Slovenes, Serbs, Croats) and Ukrainians. Citizens of some other countries were also 20
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held in Auschwitz (numbering from one to several, more than a dozen, or several dozen), among them Albanians, Belgians, Danes, Greeks, Spaniards, Dutch, Lithuanians, Luxembourgers, Latvians, Norwegians, Romanians, Slovaks, Swiss, Hungarians, Italians and one person each of Argentinian, Bulgarian, Chinese and Estonian extraction. The camp underwent systematic expansion throughout its existence. To this end, the entire population of the Zasole district was expelled, and their homes demolished. By the end of 1941, Polish civilians were also expelled from the nearby villages of Babice, Budy, Rajsko, Brzezinka, Broszkowice, Plawy and Harmeze. A so-called camp interest zone (Interessengebiet) of 40 sq. km was formed from the depopulated area. A tall double barbed-wire fence, electrified at high voltage, surrounded the grounds of the camp proper. Spotlights mounted on the fence posts illuminated the camp at night. SS men, armed with machine guns, sat in watchtowers spaced along the fence. Entry to the camp was through a gate above which, on the pattern of other German concentration camps, an inscription read Arbeit macht frei—“work sets you free.” Located on the north side of the camp, that gate was inaccessible and not visible to prying eyes.
Expansion of KL Auschwitz.
Fence of KL Auschwitz Source: From collection of Robert Szuchta
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The gate of KL Auschwitz Source: From collection of Robert Szuchta
Camp director Karl Fritzsch welcomed newly arrived prisoners at their first roll call with the words: “I tell you that you have not come to a health resort here, but to a German concentration camp from which the only way out is through the crematorium chimney. Anybody who doesn’t like it can go and jump on the high-voltage barbed wire. If there are any Jews in the transport, they have no right to live any longer than two weeks, priests one month, and all the rest three months.”
KL Auschwitz sub-camp network.
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An integral part of Auschwitz was the network of sub-camps subordinated to the Main Camp (Stammlager) located in Oswiecim. The Auschwitz complex thus comprised three parts: 1) the Auschwitz I Main Camp, 2) the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp (Auschwitz II) three kilometers away in the village of Brzezinka, and 3) Auschwitz III-Monowitz (a complex of industrial plants with the largest one, IG Farbenindustrie, located at the depopulated villages of Dwory and Monowice; until January 1945 this plant exploited the slave labour of 35,000 people, including around 10,000 concentration camp prisoners). The Auschwitz concentration camp also had over 40 sub-camps that exploited prisoner slave labour. The network of Auschwitz branch camps covered Silesia and extended as far as Brno, in Moravia (now the Czech Republic).
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During his visit to the Auschwitz camp in March 1941, Heinrich Himmler picked the village of Brzezinka as the site for a future camp, which was initially planned to hold 100,000 Soviet prisoners of war. It was to be made up of four parts, called segments. In the end, two segments, capable of holding 80,000 prisoners, were built, and the construction of a third segment, designed to hold 60,000 inmates, was begun. As it turned out later, it was this camp that the Germans intended as a major facility for the “final solution of the Jewish question” in occupied Europe.
Setting up of Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
From the spring of 1942, the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp began serving as a centre for immediate extermination of Jews from Western, Southern, and Northern Europe, and parts of Central Europe. Four gas chambers were built here, capable of killing around 5,000 people a day, crematoria and two makeshift gas chambers called bunker 1 and bunker 2. The first Jewish deportees arrived at Birkenau in March 1942. They were 999 women from Slovakia and 112 women from France. Subsequent transports followed, from Bohemia and Moravia, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Greece, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia, Norway and parts of the USSR. Between May 1942 and September 1944 Polish Jews from various parts of the General Governorate and the territories annexed to the Reich were transported here. Most deportees arrived at Birkenau between May 1942 and September 1943, when transports averaging 2,000–3,000 people were reaching the camp. From the end of April to July 1944, 438,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered in the camp. The last and largest group of Polish Jews to be killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau included around 60,000 people from the Lodz ghetto (Litzmannstadt ghetto), who were transported to the camp in August and September 1944.
Auschwitz-Birkenau a location for the genocide of European Jews
Prisoners of other ethnic backgrounds were also sent to the AuschwitzBirkenau extermination camp or sentenced to death in the Main Camp for various infractions. One of the numerous groups imprisoned in Birkenau were the Roma and Sinti, for whom the so-called “Gypsy camp” (Zigeunerlager) was established in February 1943. Around 23,000 people, mostly from Germany, Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, and also from Poland (the Białystok region) were held there. On Himmler’s orders, the “Gypsy Camp” was liquidated on August 2, 1944, with the final group of over 2,897 Roma men, women and children murdered in the gas chambers.
Liquidation of Auschwitz-Birkenau Gypsy camp.
After the war, there were various attempts to assess the number of victims of this biggest death factory in history. It took many years of
Number of KL Auschwitz victims.
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Source: Archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim
Aerial photograph of the Auschwitz camp complex, taken by American pilots in the summer of 1944.
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Crematorium III building in Auschwitz-Birkenau Source: Archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim
Crematorium III, along with the underground section containing the gas chamber, began to operate on June 25, 1943. It functioned until the SS blew it up on January 20, 1945, during the liquidation of the camp. In 1943, the SS authorities established the “capacity� of Crematoria II and III as 1,440 corpses per day each; that of Crematoria IV and V as 768 each; and that of Crematorium I, in the Auschwitz I Main Camp, as 340. That capacity, however, was far exceeded during the peak arrivals of transports in 1943 and 1944. A total of up to 5,000 corpses were burned per 24 hours in crematoria II and III, and a total of 3,000 in crematoria IV and V.
Ruins of Crematorium III today Source: From collection of Robert Szuchta
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interdisciplinary research to come up with the possibly most accurate balance sheet of its murderous activity, which turned out to be horrifying. It is estimated that around 1,300,000 people arrived at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, of whom around 1,100,000 were Jews from all over Europe (around 300,000 Polish and around 438,000 Hungarian Jews), 140,000–150,000 Poles, around 23,000 Roma and Sinti, around 15,000 Soviet POWs, and around 25,000 prisoners of other ethnic backgrounds (among others, Czechs, French, Yugoslavians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Germans, Austrians). The overwhelming majority of the people who arrived at Auschwitz were not registered. These were mostly Jews, who were directed straight from the trains to the gas chambers. Throughout the camp’s existence, only 400,000 prisoners were registered.
Among the 1,100,000 people killed in Auschwitz, the most numerous were around 960,000 Jews, followed by around 70,000 to 75,000 Poles, around 20,000 Roma and Sinti, around 15,000 Soviet POWs, and around 10,000 to 15,000 prisoners of other ethnic backgrounds. When the Soviet army entered the Auschwitz camp on January 27, 1945, there were only around 7,000 prisoners there. Many of them died soon after liberation.
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KL Stutthof.
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As early as September 1939, the Germans established a camp in the village of Sztutowo near Gdansk—since 1942 known as KL Stutthof. It was intended for Poles from the Gdansk region. Beginning in the spring of 1944, the Germans started confining prisoners from other regions there, including Home Army soldiers from the Warsaw Uprising. In the final phase, a large contingent of Jewish women prisoners was sent there. People from the Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia), Scandinavia (Norway and Denmark), and other Western European countries were also held there. The commandants were Max Pauly (until August 1942) and Paul Werner Hoppe. It is estimated that nearly 130,000 prisoners passed through the camp; various estimates place the number of those murdered at 60,000 to 90,000. On 25 January 1945, the Germans ordered its evacuation and organized the so-called “death march” into the depths of the Reich for most of the prisoners who remained alive.
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In the summer of 1940, the Germans set up a forced labour camp for Polish prisoners, located near quarries in a southern district of Cracow. After the Jewish ghetto in Cracow was closed, in March 1941 the German authorities decided to convert the camp into a labour camp for Jews (Judenarbeitslager). This camp—known as “Plaszow”—was expanded to accommodate a greater number of labourers. The inmates, of whom some were each day taken from the Cracow ghetto, worked in the quarries or production shops. In the spring of 1943 the number of inmates peaked at 12,000, which meant overcrowding. Divided into several sections, the camp was surrounded by a double barbed wire fence, with 13 watchtowers along it, equipped with spotlights, machine guns and a telephone network. Various production plants operated in the camp’s southern and central parts. On 11 February 1943 Amon Göth was appointed camp commandant. It is estimated that he killed around 500 prisoners himself. Similar cruelty shown by Ferdinand Glaser, commander of camp guards, remained seared into the memory of those prisoners who were lucky to survive. Between August 1943 and September 1944, the camp grounds were witness to almost daily mass executions of Jews transported here from villages and towns near Cracow. Towards the end of 1943 construction work on a crematorium and gas chambers started, which were left unfinished, though. Plaszow inmates died of hunger, disease, brutal labour, sadistic beating, and were killed in mass executions. In the autumn of 1944 the Germans set out to liquidating the camp. Numerous transports were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Stutthof concentration camps. The camp was liberated on 20 January 1945 by the Red Army. A total of over 150,000 people passed through the “Plaszow” camp, mostly Jews from Cracow, Mielec, Tarnow and Rzeszow, as well as Hungary and Slovakia. The death toll is estimated at 80,000.
German concentration camp at Plaszow near Cracow.
Under a decree from Himmler, a camp for Soviet POWs was established at Majdanek, on the outskirts of Lublin, in October 1941. Its official name was originally Kriegsgefangenenlager der Waffen-SS in Lublin (Prisoner-of-War Camp in Lublin), later changed to Konzentrationslager der Waffen SS Lublin (Lublin Concentration Camp). In reality, it had many other functions. It was simultaneously a concentration camp, POW camp, extermination camp, labour camp, penal camp, and transit camp. Plans called for 250,000 prisoners to be held within grounds of over 500 hectares. Setbacks to the German war effort significantly limited the project. In the end, 280 buildings of different types were erected on 270 hectares. The central part of the camp consisted of barracks located in five “prison fields” separated by grass strips and
KL Majdanek in Lublin.
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barbed wire. Each “field” contained 22 wooden barracks, with 500 to 700 prisoners sleeping on wooden bunks or the bare ground in each of them. Majdanek prisoners also laboured at numerous industrial plants and farms that belonged to the SS. Majdanek Concentration Camp liberation. Number of victims.
The camp was liberated by Red Army soldiers in July 1944. Mostly Poles and Jews were imprisoned at Majdanek, but the camp fully deserves to be called international, as it also contained representatives of more than 52 ethnic groups from 29 countries. The Germans murdered 80,000 people at Majdanek, including around 60,000 Jews.
Crematorium furnaces at the Majdanek camp (contemporary photograph). Source: From collection of Robert Szuchta
The Germans did not manage to demolish camp buildings and remove the evidence of the crimes committee there. It was decided as early as 1944 to set up a martyrdom museum at the site of the German Majdanek camp. On July 2, 1947, the Polish Sejm voted to recognize the Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau camps as remembrance sites forming a lasting testimony to the crimes perpetrated by the German Nazis in the name of a mad idea of a racially pure future world. Wannsee conference.
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On 20 January 1942 a meeting of high Third Reich officials was held in Wannsee near Berlin to discuss technical considerations of the “final solution of the Jewish question” on a European scale. A plan was put forward which envisaged mass deportations of Jews from all over
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Europe to extermination camps located in occupied Poland, and a further expansion of the genocide apparatus. The implementation of this programme in occupied Europe was assigned to Adolf Eichmann. After the first mass murders of Jews committed by the Einsatzgruppen2 in Eastern Europe (in the territories of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine occupied in the summer and autumn of 1941), a decision was made to exterminate all Polish Jews living in the General Governorate. It must have been taken in the autumn of 1941. For this purpose, the Nazi Germans erected extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) devoted entirely to murdering people.
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The first German extermination camp for Jews was Kulmhof (in Chelmno nad Nerem). Jewish transports were coming in from Warta Land ghettoes. In the basements of the so-called palace they were told to undress, given towels and soap (to create an appearance of shower rooms) and rushed along the corridor into the trucks that served as mobile gas chambers. The mobile gas chambers on trucks used in Chelmno nad Nerem were tested earlier in the East. The trucks left for nearby woods, where the bodies of people gassed along the way were buried in pits. From summer 1942 they were burnt on special frames, and subsequently in crematoria. The number of victims is estimated at over 150,000. In addition to Jews, several transports of Roma and Sinti, Catholic priests and nuns, and Polish children from the Germanised Zamosc region were murdered there.
Kulmhof in Chełmno nad Nerem, Warta Land – first extermination camp.
Account of Michał Podchlebnik, a leather worker from Kolo, transported to the Kulmhof extermination camp in late December 1941 (excerpt) “In the early morning, at around 8 a.m., a car pulled in at the palace. I heard a German addressing the transport that had just arrived. He said: ‘you’ll go to the East, there are large areas to work on, you just
Einsatzgruppen—(Einsatzgruppen des Sicherheitsdienstes (SD) und der Sicherheitspolizei (SIPO))— special task forces of the Security Service and Security Police, set up to carry out special assignments in areas secured by the Wehrmacht. Since June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen were charged with liquidating people who were considered enemies of the Reich: communists, Gypsies and, most of all, Jews. The number of their victims is estimated at 1,500,000 - 2,000,000.
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need to change into clean clothes you’ll be given, and take a shower.’ Some applause could be heard. After a while, we heard the shuffling of bare feet along the basement corridor near the cell we were locked in. (…) At a certain moment I heard a car door shut. Screams could be heard, and pounding against the car walls. Then I heard the car engine start and after six or seven minutes, when the screams subsided, the car left the yard. (…) It continued all through the day. (…) In the evening, when my cellmates got back from work in the woods, they told me they had been burying the Jews from Klodawa in a mass grave. They pulled out the corpses from big black cars in which, so they said, the Jews had been suffocated by exhaust fumes. (…)”
“Reinhardt Operation” extermination camps.
Between March and July 1942 three extermination camps were finished and put into operation: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Those camps lay along the Bug River, in the border corridor dividing the General Governorate, the Reich Commissariat of Ukraine and the Bialystok District, in the vicinity of small railroad stations on important communication routes, at considerable distance from any larger towns. The Germans counted on being able to conceal the mass atrocity from public knowledge.
Monument to the victims of the Sobibor Nazi extermination camp. Source: From collection of Robert Szuchta
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17,000 stones set in a concrete surface symbolise Jewish communities, the victims of the Treblinka extermination camp. Source: From collection of Robert Szuchta
Monument—remembrance site for the victims of the Belzec extermination camp. Source: From collection of Robert Szuchta
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Killing techniques in extermination camps.
Beginning in the early spring of 1942, the inhabitants of ghettos were herded to nearby train stations and transported to the extermination camps in freight cars, in horrible conditions (jampacked with 80, 100, or 120 people in each car). The trains arrived at special railroad spurs and the Jews were forced from there straight to an open square, where their hand baggage and clothes were taken from them. Then women and children were separated from men. Occasionally, a handful of strong, healthy men had the chance to live for a few days or weeks more—exploited at backbreaking labour sorting clothing and suitcases, or emptying the gas chambers and burning the bodies. Then they were murdered. The victims, including children and pregnant women, were herded into “bathhouses.” In fact, these were gas chambers, where they were murdered with exhaust fumes from diesel tank engines.
Account of the extermination of Jews at Belzec, given by SS Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein on 4 May 1945: “(...) At around 7:00 the next morning, I was told: ‘The first transport arrives in 10 minutes.’ Several minutes later, a train did indeed arrive from Lviv; 45 cars with 6,700 Jews, 1,450 of whom were already dead. (…) The train stopped. 200 Ukrainians opened the doors and, lashing out with leather whips, drove the Jews from the cars. (…) Next, the procession began moving. (…) At the door stood a stout SS man, who spoke in a fatherly tone to these miserable people: ‘In you go, don’t hold things up! Breathe deeply in the chamber, this inhalation is necessary to prevent sicknesses and epidemics.’ When asked what would become of them, he replied ‘The men will work, naturally, building houses and roads, but the women won’t have to work. Should they so desire, they can help in the kitchens or the homesteads.’ (…) Finally, the chambers were packed tight. (….) The SS pushed them against each other as long as this was possible. The doors were closed, and the rest waited naked outside for their turn. The people were to be killed with diesel exhaust fumes. (…) After 28 minutes, only a few people are still breathing. Finally, after 32 minutes, no one is alive. People from the labour detail open the wooden doors on the far side. (…) The corpses, wet with sweat and urine, their legs befouled with excrement and menstrual blood, are dragged out. Children’s corpses are tossed. Not a moment can be lost. The Ukrainians’ whips whistle among the labour detail. Two dozen dentists rip the jaws apart with their heels and check for gold. The ones with gold go to the left, and the ones without gold to the right. Other dentists use pincers or little hammers to break the gold teeth and crowns out of the jawbones. 32
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Captain Wirth strolled nearby. He was in his element. Several workers were checking for gold, diamonds, and valuables in the sex organs and anuses. (…) The naked corpses were carried on stretchers about a meter long to a pit measuring 100 x 20 x 12 meters. After a time, a layer of dead bodies would settle, making space for another. Then they were covered with ten centimetres of sand, so that only the occasional head or hand stuck out.”
The Germans did not build crematoria in extermination camps. In the first phase, the bodies of the gassed victims were buried in deep pits. Beginning from the second half of 1942, the decomposing corpses were exhumed and burned on great open-air pyres along with the bodies of people just murdered. It was the so-called Sonderaktion 1005, commanded by SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel. The victims’ property (including clothes and the gold teeth extracted after their death) was confiscated, sorted and sent in special transports to the central warehouses of “Operation Reinhardt” in Lublin. In August 1942, a portion of the Majdanek camp in Lublin was converted into an extermination camp for the Jewish population. Construction of five gas chambers began, which were finished in October. Carbon monoxide released directly from pressurised containers was used in those gas chambers, as well as Zyklon-B. The furnaces in the crematorium could burn up to 1,000 bodies in a 24-hour period. Until the autumn of 1943, mostly Jews from the Lublin area were killed at the Majdanek camp.
Extermination of Polish Jews in Majdanek.
On 3 November 1943, the Germans shot dead 42,000 Jewish prisoners still held in labour camps across the Lublin region. That operation was called Erntefest (Harvest). It was supposed to conclude the process of exterminating Jews in the General Governorate. The Germans shot dead almost 18,000 Jewish prisoners at Majdanek that day.
Erntefest operation
It is exceptionally difficult to estimate the number of extermination camp victims. In view of the nature of the crime, the desire to conceal it from international public awareness, and the very method of committing the murders, the Germans kept no records on the people brought to Operation Reinhardt camps to die. Nor was there any extensive camp documentation as at Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Current estimates place the proportion of Jews murdered in Operation Reinhardt at 70% of all those living in the General Governorate.
Number of victims murdered in extermination camps
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Jewish victims of Operation Reinhardt extermination camps Extermination camp
Number of victims (thousands)
In existence from – to
Belzec
March 1942 – December 1942
450–500
Sobibor
May 1942 – October 1943
170–180
Treblinka
July 1942 – October 1943
800–900
Majdanek
August 1942 – November 1943
Total
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1480–1640
Prisoner mutinies in extermination camps.
At some extermination camps prisoners staged armed revolts. During a mutiny at Treblinka in August 1943, around 200 prisoners broke away from the burning camp. Some of them survived. In October 1943, around 300 prisoners made a dash for freedom during a mutiny at the Sobibor camp, and 58 of them managed to escape. The extermination camps along the River Bug were liquidated in the second half of 1943. After the murder of the last prisoners, the killing equipment, camp garrison quarters, and prisoner barracks were liquidated. The sites were levelled and planted over. No one was ever supposed to find out what had happened there. Also the Jewish Sonderkomanndo prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau rose in revolt on 7 October 1944. When the rumour broke that they would be murdered, the prisoners lashed out at SS men with hand tools, cut the barbed-wire fence and tried their luck at escaping. Unfortunately, the escape was not successful, 451 prisoners were shot dead.
Camp resistance movement. Witold Pilecki’s mission.
The fact that German concentration camps existed in Poland was known, and not only to local civilians. From the moment the camps began functioning, the underground Polish authorities were informed as to their purpose and the conditions under which the prisoners existed. This information came from escapees and also from the prisoners themselves, who formed clandestine organizations inside the camps. An example of uncommon sacrifice is the biography of Polish Army cavalry-platoon commander Witold Pilecki. Prisoners also conveyed information through the local civilians who risked their lives to supply medicine and food to labour details working outside the camp. At least 1,200 civilians engaged in this activity in the land of Oswiecim.
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Witold Pilecki (1901–1948) fought in the 1939 September campaign. After Poland’s defeat, he served in the underground resistance, and co-founded the Secret Polish Army. In September 1940, he voluntarily mixed in with a crowd rounded up in a Warsaw street and was transferred to the newly established KL Auschwitz (and was held there until 1943). His mission in the camp was to set up an underground organisation that would stay in touch with the Polish resistance; he regularly dispatched reports to the headquarters in Warsaw. He conspired with many prisoners, including Stanisław Dubois, Xawery Dunikowski and Bronisław Czech. In 1943, he managed to escape together with two other inmates. He got to Warsaw, where he presented a plan to attack the camp, which was not approved by the Home Army command. In 1944 he fought in the Warsaw Uprising. Witold Pilecki was arrested by the communists after the war in 1947 and sentenced to death for his independence activity. The sentence was carried out. Source: Public Domain
Jan Karski (Kozielewski, 1914–2000) as a courier for the Polish Underground State, reached the West on two missions with accounts of the situation in occupied Poland. During his second mission in the autumn of 1942, he delivered a report on the situation of Jews in occupied Poland and the way they were being murdered, along with a plea for help, to representatives of the Polish government-inexile and then to British and American politicians, including the US president and the president of the World Zionist Organization. Karski had obtained his information from representatives of underground Jewish organizations. He entered the Warsaw ghetto himself on two occasions, and managed to reach a camp in Izbica Lubelska, where he witnessed Jews being transported to their deaths at the extermination camp in Belzec. Source: MFA
The leadership of the Polish Underground State took measures to support the prisoners of the German concentration camps and, through the government-in-exile, informed free-world governments and the international public about the atrocities being committed in the camps. In 1942 and 1943, Polish underground organisations published a series
Telling the world about crimes perpetrated in German concentration camps.
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Cover of the brochure Auschwitz—the Camp of Death One of the first brochures about Auschwitz. It was written by Natalia Zarembina, a prisoner who managed to get out of Auschwitz. The book first appeared in occupied Warsaw in December 1942, in a print run of 2,500 copies. It was published in the free world in eight different languages, including Chinese, between 1943 and 1945. Source: From collection of Robert Szuchta
of flyers and brochures with information about the camps addressed to audiences at home and abroad. They sounded the alarm for the world and appealed for steps to aid the prisoners. As early as 1941, a representative of the Polish government in-exile in London suggested to the British authorities that they bomb Auschwitz. However, the British rejected such a solution.
British Air Marshal Richard Peirse’s response to the Polish government’s suggestion to bomb Auschwitz in 1941, in a letter to the Polish Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief, Gen. Władysław Sikorski: “I have very carefully reviewed the proposal (…) regarding an air attack on the concentration camp in Oswiecim (…) we have decided (…) and I inform you with regret that a successful attack on Oswiecim is not feasible in practice. There are two major reasons for this. First, our bomber forces have the primary task of attacking certain industrial centres (…). Second, we know from our experience that sporadic attacks on such targets as Oswiecim would most probably fail to achieve the desired result, that is, destroying the barbed wire fence and ammunition stores in such a way as to allow the POWs to escape.”
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Similarly, international Jewish organizations asked the Allies in 1944 to destroy the Auschwitz-Birkenau death apparatus, to no avail. American and British strategists regarded defeating the Third Reich and bombing industrial targets in Germany as higher priorities. The Americans also referred to the inadmissibility of using military force for non-military purposes. German policy exacerbated conflicts between the Poles and the Jews, and the ubiquitous anti-Semitic propaganda inflamed unfavourable attitudes towards them. There were pogroms, and Jews were even murdered. Incidents of blackmailing and informing upon Jews in hiding,
Polish attitudes towards extermination of Jews.
A German announcement about the execution of Poles for aiding Jews Source: Public Domain
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and extorting money or property from them, were not infrequent. The organs of the Polish Underground State unequivocally condemned and harshly punished that disgraceful practice. At the same time, elements of the Polish population attempted to aid Jews. It is worth emphasizing that in Poland, aiding a Jew was punishable by the death penalty not only for those who helped, but also for their entire families, and even neighbours. Private individuals, religious orders, and institutions set up for this purpose by the Polish Underground State aided Jews. The most important such institution was the “Żegota” Jewish Aid Council, founded in December 1942, which operated on funds from the Polish government-in-exile and Jewish organizations in the USA. It is estimated that between several dozen thousand and several hundred thousand Poles were involved in various forms of aid to fugitive Jews. After the war, the Yad Vashem Institute was established in Jerusalem, Israel. Since 1963, it has been honouring people who selflessly helped Jews or rescued them from the Holocaust with the title “Righteous Among the Nations.” As of 1 January 2014, 6,454 of the 25,271 honoured are from Poland.
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Remembering German concentration and extermination camps
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fter the war, thanks to the efforts of former prisoners, the remains of the German camps were preserved in memory of the victims and as a warning to future generations. Today, these places have extraordinary significance for Jews, Poles, Roma, Sinti and many other ethnic groups. On occasion, conflicts have erupted around those sites over the methods of commemoration. This is why the Polish prime minister has established an International Auschwitz Council made up of experts from around the world. It is responsible for day-today activities to maintain and commemorate this unique remembrance site. The International Centre for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, set up on the initiative of former KL Auschwitz prisoners as part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, conducts a broad range of educational activities addressed to international audiences and disseminates reliable knowledge about what the concentration camps were, who built them, and who their victims were.
Obligation to preserve remains of former German concentration camps for the sake of future generations.
In various countries, voices were raised after the war denying the existence of the death camps. However, the preserved Nazi records, accounts by former prisoners and eyewitnesses, along with the ruins of the camps and the killing apparatus, made it possible to refute the deniers with the truth about the perpetrators and victims. Today, with the passing of generation of former prisoners, new dangers have arisen, including distorted judgements resulting from oversimplification and a lack of reliable knowledge about World War II and the functioning of the Nazi German camp system. Ignorance sometimes leads to a refusal to believe that people are capable of such deeds.
Denial of the existence of German concentration camps and the Holocaust.
People ignorant of the history of Poland and the Second World War can sometimes be heard using the term “Polish concentration camps.” Not only does this label falsify history, but it also relieves the Germans
“Polish concentration camps” as testament to ignorance.
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of their responsibility as those who built them, unjustly turning the Poles, who were victims of the German concentration camps, into perpetrators. This was the reason why the Polish government in 2006 submitted a request to UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee to change the name of the remembrance site of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Oswiecim. Poland’s initiative met with support from the Israeli Yad Vashem Institute and former prisoners of this camp living today in various parts of the world. On 27 June 2007, during its 31 session, the UNESCO Committee approved Poland’s request, changing the camp’s name to “Auschwitz Birkenau. German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945).”
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Author: Robert Szuchta This publication was made possible through the Public and Cultural Diplomacy Department, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs