The first camp to be open in Poland ...and the last one to be liberated.It was the first camp outside German borders. This was the first German Nazi concentration camp on Polish territory – it was in operation in 1939 (34 km from Gdansk, at the head of the River Vistula Spit) following the invasion of Poland in World War II. It was the camp the last camp liberated by the Allies, on May 9, 1945. Today Stutthof is a museum.
Totally about 110,000 people were detained in this camp... more than 85,000 people were killed. The former prisoner of Stutthoff and Lithuanian writer Balys Sruoga later wrote a novel Dievų miškas (The Forest of Gods) describing the everyday horrors of this camp
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From an internment camp to the “Final Solution”1941
Originally, Stutthof was a civilian internment camp under Danzig police. In November 1941, it became "labor education" camp. 1942 Finally, in January 1942, Stutthof became a regular concentration camp. The original camp (known as the “old camp”) was surrounded by barbed-wire fence *. It comprised 8 barracks for the inmates and a "kommandantur" for the SS guards. 1943 In 1943, the camp was enlarged and a new camp was constructed alongside the earlier one. It was also surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fence and contained 30 new barracks (total area: 1.2 km²). 1944 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: it became a mass extermination camp. Mobile gas wagons were also used to complement the maximum capacity of the gas chamber (150 people per execution) when needed. |
Life condition in the campThe first prisoners were mainly Polish people from Tricity (Trójmiasto) in Poland. The prisoners were forced to work by the camp construction works, land regulating, cutting the trees, erecting wooden sheds and huts for headquarters and guards.
Later, the camp grew to be a place of extermination of people deported from other regions of Poland and even of foreigners, among others of such citizenship: Russian, Belarusian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Czech, Slovakian, Rumanian, Finnish, Danish, Belgian, Dutch, German, Austrian, Hungarian, Yugoslavian and Spanish. Prisoners were used in hard labour; they worked 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. They lived in wooden barracks with no door, windows and no room for medical or hygiene care. The prisoners slept on the floor covered with straw. The lack of proper, warm clothes was a huge problem. Many people died of starvation . 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 camp's small gas chamber. Gassing with Zyklon B began in June 1944. Camp doctors also killed sick or injured prisoners in the infirmary with lethal injections.
Research shows that the Stutthof concentration camp was a potential source for human remains that Nazi Dr. Rudolf Spanner used to make a limited quantity of soap from human fat. |