Download german nazi ConCentration Camps

german Nazi
Concentration
camps
1933–1939
T
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.
1
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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
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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
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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
A
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.
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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
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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.
* * *
KL Stutthof.
26
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.
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
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.
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
27
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.
28
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
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
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.
***
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.
2
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
29
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
30
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
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
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
31
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
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
33
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
60
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.
34
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
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.
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
35
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.”
36
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
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
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
37
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.
38
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
Remembering German
concentration and
extermination camps
A
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.
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
39
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