The 1st of September 1939. Nazi Germany invades Poland which marks the beginning of the Second World War. After defeating the Polish army, the Germans ruthlessly suppress the Poles whom they consider to be racially inferior and, in the weeks, following the German attack on Poland, German SS, police, and military units shoot thousands of Polish civilians, including many members of the Polish nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia.
The Nazis seek to destroy Polish culture and the Polish nation, and eliminate any resistance, by arresting and murdering Poles. The Germans mean for Poland to be an endless supply of slave labor, and a site for the mass extermination of European Jewry. On 2 September 1939, the Nazis set up the first German concentration camp outside German borders in World War II.
The camp’s name is Stutthof, and after the war, its former personnel will pay for their crimes with their own lives, when they will be brutally executed in front of 200,000 people. This mass execution will be recorded by official press photographers, and resemble a theater of horror. The Germans established the Stutthof camp in a wooded area west of Stutthof, a town about 22 miles east of Danzig, today’s Gdańsk.
The original camp, known as the old camp, was surrounded by barbed-wire fences and 8 barracks for the inmates built by prisoners in 1940. The camp was established in connection with the ethnic cleansing project that included the liquidation of Polish elites such as members of the intelligentsia as well as religious and political leaders. Even before the war, the Germans had 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 for political prisoners and persons accused of violating labor discipline, administered by the SD - German Security Police. Finally, in January 1942, Stutthof became a regular concentration camp under the jurisdiction of the SS.
In 1943, the camp was enlarged and a new camp was constructed alongside the earlier one. It contained 30 new barracks and was surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences. 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.
The maximum capacity of the gas chamber was 150 people per execution. Eventually, the Stutthof camp system became a vast network of forced-labor camps. 105 Stutthof subcamps were established throughout northern and central German-occupied Poland.
Tens of thousands of people, perhaps as many as 100,000, were deported to the Stutthof camp. The prisoners were mainly non-Jewish Poles. Conditions in the camp were brutal.
Many prisoners 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 gas chamber. Gassing with Zyklon B gas began in June 1944.
4,000 prisoners, including Jewish women and children, were killed in a gas chamber before the evacuation of the camp. Camp doctors also killed sick or injured prisoners in the infirmary with lethal injections of phenol. More than 60,000 people died in Stutthof concentration camp and its subcamps.
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. The camp staff consisted of SS guards and, after 1943, Ukrainian auxiliaries. In June 1944, the SS in Stutthof began conscripting women from Danzig and the surrounding cities to train as camp guards because of their severe shortage after the women's subcamp of Stutthof called Bromberg-Ost was set up in the city of Bydgoszcz.
The evacuation of prisoners from the Stutthof camp system in northern Poland began in January 1945. When the final evacuation began, there were nearly 50,000 prisoners in the Stutthof camp system, the overwhelming majority of them Jews. About 5,000 prisoners from the Stutthof subcamps were marched to the Baltic Sea coast, forced into the water, and machine gunned.
The rest of the prisoners were marched in the direction of Lauenburg in eastern Germany but after they were cut off by advancing Soviet forces, the Germans forced the surviving prisoners back to Stutthof. Marching in severe winter conditions and treated brutally by the SS guards, thousands died during the march. In late April 1945, the remaining prisoners were removed from Stutthof by sea, since Stutthof was completely encircled by Soviet forces.
Again, hundreds of prisoners were forced into the sea and shot. It has been estimated that over 25,000 prisoners, one in two, died during the evacuation from Stutthof and its subcamps. When Soviet forces liberated Stutthof on the 9th of May 1945, they found only about 100 prisoners who had managed to hide during the final evacuation of the camp.
Altogether, some 100,000 prisoners passed through Stutthof; 60,000 of them perished, while another 22,000 were transferred to other concentration camps. After the war, the former Stutthof personnel were tried at the First Stutthof trial which began on the 25th of April 1946. Among the accused was Jenny Wanda Barkmann who as a guard at Stutthof had brutalized prisoners and was known for beating inmates, some to death, either with her bare hands or with her whip.
Among her victims were also children. During the trial, Barkmann was not particularly worried about her life, but was rather concerned about her appearance. She wore stylish clothes and the different hairstyle every day and reportedly flirted with the prison guards.
Another accused was Wanda Klaff, who had became infamous at Stutthof for her brutal treatment of prisoners whom she would beat and kick without any reason at all until they lay still. When she was in particularly bad mood, she would drown the female inmates in mud or club them to death. During the trial she said: "I am very intelligent and I was very devoted to my work in the camps.
I struck at least two prisoners every day. " Having made this statement, she was probably the only one to think so. Another accused was Elisabeth Becker who had become known as a ruthless overseer.
She brutalized prisoners and would beat children with their mothers and then select them to be send to the gas chamber to be killed without any remorse. Another Stutthof guard who stood trial was Ewa Paradies who, in the freezing cold winter, often ordered a group of female prisoners to undress and stand in the snow. Then she poured cold water on the naked women and when they moved, she would beat them.
” Among the 5 Stutthof guards, who were sentenced to death was also Gerda Steinhoff. She was known for beating female inmates, including children, to death as well as selections of prisoners to be sent to the gas chambers. Despite the serious charges, the women were said to have behaved insolently, giggling and joking during the proceedings.
When the trial ended on the 31st of May, 11 defendants, convicted of crimes against humanity, were sentenced to death by hanging. Among them were 5 above mentioned women. 4 cried and pleaded for their life, only one, Jenny Wanda Barkmann, remained calm.
Their execution was held publicly and became a theater of horror which was recorded by official press photographers. After World War II, only three public executions of war criminals were carried out in Poland. One of them took place at Biskupia Górka Hill near Gdańsk, former Danzig.
When on the 4th of July 1946, 11 Nazi Criminals from the Stutthof concentration camp were hanged from the gallows, 200,000 people were watching. On that day Biskupia Górka Hill experienced a real siege. Three days earlier, the newspapers had reported the date of the execution and workplaces announced a day off and provided employees with transport to the event.
Everyone could come to witness the execution. The security forces feared that a lynching might occur at any moment and the militia and army had difficulty controlling the huge crowd. The 4th of July was very warm, the sun was shining.
Punctually at 5 PM, eleven open trucks brought the prisoners to the execution ground, their hands and legs tied with cords. On the platform of each of the eleven trucks stood a convict, six men and five women in total. The trucks were backed under the gallows and the condemned made to stand on the tailboards or on the chairs on which they had been sitting.
Former Stutthof prisoners, dressed in striped uniforms, had volunteered to serve as executioners and put a simple cord noose around the convicts’ necks. The execution was planned in such a way that after each truck would be driven forward, the 11 convicts would be left suspended, and their bodies would not fall from too great a height. As a result, the nooses did not break their necks and did not cause an instant death.
This short-drop method of hanging resulted in a torturous death by strangulation of each of the criminals lasting anywhere from 10 to 20 long minutes. When the driver of the first truck carrying Johann Pauls, the former commandant of the guards in Stutthof, started the engine and moved slowly forward, Pauls, before sliding off the platform and hanging on the rope, managed to shout "Heil Hitler! ".
He was answered by the insults of the crowd. As Pauls' body went still, another truck started moving and another criminal began what those present at the execution described as a "rope dance". As each truck moved forward, the other convicts had the opportunity to take a good look at what awaited them in the next few moments.
When one truck driver failed to start the engine several times, the former Stutthof prisoner pushed the convict off the platform. The crowd waved and the people shouted: "For our husbands, for our children". After the last convict died, the security forces then allowed the crowd to the gallows.
People ripped off buttons, cut off pieces of fabric and kicked and smashed the corpses. The gathered people were then chased away, and the bodies were removed from the gallows. After the execution it was rumored that Jenny Wanda Barkman’s body was cremated, her ashes were taken to Hamburg and dumped into the toilet of the apartment where she had been born.
However, it was not true. Instead, the bodies of those executed were taken to the Medical University of Gdańsk to be used as a teaching aid in anatomy classes. There were no tears shed for Stutthof Nazi torturers.
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