Coordinates: 54°19′44″N 19°09′14″E / 54.32889°N 19.15389°E / 54.32889; 19.15389

Stutthof concentration camp in 2008

Stutthof was the first Nazi concentration camp built outside of 1937 German borders.

Completed on September 2, 1939, it was located in a secluded, wet, and wooded area west of the small town of Sztutowo (German: Stutthof). The town is located in the former territory of the Free City of Danzig, 34 km east of Gdańsk, Poland. Stutthof was the last camp liberated by the Allies, on May 9, 1945. More than 85,000 victims^[1] died in the camp out of as many as 110,000 people deported there.

Camp[link]

Nazi concentration camps in occupied Poland (marked with black squares)

The Nazi authorities of the Free City of Danzig were compiling material about known Jews and Polish intelligentsia as early as 1936 and were also reviewing suitable places to build concentration camps in their area. Originally, Stutthof was a civilian internment camp under the Danzig police chief. In November 1941, it became a "labor education" camp, administered by the German Security Police. 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 eight barracks for the inmates and a "kommandantur" for the SS guards, totalling 120,000 m². 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 thirty new barracks, raising the total area to 1.2 km².

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. Mobile gas wagons were also used to complement the maximum capacity of the gas chamber (150 people per execution) when needed.

Staff[link]

The camp staff consisted of SS guards and after 1943, Ukrainian auxiliaries. In 1942 the first female prisoners and female German guards arrived in Stutthof, including Aufseherin Herta Bothe.^[2][3] A total of over 130 women served in the Stutthof complex of camps. 34 female guards, including Gerda Steinhoff, Rosy Suess, Ewa Paradies and Jenny-Wanda Barkmann, have been identified later as having committed crimes against humanity at Stutthof. Starting in June 1944, the SS in Stutthof began conscripting women from Danzig and the surrounding cities to train as camp female guards because of a severe shortage of guards. In 1944 a women's subcamp of Stutthof called Bromberg-Ost (Konzentrationslager Bromberg-Ost) was set up in the city of Bydgoszcz.^[4]

Several Norwegian Waffen SS volunteers worked as guards or as instructors for prisoners from Nordic countries, according to senior researcher at Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities — Terje Emberland.^[5]

Prisoners[link]

Inside the gas chamber

The first inmates imprisoned on 2 September 1939 were 150 Polish citizens, arrested on the streets of Danzig right after the outbreak of the war. The inmate population rose to 6,000 in the following two weeks, on 15 September 1939.

Tens of thousands of people, perhaps as many as 110,000, were deported to the Stutthof camp. The prisoners were mainly non-Jewish Poles. There were also Polish Jews from Warsaw and Białystok, and Jews from forced-labour camps in the occupied Baltic states, which the Germans evacuated in 1944 as Soviet forces approached. These totals are thought to be conservative, as it is believed that inmates sent for immediate execution were not registered. A number of Germans were also sent^[6] to the camp, where they were known as the "camp aristocracy" - a large group of German criminals was also given kapo positions and terrorized other inmates^[7], other Germans included a couple of social democrats, and later members of a military faction that tried to gain power from Hitler; in 1945 the camp authorities noted that 35% of inmates were Poles, 8% Russians, and 7% Germans (some of which were Poles who refused to accept Volksliste)^[8].

When the Soviet army began its advance through Nazi-occupied Estonia in July and August 1944, the camp staff of Klooga concentration camp evacuated the majority of the inmates by sea to the Stutthof concentration camp.

Conditions[link]

Crematory building

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. More than 85,000 people died in the camp.

The Germans used Stutthof prisoners as forced labourers. Some prisoners worked in SS-owned businesses such as the German Equipment Works (DAW), located near the camp. Others laboured in local brickyards, in private industrial enterprises, in agriculture, or in the camp's own workshops. In 1944, as forced labour by concentration camp prisoners became increasingly important in armaments production, a Focke-Wulf aircraft factory was constructed at Stutthof. Eventually, the Stutthof camp system became a vast network of forced-labour camps; 105 Stutthof subcamps were established throughout northern and central Poland. The major subcamps were Thorn and Elbing.

The Stutthof camp has been suggested as one of the possible sources for human remains that Dr. Rudolf Spanner used to make a limited quantity of soap from human fat.^[9]

The former prisoner of Stutthoff and Lithuanian writer Balys Sruoga later wrote a novel Dievų miškas (The Forest of Gods) describing the everyday life of this camp.

Soap production from the bodies of victims[link]

Some evidence exists of small-scale soap production of soap made from human corpses in the Stutthof concentration camp.^[10]

In his book "Russia at War 1941 to 1945", Alexander Werth reported that while visiting Gdańsk/Danzig in 1945 shortly after its liberation by the Red Army, he saw an experimental factory outside the city for making soap from human corpses. According to Werth it had been run by "a German professor called Spanner" and "was a nightmarish sight, with its vats full of human heads and torsoes pickled in some liquid, and its pails full of a flakey substance - human soap".^[11]

Death march[link]

Camp memorial

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, the majority of them Jews, in the Stutthof camp system. About 5,000 prisoners from Stutthof subcamps were marched to the Baltic Sea coast, forced into the water, and machinegunned. The rest of the prisoners were marched in the direction of Lauenburg in eastern Germany. 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 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. Over 4,000 were sent by small boat to Germany, some to the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, and some to camps along the Baltic coast. Many drowned along the way. A barge full of prisoners was washed ashore at Klintholm Havn in Denmark where 351 of the 370 on board were saved on 5 May 1945. Shortly before the German surrender, some prisoners were transferred to Malmö, Sweden, and released into the care of that neutral country. It has been estimated that over 25,000 prisoners, one in two, died during the evacuation from Stutthof and its subcamps.

Liberation[link]

Soviet forces liberated Stutthof on May 9, 1945, and liberated about 100 prisoners who had managed to hide during the final evacuation of the camp.

Stutthof sub camps[link]

Sub-camps of the German concentration camp Stutthof near Danzig during the Third Reich:^[12]

Commanders[link]

• SS-Sturmbannführer - Max Pauly - September 39 - August 42
• SS-Sturmbannführer - Werner Hoppe - August 42 - January 45

Stutthof Trials[link]

Entrance to the camp

Stutthof concentration camp in 2007

The Nuremberg Trials did not include staff of the Stutthof concentration camp. However, the Poles held four trials in Gdańsk against former guards and kapos of Stutthof, charging them with crimes of war and crimes against humanity. The first trial was held against 30 ex-officials and kapos of the camp, from April 25, 1946, to May 31, 1946. The Soviet/Polish Special Criminal Court found all of them guilty of the charges. Eleven of them, including the former commander, Johann Pauls, were sentenced to death. The rest were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment.

Some of the sentences of the first trial:

• Johann Pauls: death sentence (executed on July 4, 1946)
• Gerda Steinhoff: death sentence (executed on July 4, 1946)
• Kapo Josef Reiter: death sentence (executed on July 4, 1946)
• Wanda Klaff: death sentence (executed on July 4, 1946)
• Erna Beilhardt: 5 years imprisonment
• Kapo Waclaw Kozlowski: death sentence (executed on July 4, 1946)
• Jenny-Wanda Barkmann: death sentence (executed on July 4, 1946)
• Kapo Fanciszek Szopinski: death sentence (executed on July 4, 1946)
• Ewa Paradies: death sentence (executed on July 4, 1946)
• Kapo Kazimierz Kowalski: 3 years imprisonment
• Jan Breit: death sentence (executed on July 4, 1946)
• Kapo Tadeusz Kopczynski: death sentence (executed on July 4, 1946)
• Elisabeth Becker: death sentence (executed on July 4, 1946)
• Werner Hoppe: Apprehended in 1953 in West Germany, later sentenced to 9 years imprisonment

The second trial was held from January 8, 1947, to January 31, 1947, before a Polish Special Criminal Court. 24 ex-officials and guards of the Stutthof concentration camp were judged and found guilty. Ten were sentenced to death.

The sentences of the second trial:

• Theodor Meyer: death sentence (executed on October 10, 1947)
• Ewald Foth: death sentence (executed on October 10, 1947)
• Karl Reger: 8 years imprisonment
• Eduard Zerlin: 12 years imprisonment
• Emil Wenzel: 10 years imprisonment
• Adalbert Wolter: 8 years imprisonment
• Karl Eggert: death sentence (executed on October 10, 1947)
• Wilhelm Vogler: 15 years imprisonment
• Paul Wellnitz: death sentence (executed on October 10, 1947)
• Kapo Alfred Nikolaysen: death sentence (executed on October 10, 1947)
• Hans Rach: death sentence (executed on October 10, 1947)
• Adolf Grams: 10 years imprisonment
• Josef Wennhardt: 8 years imprisonment
• Fritz Peters: death sentence (executed on October 10, 1947)
• Kurt Dietrich: death sentencee (executed on October 10, 1947)
• Hugo Ziehm: 3 years imprisonment
• Erich Thun: life imprisonment
• Albert Paulitz: death sentence (executed on October 10, 1947)
• Werner Wöllnitz: 10 years imprisonment
• Martin Stage: 8 years imprisonment
• Oskar Gottchau: 10 years imprisonment
• Karl Zurell: death sentence (executed on October 10, 1947)
• Walter Englert: 3 years imprisonment
• Johannes Görtz: 8 years imprisonment

The third trial was held from November 5, 1947, to November 10, 1947, before a Polish Special Criminal Court. 20 ex-officials and guards were judged. 19 were found guilty, and one was acquitted.

The sentences of the third trial:

• Karl Meinck: 12 years imprisonment
• Gustav Eberle: 10 years imprisonment
• Harry Müller: 4 years imprisonment
• Alfred Tissler: 5 years imprisonment
• Otto Schneider: 10 years imprisonment
• Johann Lichtner: 5 years imprisonment
• Ernst Thulke: 5 years imprisonment
• Otto Welke: 10 years imprisonment
• Willy Witt: 10 years imprisonment
• Heinz Löwen: 5 years imprisonment
• Erich Stampniok: 5 years imprisonment
• Richard Timm: 4 years imprisonment
• Adolf Klaffke: 10 years imprisonment
• Hans Möhrke: 4 years imprisonment
• Hans Tolksdorf: acquitted and released
• Nikolaus Dirnberger: 4 years imprisonment
• Friedrich Tessmer: 4 years imprisonment
• Erich Jassen: 10 years imprisonment
• Johann Sporer: 4 years imprisonment
• Nikolai Klawan: 3 years imprisonment

The fourth and final trial was also held before a Polish Special Criminal Court, from November 19, 1947, to November 29, 1947. 27 ex-officials and guards were judged, 26 were found guilty, and one was acquitted.

Sentences of the fourth trial:

• Christof Schwarz: 3 years imprisonment
• Albert Weckmüller: 15 years imprisonment
• Kurt Reduhn: 10 years imprisonment
• Walter Ringewald: 7 months imprisonment
• Hermann Link: 5 years imprisonment
• Richard Wohlfeil: 7 months imprisonment
• Waldemar Henke: 5 years imprisonment
• Anton Kniffke: 3 years imprisonment
• Kapo Franz Spillmann: acquitted and released
• Gustav Brodowski: 7 months imprisonment
• Johann Wrobel: 7 months imprisonment
• Ernst Knappert: 7 months imprisonment
• Martin Pentz: 5 years imprisonment
• Horst Köpke: 10 years imprisonment
• Bernard Eckermann: 7 months imprisonment
• Rudolf Berg: 10 years imprisonment
• Josef Stahl: 10 years imprisonment
• Johann Pfister: 5 years imprisonment
• Johannes Wall: 5 years imprisonment
• Leopold Baumgartner: 7 months imprisonment
• Willi Buth: life imprisonment
• Richard Akolt: 3 years imprisonment
• Fritz Glawe: 10 years imprisonment
• Emil Lascheit: 10 years imprisonment
• Gustav Kautz: 5 years imprisonment
• Emil Paul: 7 months imprisonment
• Erich Mertens: 5 years imprisonment

See also[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: KL Stutthof

• Stutthof Trial
• Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles
• Soap made from human corpses
• List of Nazi-German concentration camps
• List of subcamps of Stutthof
• Rescue of Stutthof victims in Denmark

References[link]

External links[link]

• Stutthof National Museum
• KL Stutthof monography (Polish)
• SS personnel serving at Ravensbrück
• SS personnel serving at Stutthof
• Karl M. Haugan describes conditions at Stutthof (Norwegian)
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia entry
• Brief facts and photos of the camp (The accuracy of the statements in this link are dubious, for instance the allegation it makes regarding the meaning of R.J.F. is completely untrue. See the link below for further info.)
• "The Soap Allegations"

Internment camp for Japanese-Canadians in British Columbia during World War II.

Internment is the imprisonment or confinement^[1] of people, commonly in large groups, without trial. The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) gives the meaning as: "The action of 'interning'; confinement within the limits of a country or place."

Most modern usage is about individuals, and there is a distinction between internment, which is being confined usually for preventive or political reasons, and imprisonment, which is being closely confined as a punishment for crime.

Internment also refers to the practice of neutral countries in time of war in detaining belligerent armed forces and equipment in their territories under the Second Hague Convention.^[2]

Early civilizations such as Assyria used forced resettlement of populations as a means of controlling territory,^[3] but it was not until much later in the late 19th and 20th centuries that records exist of groups of civilian non-combatants being concentrated into large prison camps.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights restricts the use of internment. Article 9 states that "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile."

Internment camp[link]

An internment camp is a large detention center created for political opponents, enemy aliens, people with mental illness, members of specific ethnic or religious groups, civilian inhabitants of a critical war-zone, or other groups of people, usually during a war. The term is used for facilities where the inmates were selected by some generalized criteria, rather than detained as individuals after due process of law fairly applied by a judiciary. As a result of the mistreatment of civilians interned during recent conflicts, the Fourth Geneva Convention was established in 1949 to provide for the protection of civilians during times of war "in the hands" of an enemy and under any occupation by a foreign power.^[4] It was ratified by 194 nations. Prisoner-of-war camps are internment camps intended specifically for holding members of an enemy's armed forces as defined in the Third Geneva Convention, and the treatment of whom is specified in that Convention.

A layout for an internment/resettlement facility for dislocated civilians

Concentration camp[link]

Boer women and children in a British-run concentration camp in South Africa (1900-1902)

The Random House Dictionary defines the term "concentration camp" as: "a guarded compound for the detention or imprisonment of aliens, members of ethnic minorities, political opponents, etc.", and, the American Heritage Dictionary defines it as: "A camp where civilians, enemy aliens, political prisoners, and sometimes prisoners of war are detained and confined, typically under harsh conditions."

Earliest usage and origins of the term[link]

Polish historian Władysław Konopczyński has suggested the first concentration camps were created in Poland in the 18th century, during the Bar Confederation rebellion, when the Russian Empire established three concentration camps for Polish rebel captives awaiting deportation to Siberia.^[5]

The earliest of these camps may have been those set up in the United States for Cherokee and other Native Americans in the 1830s; however, the term originated in the reconcentrados (reconcentration camps) set up by the Spanish military in Cuba during the Ten Years' War (1868–1878) and by the United States during the Philippine–American War (1899–1902).^[6]

The English term "concentration camp" grew in prominence during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), when they were operated by the British in South Africa.^[6][7]

There were a total of 45 tented camps built for Boer internees and 64 for black Africans. Of the 28,000 Boer men captured as prisoners of war, 25,630 were sent overseas. The vast majority of Boers remaining in the local camps were women and children.

Concentration camps were used in German South-West Africa during the Herero genocide between 1904 and 1907. The camp at Shark Island, Namibia was of the nature of an extermination camp, arguably the world's first.^[8]

Shift in meaning[link]

Jewish slave laborers in the Buchenwald concentration camp near Jena, 16 April 1945. Second row, seventh from left is Elie Wiesel.

During the 20th century, the arbitrary internment of civilians by the state reached a climax with Nazi concentration camps (1933–1945). As a result, the term "concentration camp" carries many of the connotations of "death camp" or "extermination camp", and is sometimes used synonymously.

However, even Nazi concentration camps were not necessarily death camps. For example, some camps were sources of slave labor: the inmates were exploited rather than killed, although many were worked to death or killed for refusing to work.

List of camps[link]

See also[link]

• Prisoner-of-war camp
• Extermination camp
• Labor camps
• Quasi-criminal
• Extrajudicial detention
• Civilian Internee

References[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Internment

This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2009)

Jenny-Wanda Barkmann, back row right, at a war crimes trial between April 25 and May 31, 1946, in Gdańsk

Jenny-Wanda Barkmann (c.1922 – July 4, 1946) was a Nazi concentration camp guard.

She is believed to have spent her childhood in Hamburg, Germany. In 1944, she became an Aufseherin in the Stutthof SK-III women's camp, where she brutalized prisoners, some to death. She also selected women and children for the gas chambers. She was so severe the women prisoners nicknamed her the Beautiful Specter.^[1]

Barkmann fled Stutthof as the Soviets approached. She was arrested in May 1945 while trying to leave a train station in Gdańsk. She became a defendant in the Stutthof Trial, where she and other defendants were convicted for their crimes at the camp. She is said to have giggled through the trial,^[2] flirted with her prison guards and was apparently seen arranging her hair while hearing testimony. She was found guilty, after which she declared, "Life is indeed a pleasure, and pleasures are usually short."^[3]

Barkmann was publicly hanged along with 10 other defendants from the trial on Biskupia Gorka Hill near Gdańsk on July 4, 1946. She was around 25 years old.^[4]

References[link]

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• One Man (film), a 1977 Canadian film
• One Man (horse), an Irish Thoroughbred racehorse
• One Man, a 2002 album by American R&B singer Tank

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Nesse Godin (Galperin) (born March 28, 1928 in Šiauliai, Lithuania) is a Lithuanian American Holocaust survivor.^[1] She has dedicated her adult life to teaching and sharing memories of the Holocaust. Nesse is known for the ability to translate the Holocaust into a personal glimpse of this enormous and horrifying history.

Early years[link]

1933-1939[link]

"My family was very religious and observed all the Jewish laws. I attended Hebrew school and was raised in a loving household, where the values of community and caring always were stressed. After the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, we heard from relatives in Łódź that Jews there were being treated horribly. We could not believe it; how could your neighbors denounce you and not stand up to help you?"

1940-1944[link]

These were the years of German occupation in Lithuania, as well as numerous other places and regions throughout Europe.

"On June 26, 1941, the Germans occupied our city, just four days after the invasion of the USSR. In the weeks that followed, SS killing units and Lithuanian collaborators shot about 1,000 Jews in the nearby Kuziai forest. In August, we were forced to move into a ghetto, where we lived in constant hunger and fear. There I witnessed many “selections,” during which men, women, and children were taken to their deaths. My father was among them. In 1944 as the Soviet army approached, the remaining Jews were deported to the Stutthof concentration camp. There I was given the number 54015."

1945-1950[link]

From Stutthof, Nesse was transported to several camps, and was sent on a death march in January 1945. In the cold winter weather and with little food, many of the prisoners died, freezing to death. On March 10, 1945, she was liberated by Soviet troops. As she was still a young child then, she was given a random minder, but soon afterwards she got re-united with her mother. In 1950, after spending five years in the displaced persons camp in Feldafing, Germany, she and her husband Jack (also a survivor), along with their two children, Pnina and Edward, moved to the United States and settled down in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

Later years[link]

In 1954, Nesse and Jack saw the birth of their third and final child, Rochelle. Holding blue-collar jobs, Nesse and Jack worked hard and diligently to support their family, which included Nesse's mother, Sara. She has seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Advocacy/Awareness speaking and volunteering[link]

For the past 40-plus years, Nesse has been a busy individual, speaking about the Holocaust to domestic and international audiences. She has appeared before a variety of audiences including the United States Naval Academy, United States Military Academy, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the United Nations General Assembly, numerous schools, like Seneca Valley High School, Robinson Secondary School and Bluffton High School, universities, churches, synagogues, civic groups and teacher's conferences.

Nesse is on the Board of Directors and Founding Member of several Holocaust Survivor groups. She served on the board of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington and is a board member of the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington, and many other worthy organizations. Nesse is Co-President of the Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Friends of Greater Washington and she's participated as a speaker for the Capitol Children's Museum of Washington, D.C. [1]

Nesse has earned numerous awards and honors for her speaking.

Present day[link]

Nesse currently lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her husband, Jack. She volunteers weekly at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and continues to speak out against the horrors of genocide, violence, and hatred.

"Why I Volunteer:"

As you know I was a prisoner from the age of 13 to 17. I lived through a ghetto, concentration camp, four labor camps and a death march. I was not strong, I was not smart, I was a little girl. I think that I survived the Holocaust by the grace of the Lord above and by the kindness of Jewish women that gave me a bite of bread, wrapped my body in straw to keep me warm, held me up when I was hurt by the guards, gave me hope, but also asked me to promise them that if I survived I would not let them be forgotten. Remember and tell the world what hatred can do. I feel that the USHMM is fulfilling my promise that I made to those women that did not survive. I am proud to be a devoted volunteer in our most wonderful institution of education as I call our USHMM.

References[link]

External links[link]

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Memory Project - Nesse Godin
• Meet United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Survivor Volunteers - Nesse Godin
• Wolfman Productions - Nesse Godin: Surviving the Holocaust
• Nesse Godin United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ID Card
• dcmilitary.com - Holocaust survivor shares memories
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Teaching about the Holocaust Online Workshop: Personal Testimony
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Momory Project - Nesse speech against Darfur genocide