The camp was established in connection with the ethnic cleansing project that included the
liquidation of Polish elites (members of the intelligentsia, religious and political leaders) in the Danzig area and Western Prussia. Even before the war began, the German
Selbstschutz in
Pomerania created lists of people to be arrested, under the
Danzig police chief, before its subsequent massive expansion. In November 1941, it became a "labor education" camp (like
Dachau), administered by the
German Security Police. Finally, in January 1942, Stutthof became a regular concentration camp. 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 The camp staff consisted of German
SS guards and, after 1943, the
Ukrainian auxiliaries brought in by SS-
Gruppenführer Fritz Katzmann, the Higher
SS and Police Leader of the area. In 1942 the first German female
SS Aufseherinnen guards arrived at Stutthof along with female prisoners. A total of 295 women guards worked as staff in the Stutthof complex of camps. Among the notable female guard personnel were:
Elisabeth Becker,
Erna Beilhardt, Ella Bergmann, Ella Blank, Gerda Bork,
Herta Bothe, Erna Boettcher,
Hermine Boettcher-Brueckner, Steffi Brillowski, Charlotte Graf, Charlotte Gregor, Charlotte Klein,
Gerda Steinhoff,
Ewa Paradies, and
Jenny-Wanda Barkmann. Thirty-four female guards including Becker, Bothe, Steinhoff, Paradies, and Barkmann were identified later as having committed crimes against humanity. The
SS in Stutthof began conscripting women from Danzig and the surrounding cities in June 1944, to train as camp guards because of their severe shortage after the women's subcamp of Stutthof called
Bromberg-Ost (Konzentrationslager Bromberg-Ost) was set up in the city of
Bydgoszcz. Several Norwegian
Waffen SS volunteers worked as guards or as instructors for prisoners from
Nordic countries, according to senior researcher at the Norwegian Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities, Terje Emberland.
Prisoners The first 150 inmates, imprisoned on 2 September 1939, were selected among Poles and Jews arrested in Danzig immediately after the outbreak of war. Other sources say that the camp staff shot most remaining inmates in a mass murder. Stutthof's registered inmates included citizens of 28 countries, and besides Jews and Poles – Germans, Czechs, Dutch, Belgians,
French, Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Lithuanians, Latvians, Belarusians, Russians, and others. There were also those classed and condemned as "vagrants who travel around after the manner of the gypsies", a category that included
Romani,
Sinti and
Yenish people. Among 110,000 prisoners were Jews from all over Europe, members of the
Polish underground, Polish civilians deported from
Warsaw during the
Warsaw Uprising, Lithuanian and Latvian intelligentsia,
Latvian resistance fighters,
psychiatric patients,
Soviet prisoners of war, Another prominent inmate was Lithuanian professor and writer
Balys Sruoga who also survived since 1943 and detailed his time in camp including
death march (ca 60 km 2-day trip during 1945 winter in the snow to
Żukowo and then 50 km to
Lębork) writing a book in 1945
Forest of the Gods. It is believed that inmates sent for immediate execution were not registered.
Conditions Conditions in the camp were extremely harsh; tens of thousands of prisoners succumbed to starvation and disease. Many 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.
Solidarity and religious observance: memoirs of Helen Lewis In the recollection of Helena Katz (
Helen Lewis), who in August 1944 had arrived with a group of three hundred women from the family camp at
Auschwitz-Birkenau, there was a sharp division among Jewish women in her Kochstädt sub camp outside
Praust. Her group, whose ordeal had begun in the
Theresienstadt Ghetto, were from German-speaking, broadly
assimilationist, backgrounds in the
Reich and occupied
Czechoslovakia (Katz was a professional dancer from Prague). The group of five hundred women who had preceded them from Poland, the
Baltic states, Hungary and Romania, spoke
Yiddish, and "bitterly resented" both the newcomers' "lack of religious ardour" and the privilege they had enjoyed in retaining their unshaven hair. In a devotional act that may have taken different forms elsewhere in the Stutthof camp system, the gulf between the two groups was bridged when together they committed to fast in honour of
Yom Kippur (26 September 1944). Notwithstanding the administration's retaliatory threat of no food or drink for 36 hours, the women did not break ranks: food was refused. It was a victory in a "battle of wills" that, perversely, was rewarded by their SS commandant (
Oberaufseherin) (a woman who had made known her personal involvement in the extermination of children from the
Riga Ghetto) with a post-fast meal complete with sweet pudding. Unexpected rations were again available, two months later, when the
Oberaufseherin encouraged Katz and her fellow inmates to stage Christmas and New Year reviews featuring dramatic sketches, music, singing, and (with Katz performing) dancing. The "quirky" indulgences came to an end on 27 January 1945 when, in advance of approaching Soviet forces, all those in a condition to walk out were marched out of the camp. Those left behind in Kochstädt, the sick and the dying, where cared for by a new SS commandant, a former teacher who, from his arrival in camp, had been secretly feeding and protecting prisoners. Once the camp was liberated, his former charges saved him from Soviet retribution. == Death march ==