Stutthof Concentration Camp

The Stutthof concentration camp bears the dubious distinctions of being both the first camp constructed outside Germany as well as the last concentration camp liberated by the victorious Allied armies. The camp was not designed as a concentration camp for displaced Jews. Rather, the location was initially conceived in 1939 as a relatively small "reeducation" camp, a Nazi euphemism for a civilian internment facility for detaining local free thinkers, dissidents, political activists, and communists. Other "troublemakers" imprisoned there included journalists, scientists, and academics (most from the nearby occupied city of Danzig, now Gdansk). The site was remote but well connected by both rail and by sea for easy transportation of incoming prisoners. The camp was redesignated as a Jewish concentration camp in 1942 and within months became an integral part of the Nazi’s Final Solution. Although records are incomplete, Holocaust researchers estimate conservatively that between 80,000 and 90,000 prisoners died at Stutthof.

Background

With the invasion and subsequent military occupation of Poland in late summer, 1939, the National Socialist Party of Nazi Germany faced an enormous propaganda dilemma. The educated class in Poland’s cities maintained significant doctrinal objections to the Party’s central tenets: its endorsement of military conquest; its vision of eventual European domination; its conservative anticapitalist economic policy of state ownership; its belief in Aryan supremacy; its avowed campaign to eradicate the Jewish population as the core reason for European economic, social, and cultural tensions; and its faith in a central totalitarian government. A civilian internment facility was built on the grounds of a wooded retirement village called Stutthof and opened in early September 1939. The facility operated just outside the tiny northern Polish fishing village of Sztutowo along the Bay of Danzig at the delta of the Vistula River just a few miles south of the Baltic Sea. It was designed initially to provide the Third Reich a convenient place to confine "undesirables," that is, the more vocal of the Polish intelligentsia—professionals, teachers, religious, writers, leftist social activists, even scientists and lawyers—who vigorously opposed the doctrines of the National Socialist Party.

The layout provided for only eight barracks and two administrative centers to house just under two hundred of the more radical dissidents arrested in nearby cities. The Nazis hoped to disrupt any chance for organized resistance. Within three weeks of the camp’s opening, however, the population soared to more than seven thousand. Crunched for provisions and with a sanitary system underequipped to handle that number, conditions in the camp quickly deteriorated.

Overview

Under the direction of SS Commandant Max Pauly (1907–1946), the camp quickly enlarged its housing facilities using camp labor. By the end of 1943, the camp had more than thirty barracks, and at its peak of operations in that year housed upwards of 50,000 prisoners. The conditions were rank—waves of tuberculosis and typhus regularly decimated the camp population. The sick were routinely euthanized either by lethal injection or by drowning.

With the camp’s redesignation in 1943 as a concentration camp, guards began to weed out the weak, the infirm, and the elderly from among each trainload of new arrivals. These were executed and buried in mass graves. The bulk of the camp population was then directed into brutal forced labor assignments, working twelve-hour shifts in regional armaments factories, brickyards, collective farms, and the nearby aircraft plants and submarine dockyards. In addition, prisoners were used to staff the camp’s own administrative offices and its hospital facilities.

When Nazi command commenced the Final Solution initiative in 1944, Stutthof was again redesignated as an extermination camp. Three small brick buildings were added to the camp’s northern edge, each equipped with primitive shower system. The windows were tightly sealed. Unlike other extermination camps that used carbon monoxide in the gassing procedure, Stutthof used pellets of Zyklon B, a cyanide derivative developed first in Germany before the war and used then as a powerful insecticide. Arrivals would be told they were first to be disinfected in the camp showers. After stripping and being shaved, the arrivals would be herded into the shower room and the doors locked. The pellets would be dropped through ventilation shafts, which would be quickly secured shut. Within ten minutes, the process would be completed. The bodies, about 150 at a time, would be taken by trucks to nearby brick ovens for cremation.

With the approach of the Soviet Army, Nazi administrators moved to close the facility at Stutthof. In January 1945, in a desperate move to relocate the remaining prisoners, more than five thousand men, women, and children were directed to walk to the camp at Lebork, more than twenty miles away. It would take more than ten days in midwinter. Fewer than half finished the journey. When the Russians finally entered the camp, the day after VE Day, 1945, they found only one hundred prisoners, who had hidden rather than be compelled to make the march. Pauly was arrested, tried, and hanged by a British war crimes tribunal in 1946, not for his role in Stutthof, but for his brutal command of a nearby facility at Neuengamme outside Hamburg.

Perhaps the most disturbing legacy of the Stutthof facility centers on the experiments of the camp’s chief doctor, Rudolf Spanner (1895–1960). Spanner, a germophobe, grew convinced that the saponification process of producing soap by combining animal fat with ashes could be facilitated using the oily human fat produced by the burning of the bodies of the camp’s prisoners. For months, he experimented with different combinations of human fat in an effort to produce a usable soap product for sterilizing his operating rooms. When Allied forces inspected the doctor’s lab, they found vials of the residue of a flaky product later identified as human soap. Spanner was never arrested for his research but was allowed to return to his medical research in Cologne.

The facility is one of the most developed memorial sites in Poland—the grounds include the original barracks, fence work, administrative offices, the gassing facilities, and two of the original ovens.

Bibliography

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