The morning of 1 September 1939. Nazi Germany attacks Poland and   begins the Second World War. The invasion is  followed not only by military defeat but by a   carefully planned system of repression. Arrests  begin immediately. Teachers, priests, officials,   and community leaders are taken from their  homes and disappear into prisons and camps or   are executed.

The occupation authorities build  a machinery of terror based on police power,   racial ideology, and organized violence. One of  the first results of this system is the opening   of a concentration camp near the port city of  Danzig on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea.   Its name is Stutthof and the  Germans open it on 2 September 1939,   just one day after the start of the war.

In the  years that follow, guards in this camp torture,   starve, and murder tens of thousands  of innocent men, women and children.   However, after the war, eleven of those  responsible are finally brought to justice—and   publicly hanged before nearly 200,000 people,  in execution remembered for their brutality. Situated near Danzig, today’s Polish Gdańsk,  concentration camp Stutthof was created as part   of the Nazi plan to destroy Polish society and  later to exterminate European Jews.

At first,   it functioned as a civilian internment  camp, but it quickly grew into a full   concentration camp under the control of the  SS, the Nazi paramilitary units responsible,   among others for guarding concentration  camps and enforcing racial policy.   Prisoners were forced to build the  camp themselves, cutting trees,   raising barracks, and fencing the area  with barbed wire.

From the beginning,   violence was routine in the camp. Guards beat  prisoners for moving too slowly, for speaking,   or for no reason at all. Hunger, disease,  and exhaustion became constant companions.  As the war expanded, so did the camp. By 1942,  Stutthof was fully integrated into the Nazi   concentration camp system and into the German  war economy.

Prisoners were exploited as forced   labour in workshops, factories, agriculture, and  armaments production. Those who became too weak   were removed. Some were shot, others were killed  with phenol injections to the heart and from 1944,   a gas chamber was used in the camp. Thousands  of people were murdered in Stutthof, including   women and children.

Typhus epidemics swept through  the overcrowded barracks, worsened by deliberate   neglect and the refusal of medical help.  Survivors later described bodies stacked like   firewood and the sick left to die on the floors. The guards who ran this system were not distant   figures. They were present every day, enforcing  terror with their hands and weapons. Brutality in   Stutthof was not limited to moments of execution  or selections which decided who would live and   who would be killed in the gas chamber.

It shaped  everyday life in the camp and was built into its   routines. Prisoners were subjected to constant  humiliation intended to destroy their sense of   dignity and identity. Roll calls lasted for  hours in every type of weather. Prisoners   were forced to stand motionless while guards  beat those who moved, collapsed, or tried to   support each other.

Punishment was collective  – if one prisoner was accused of an offence,   usually entire groups of inmates were beaten  or denied food as a collective punishment.  Physical torture was commonly used – prisoners  were whipped with sticks, rubber truncheons,   or rifle butts. Beatings often continued until  bones broke or victims lost consciousness.   Guards kicked prisoners with heavy boots  and used dogs to terrorize and attack them.

Some prisoners were suspended by their arms  behind their backs and left hanging for hours,   a method that caused intense pain and  permanent injury. Others were forced to   crawl through mud while being struck repeatedly. Hunger was used as another weapon. Food rations   were deliberately insufficient and of poor  quality.

Bread was mixed with sawdust or other   fillers. Soup often consisted of dirty water with  scraps of rotten vegetables. Prisoners fought over   food and were beaten for trying to steal or share  it with other inmates. Starvation weakened bodies   and made resistance impossible.

Many prisoners  died slowly from hunger alone, shrinking until   they could no longer stand during roll calls. Medical neglect was systematic. The camp infirmary   was not a place of healing but often a place of  death. Sick prisoners were denied treatment or   examined only to determine whether they were fit  for work. Those deemed useless were selected for   killing and phenol injections to the heart were  administered without warning.

Victims collapsed   within seconds and their bodies were removed  immediately. Others were left untreated until   disease or exhaustion finished them. One  survivor recalls that his mother, having   given birth in the camp, was made to witness  her newborn being cast into the incinerator.  This systematic brutality was not the result  of chaos or individual excess alone.

It was   the outcome of a camp system designed  to destroy human beings physically and   mentally. Guards were trained to see prisoners  as enemies, parasites, or objects. Violence   was rewarded, while mercy was punished. In 1945, as the Third Reich collapsed,   the SS attempted to erase the camp by evacuating  it.

On 25 January 1945, the Stutthof commandant   SS-Obersturmbannführer Paul-Werner Hoppe ordered  the evacuation of the camp. In the first phase,   about 11,600 prisoners were forced to leave the  main camp and begin a death march toward the   west-away from the Soviet units of the Red army.  After this, 33,948 people were still imprisoned,   including 11,863 in Stutthof itself and 22,085  in the satellite camps.

During the marches,   the SS forced the inmates to form columns of  1,000 to 1,500 prisoners, with a distance of   about 4.5 miles — or seven kilometres — between  each column. Around 40 guards supervised each   group. Prisoners who could not keep up were shot  by the guards on the spot. The marches took place   in deep snow and bitter cold, with almost no  food.

Although it was planned to last seven days,   it took ten days for those who survived the brutal  conditions and brutality of the German guards.  On 31 January 1945, the Palmnicken massacre  took place when around 3,000 Jewish prisoners   from Stutthof concentration camp were driven  into the Baltic Sea and shot with machine guns   in the sea or were shot in the courtyard of  the amber factory in the town of Palmnicken,   today’s Russian Yantarny in Kaliningrad  enclave.

Only about 15 people are   believed to have survived this massacre. More than 100,000 people passed through the   Stutthof camp system and at least 60,000 of  them died from gassing, starvation, disease,   executions, forced labour, and evacuation  marches. When Soviet soldiers finally entered   Stutthof on 9 May 1945, they found only a  handful of survivors hiding among the ruins.

After the war, investigations began almost  immediately. Polish and Soviet commissions   gathered evidence and survivor testimony. In  April 1946, the first Stutthof trial opened in   Gdańsk. Former guards, both men and women, stood  in the dock accused of crimes against humanity.   Witnesses described beatings, killings,  and selections for the gas chamber.

The   behaviour of some defendants shocked observers. Among the accused was Jenny Wanda Barkmann who   as a guard at Stutthof was known for beating  inmates – including children, some to death,   either with her bare hands or with her whip.  During the trial, Barkmann was not particularly   worried about her life, but was rather concerned  about her appearance.

She wore stylish clothes   and the different hairstyle every day and  reportedly flirted with the prison guards.  Another accused was Wanda Klaff, who had become  infamous at Stutthof for her brutal treatment of   prisoners whom she would beat and kick without  any reason at all until they lay still. When she   was in a particularly bad mood, she would drown  the female inmates in mud or club them to death. 

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.” Having  made this statement, she was probably the only   one who thought she was intelligent. Another accused was Elisabeth Becker.   She beat children with their mothers and  then selected them to be sent to the gas   chamber to be killed without any remorse.

Another Stutthof guard who stood trial was   Ewa Paradies who, in the freezing cold winter,  often ordered a group of female prisoners to   undress and stand in the snow. Then she  poured cold water on the naked women and   when they moved, she would beat them. Among the accused were also kapos,   citizens who were arrested during the war, put  in the concentration camp and served the Germans   in the camp and persecuted their own fellow  citizens during the war.

One of the kapos,   who was in the so-called first Stutthof trial was  Wacław Kozłowski, a butcher by profession and a   military veteran who fought in the defence  of the city of Gdynia against Germans in   1939. In Stutthof, he murdered civilians without  restraint, traveling around all of the subcamps of   Stutthof with portable gallows, and then ordering  himself to play mournful songs on the accordion.

On 31 May 1946, the verdicts were announced and  11 defendants were sentenced to death by hanging.   Among them were five female guards Jenny  Wanda Barkmann, Elisabeth Becker, Wanda Klaff,   Ewa Paradies, Gerda Steinhoff, commandant of the  guards Johann Pauls, and 5 Polish kapos Jan Breit,   Tadeusz Kopczyński, Józef Reiter, Wacław  Kozłowski, and Franciszek Szopiński.

Their   names had become symbols of cruelty inside the  camp. Only when the reality became unavoidable   did some of them collapse, crying and begging  for mercy. Their pleas, however, came too late. Their execution took place publicly on 4 July  1946 at Biskupia Górka, a hill near Gdańsk. It   was one of the very few public executions  of Nazi war criminals in postwar Poland.

Newspapers announced the event days in advance.  Workplaces gave time off and trains and buses   brought people from across the region to the  execution site. By late afternoon, an enormous   crowd of 200,000 people had gathered. Many of  them were former prisoners of the Stutthof camp.  Punctually at 5 PM, eleven open trucks arrived,  each carrying a condemned person with hands and   legs bound.

Former Stutthof prisoners, wearing  striped camp uniforms, had volunteered to act   as executioners. They placed simple rope nooses  around the necks of the condemned. The method   used was short-drop hanging, which did not break  the neck. As the trucks moved forward one by one,   each person was left struggling at the end of  the rope. Death by strangulation came slowly,  lasting between ten and twenty minutes  for each of the eleven prisoners.

Witnesses later spoke of bodies twisting and  trembling in what they called a rope dance.  After the last body went still, the crowd  surged forward. People tore at clothing,   kicked the corpses, and tried to take  pieces of clothes to have a memory from   the execution. Security forces eventually  cleared the site and removed the bodies.

There were also some unfortunate side  effects of this theatre of horror.   Some children started hanging their toys  and there were cases in which one child   hanged another after seeing a public hanging. The execution of the Stutthof guards did not   undo the suffering they had caused, but after  the collapse of the system that empowered them,   it marked the moment when those who ruled through  terror were forced to face its consequences.

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