On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, igniting World War II. After the Polish Army was defeated, the Germans launched a brutal campaign of suppression against the Polish people, whom they considered racially inferior. In the weeks that followed, SS police and military units shot thousands of Polish civilians, including members of the nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia. The Nazis aimed to destroy Polish culture and eliminate resistance through mass arrests and executions, intending Poland to serve as an endless source of slave labor and a site for the extermination of European Jewry.
The very next day, September 2, 1939, the Nazis established their first concentration camp outside German borders. It was called Stutthof, located in a wooded area west of the town of Sztutowo, about 22 miles east of Danzig, today known as Gdańsk. The original camp, later called the Old Camp, consisted of barbed-wire fences and eight barracks built by prisoners in 1940. The camp was established in connection with the ethnic cleansing project targeting Polish elites, including intellectuals and religious and political leaders.
Even before the war, the Germans had compiled lists of people to arrest and had secretly scouted suitable locations for concentration camps in the region. Stutthof began as a civilian internment camp under the Danzig police chief. In November 1941, it was expanded into a labor education camp for political prisoners and those accused of violating labor discipline, administered by the SD, the German Security Police. In January 1942, Stutthof became a regular concentration camp under SS jurisdiction.
In 1943, the camp was enlarged with 30 new barracks and surrounded by electrified barbed wire. A crematorium and a gas chamber were added that same year, just in time to begin mass executions when Stutthof was absorbed into the Final Solution in June 1944. The gas chamber could hold up to 150 people per execution. Eventually, Stutthof became a vast network of forced labor camps.
One hundred and five subcamps were established throughout northern and central occupied Poland. Tens of thousands of people, perhaps as many as 100,000, were deported to Stutthof. The prisoners were mainly non-Jewish Poles. Conditions were brutal, and many died in typhus epidemics that swept the camp in the winters of 1942 and 1944.
Prisoners judged too weak or sick to work by SS guards were gassed. Gassing with Zyklon B began in June 1944, and around 4,000 prisoners, including Jewish women and children, were killed in the gas chamber before the camp was evacuated. Camp doctors also killed sick and injured prisoners in the infirmary with lethal injections of phenol. In total, more than 60,000 people died at Stutthof and its subcamps.
Until 1942, nearly all prisoners were Polish. The number of prisoners increased considerably in 1944, with Jews forming a significant portion of the newcomers. The first contingent of 2,500 Jewish prisoners arrived from Auschwitz in July 1944. In total, 23,566 Jews, including 2,817 women, were transferred from Auschwitz to Stutthof.
The camp staff consisted of SS guards and, after 1943, Ukrainian auxiliaries. In June 1944, the SS began conscripting women from Danzig and the surrounding cities to train as camp guards due to a severe shortage. A women’s subcamp called Brösen was set up in the city of Bytów. The evacuation of prisoners from the Stutthof system began in January 1945 when the Red Army approached.
At that time, nearly 50,000 prisoners were in the Stutthof system, the overwhelming majority of them Jewish. Around 5,000 prisoners from the subcamps were marched to the Baltic Sea coast, forced into the water, and machine-gunned. The rest were marched toward Lenberg in eastern Germany, but after being cut off by advancing Soviet forces, the Germans forced the surviving prisoners to turn back to Stutthof. Marching in severe winter conditions and treated brutally by SS guards, thousands died along the route.
In late April 1945, the remaining prisoners were removed from Stutthof by sea, since the camp 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 evacuations from Stutthof and its subcamps. When Soviet forces liberated the camp on May 9, 1945, they found only about 100 prisoners who had managed to hide during the final evacuation.
Altogether, some 100,000 prisoners passed through Stutthof. Sixty thousand perished, while another 22,000 were transferred to other concentration camps. After the war, former Stutthof personnel were tried at the first Stutthof trial, which began on April 25, 1946. Among the accused was Jenny-Wanda Barkmann, a guard known for brutalizing prisoners, beating some to death with her bare hands or with a whip.
Her victims included children. During the trial, Barkmann was reportedly unconcerned about her life but worried about her appearance, wearing stylish clothes and a different hairstyle every day and flirting with the prison guards. Another accused was Gerda Steinhoff, who had become infamous for beating and kicking prisoners without reason and for drowning female inmates in mud or clubbing them to death when in a particularly bad mood. 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. ” Another accused, Elisabeth Becker, was a ruthless overseer who brutalized prisoners, beat children in front of their mothers, and selected them for the gas chamber without remorse. Eva Paradies was another Stutthof guard who stood trial; in freezing winter weather, she often ordered female prisoners to undress and stand in the snow, then poured cold water on them and beat them if they moved. Ewa Paradies was among the five female guards sentenced to death, as was Gerda Steinhoff, known for beating female inmates and children to death and for selecting prisoners for the gas chambers.
Despite the serious charges, the women were said to have behaved insolently, giggling and joking during the proceedings. The trial ended on May 31, 1946. Eleven defendants convicted of crimes against humanity were sentenced to death by hanging, among them the five women. Four cried and pleaded for their lives.
Only Jenny-Wanda Barkmann remained calm. Their execution was held publicly and became a theater of horror, recorded by official press photographers. After World War II, only three public executions of war criminals were carried out in Poland. One took place near Gdańsk at Biskupia Górka Hill, where on July 4, 1946, eleven Nazi criminals from Stutthof concentration camp were hanged from the gallows before 200,000 spectators.
Three days earlier, newspapers had announced the date of the execution, and workplaces gave employees the day off and provided transport to the event. Security forces feared a lynching, and the militia and army struggled to control the enormous crowd. July 4 was very warm, and the sun was shining. At exactly 5 p.
m. , eleven open trucks brought the prisoners to the execution ground, their hands and legs tied with cords. On the platform of each truck stood a convict: six men and five women. The trucks were backed under the gallows, and the condemned were made to stand on the tailboards or chairs.
Former Stutthof prisoners dressed in striped uniforms volunteered as executioners, placing cord nooses around the convicts’ necks. The execution was planned so that when each truck moved forward, the condemned would hang suspended without falling from a great height. This short-drop method did not break necks and caused a slow, agonizing death by strangulation lasting ten to twenty minutes per person. When the driver of the first truck started the engine and moved forward, the former commandant of Stutthof, Johann Pauls, managed to shout “Heil Hitler” before sliding off the platform and hanging from the rope.
He was answered by insults from the crowd. As one truck moved forward, the remaining convicts had a clear view of what awaited them. When one driver failed to start the engine several times, a former prisoner pushed the convict off the platform. The crowd waved and shouted, “For our husbands!
For our children! ”
After the last convict died, security forces allowed the crowd to approach the gallows. People ripped off buttons, cut pieces of fabric, and kicked and smashed the corpses. The bodies were later removed and taken to the Medical University of Gdańsk to be used as teaching aids in anatomy classes.
There were no tears shed for the Stutthof torturers.