How many Nazi concentration camps were there in Poland?
Economy of Nazi Germany
A network of slave-labour camps – 457 complexes with dozens of subsidiary camps, scattered over a broad area of German-occupied Poland – exploited to the fullest the labor of their prisoners, in many cases working inmates to their death. At the Gross-Rosen concentration camp (to which Polish nationals were brought in from the annexed part of Poland) the number of subcamps was ninety seven (97). Under Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Auschwitz III (Monowitz) with thousands of prisoners each, the number of satellite camps was forty-eight (48). Stutthof concentration camp had forty (40) subcamps officially and as many as 105 subcamps in operation, some as far as Elbląg, Bydgoszcz and Toruń, from the main camp. The "Deutsche Reichsbahn" acquired new infrastructure in Poland worth in excess of 8,278,600,000 złoty, including some of the largest locomotive factories in Europe, the H. Cegielski – Poznań renamed DWM, and Fablok in Chrzanów renamed "Oberschlesische Lokomotivwerke Krenau" as well as the locomotive parts factory Babcock-Zieleniewski in Sosnowiec renamed Ferrum AG later tasked with making parts to V-1 i V-2 rockets also. Under the new management, formerly Polish companies began producing German engines BR44, BR50 and BR86 as early as 1940 with the use of slave labor.
Catholic Church and Nazi Germany during World War II
In Nazi ideological terms, Poland was inhabited by a mixture of Slavs and Jews, both of which were classed as "Untermenschen", or subhumans occupying German "Lebensraum", "living space". The Nazis instigated a policy of genocide against Poland's Jewish minority and murdering or suppressing the ethnic Polish elites. Historically, the church was a leading force in Polish nationalism against foreign domination, thus the Nazis targeted clergy, monks and nuns in their terror campaigns—both for their resistance activity and their cultural importance. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, 1811 Polish priests died in Nazi concentration camps. Special death squads of SS and police accompanied the invasion and arrested or executed those considered capable of resisting the occupation: including professionals, clergymen and government officials. The following summer, the "A-B Aktion" round up of several thousand Polish intelligentsia by the SS saw many priests shot in the General Government sector. In September 1939 Security Police Chief Heydrich and General Eduard Wagner agreed upon a "cleanup once and for all of Jews, intelligentsia, clergy, nobility". Of the brief period of military control from 1 September 1939 to 25 October 1939, Davies wrote: "according to one source, 714 mass executions were carried out, and 6,376 people, mainly Catholics, were shot. Others put the death toll in one town alone at 20,000. It was a taste of things to come."
Nazi concentration camps
The two largest groups of prisoners in the camps, both numbering in the millions, were the Polish Jews and the Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) held without trial or judicial process. There were also large numbers of Romani people, ethnic Poles, Serbs, political prisoners, homosexuals, people with disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholic clergy, Eastern European intellectuals and others (including common criminals, as the Nazis declared). In addition, a small number of Western Allied aviators were sent to concentration camps as punishment for spying. Western Allied POWs who were Jews, or who were suspected of being Jews by the Nazis, were usually sent to ordinary POW camps; however, a small number of them were sent to concentration camps because of antisemitic policies.
Sometimes the concentration camps were used to hold important prisoners, such as the generals involved in the attempted assassination of Hitler; U-boat Captain-turned-Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller; and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who was interned at Flossenbürg on February 7, 1945, until he was hanged on April 9, shortly before the war's end.
Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust
Poland had a large Jewish population, and, according to Norman Davies, more Jews were both killed and rescued in Poland than in any other nation: the rescue figure usually being put at between 100,000–150,000. The memorial at Bełżec extermination camp commemorates 600,000 murdered Jews and 1,500 Poles who tried to save Jews. Thousands in Poland have been honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, constituting the largest national contingent. Martin Gilbert wrote that "Poles who risked their own lives to save the Jews were indeed the exception. But they could be found throughout Poland, in every town and village."
Until the end of Communist domination, much of German-occupied Poland's Holocaust history was hidden behind the veil of the Iron Curtain. During the World War II Nazi occupation, Poland was the only country where any help provided to a person of Jewish faith or origin was punishable by death. Yet 6,532 men and women (more than from any other country in the world) have been recognized as rescuers by Yad Vashem in Israel.
Prisons in Poland
As of 2007, there were 85 prisons in Poland ("zakłady karne"). As of 31.12.2007, Polish prisons had the official capacity of 79213 and reported number of inmates at 87776.
Holocaust victims
According to Norman Davies, the Nazi terror was "much fiercer and more protracted in Poland than anywhere in Europe." Polish Catholic victims of the Third Reich numbered in the millions. Nazi ideology viewed ethnic Poles—the mainly Catholic ethnic majority of Poland—as subhuman. After their 1939 invasion of Poland, the Nazis instituted a policy of murdering (or suppressing) the ethnic-Polish elite (including Catholic religious leaders). The Nazi plan for Poland was the nation's destruction, which necessitated attacking the Polish Church, (particularly in areas annexed by Germany). About the brief period of military control from 1 September to 25 October 1939, Davies wrote: "According to one source, 714 mass executions were carried out, and 6,376 people, mainly Catholics, were shot. Others put the death toll in one town alone at 20,000. It was a taste of things to come."
Poniatowa concentration camp
The first two monuments in memory of the victims of Nazism at Poniatowa were erected in communist Poland at the city centre in 1958 and at the PZT factory in 1959. A different monument, commemorating only the Jewish victims of the Holocaust was unveiled in Poniatowa on 4 November 2008, for the 65 anniversary of their deaths. The inscription in both Polish and English mentions the 14,000 victims of the "Aktion Erntefest" in Poniatowa from across Poland, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia (without the remaining locations). The monument was unveiled in the presence of the ambassador of Israel to Poland David Peleg, the ambassador of Austria Alfred Langle; Andreas Meitner, minister from the German embassy; Jan Tomaszek, minister from the Czech embassy; Henryka Strojnowska, voivode of Lublin; the town mayor Lilla Stefanek, and many other officials, including Warsaw rabbi and priests.
Auschwitz concentration camp
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, German dictator Adolf Hitler ordered that the Polish leadership and intelligentsia be destroyed. Approximately 65,000 civilians, viewed as inferior to the Aryan master race, had been killed by the end of 1939. In addition to leaders of Polish society, the Nazis killed Jews, prostitutes, the Roma, and the mentally ill. SS-"Obergruppenführer" Reinhard Heydrich, then head of the Gestapo, ordered on 21 September 1939 that Polish Jews be rounded up and concentrated into cities with good rail links. Initially the intention was to deport the Jews to points further east, or possibly to Madagascar. Two years later, in an attempt to obtain new territory, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, intending to deport or kill the Jews and recognizing the inevitability of millions of other deaths.
HASAG
During the war, HASAG had factories in eight German cities and three Polish ones. Most of the workers were either forced laborers, primarily from eastern Europe, or prisoners from concentration camps. The forced laborers lived under heavy police surveillance in barracks near the factories. In 1942 and 1943, such labor camps were set up near all six of the factories in Poland. Few workers were there voluntarily and most of those were Germans in managerial positions. At the beginning of 1942, HASAG had 13,850 employees. They began bringing in Polish forced laborers in spring 1944, and in 1945, had eight "Außenkommandos", first from Ravensbrück concentration camp and then from Buchenwald, setting up a labor subcamp next to every HASAG factory in Germany. At Birkenau, the mortality rate for an "Außenkommando" was officially calculated. It was three and a half months. There were 16,581 prisoners in these labor subcamps, including 10,557 women, both Jews and non-Jews and 4,025 Jewish men. The main factory in the Schönefeld quarter of Leipzig had 5,288 forced laborers, of whom, 5,067 were women.
German AB-Aktion in Poland
Prior to "AB-Aktion", in late 1939 and early 1940, most Polish university professors, intellectuals, writers, politicians, teachers and other members of the elite of Polish society were briefly arrested by the Gestapo and had their names registered. Frank finally accepted and approved the "Ausserordentliche Befriedungsaktion" on May 16, 1940. In the following weeks, the German police, Gestapo, SD ("Sicherheitsdienst") and units of the "Wehrmacht" arrested roughly 30,000 Poles in major Polish cities, including Warsaw, Łódź, Lublin and Kraków. The interned were held in a number of prisons, including the infamous Pawiak where they were subject to brutal interrogations by Nazi officials. After time spent in the prisons of Warsaw, Kraków, Radom, Kielce, Nowy Sącz, Tarnów, Lublin or Wiśnicz, the arrested Poles were transferred to German concentration camps, most notably to the newly created camp of Auschwitz, as well as Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen. Approximately 3,500 members of the Polish intelligentsia were executed at the mass murder sites in Palmiry near Warsaw, Firlej, Wincentynów near Radom, and in the Bliżyn forest near Skarżysko-Kamienna.
History of Warsaw
During the Second World War, central Poland, including Warsaw, came under the rule of the General Government, a Nazi colonial administration. Germans planned destruction of the Polish capital before the start of war. On 20 June 1939 while Adolf Hitler was visiting an architectural bureau in Würzburg am Main, his attention was captured by a project of a future German town, "Neue deutsche Stadt Warschau". As early as 1939 Hitler approved of a plan known as the Pabst Plan, which envisaged changing Warsaw into a provincial German city. The Germans immediately closed all higher education institutions. Since the first days, the German authorities arrested and executed Poles or took them to the concentration camps. The executions were carried out mainly in the forests around Warsaw (e.g., in Kampinos Forest or Kabaty Woods). Many small monuments on Warsaw streets today commemorate those crimes. Since the beginning of the occupation, the Nazis had organized so-called "łapanka"s. These consisted of the sudden and accurate surrounding of a chosen place (for example, a railway station) and arresting every resident or passerby who happened to be there. in Polish “łapać” means to catch. Such actions were carried out in other occupied European countries, but not on the same scale as in Poland. Arrested people were deported either to concentration camps or forced labor camps in Germany. From 1943, a concentration camp existed also in Warsaw: KL Warschau. Until August 1944, about 200,000 Poles died in gas chambers.
List of Nazi ghettos
Following the 1939 Invasion of Poland, the new ghetto system had been imposed by Nazi Germany roughly between October 1939 and July 1942 in order to confine Poland's Jewish population of 3.5 million for the purpose of persecution, terror, and exploitation. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in all of Nazi occupied Europe, with over 400,000 Jews crammed into an area of , or 7.2 persons per room. The Łódź Ghetto was the second largest, holding about 160,000 inmates.
List of subcamps of Majdanek
The following is a list of subcamps of the Majdanek concentration camp run by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. The list, supplied by the Majdanek State Museum, identifies two German categories of the KL Lublin/Majdanek subcamps; the "Arbeitzlagers", and the so-called "Kommandos". The satellite camps were named "Aussenlager" (external camp), "Nebenlager" (extension or subcamp), and "Arbeitslager" (labor camp). Some of them were less than ten kilometers away from the main camp, with prisoner populations ranging from several dozens to several thousand.
The Holocaust in Poland
The Majdanek forced labor camp located on the outskirts of Lublin (like Sobibór) and closed temporarily during an epidemic of typhus, was reopened in March 1942 for Operation Reinhard; first, as a storage depot for valuables stolen from the victims of gassing at the killing centers of Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, It became a place of extermination of large Jewish populations from south-eastern Poland (Kraków, Lwów, Zamość, Warsaw) after the gas chambers were constructed in late 1942. The gassing of Polish Jews was performed in plain view of other inmates, without as much as a fence around the killing facilities. According to witness's testimony, "to drown the cries of the dying, tractor engines were run near the gas chambers" before they took the dead away to the crematorium. Majdanek was the site of death of 59,000 Polish Jews (from among its 79,000 victims). By the end of Operation "Aktion Erntefest" (Harvest Festival) conducted at Majdanek in early November 1943 (the single largest German massacre of Jews during the entire war), the camp had only 71 Jews left.
Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church in Poland
Dachau was established in March 1933 as the first Nazi Concentration Camp. Dachau was chiefly a political camp and it was here that around 2,720 (mainly Catholic) clergy were imprisoned and the Nazis established dedicated Clergy Barracks for opponents of the Nazi regime. Of a total of 2,720 clergy recorded as imprisoned at Dachau, some 2,579 (or 94.88%) were Catholic and a total of 1,034 clergy were recorded overall as dying in the camp, with 132 "transferred or liquidated" during that time - although in "Dachau: The Official History 1933-1945", Paul Berben noted that R. Schnabel's 1966 investigation, "Die Frommen in der Holle" found an alternative total of 2,771 and included the fate all the clergy listed, with 692 noted as deceased and 336 sent out on "invalid trainloads" and therefore presumed dead.
War crimes in occupied Poland during World War II
The camp system where Poles were detained, imprisoned and forced to labour, was one of fundamental structures of the Nazi regime, and with the invasion of Poland became the backbone of German war economy and the state organized terror. It is estimated that some five million Polish citizens went through them.
Trawniki concentration camp
The Trawniki concentration camp was set up by Nazi Germany in the village of Trawniki about southeast of Lublin during the occupation of Poland in World War II. Throughout its existence the camp served a dual function. It was organized on the grounds of the former Polish sugar refinery of the Central Industrial Region, and subdivided into at least three distinct zones.
German camps in occupied Poland during World War II
Before the September 1939 Nazi German–Soviet Invasion of Poland, the concentration camps built in the Third Reich held mainly German Jews and political enemies of the Nazi regime. Everything changed dramatically with the onset of World War II. The Nazi concentration camps ("Konzentrationslager", KL or KZ) set up across the entire German-occupied Europe were redesigned to exploit the labor of foreign captives and prisoners of war at high mortality rate for maximum profit. Millions of ordinary people were enslaved as part of the German war effort. The Jewish Virtual Library estimates that the number of camps reached 15,000 eventually, using civilians arrested and ambushed at random in occupied countries. According to research by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum conducted more recently, Nazi Germany created some 42,500 camps and ghettos in which an estimated 15 to 20 million people were imprisoned and often pressed into slavery. All types of confinement were used as source of labour supply.
Pawiak prison
Following the 1939 German invasion of Poland, the Pawiak Prison became a German "Gestapo" prison, then part of the Nazi concentration – death-camp system. Approximately 100,000 men and 200,000 women passed through the prison, mostly Home Army members, political prisoners, and civilians taken hostage in street round-ups. An estimated 37,000 inmates were executed and 60,000 sent to German death and concentration camps. Exact numbers are unknown, as the prison archives were never found.
Potulice concentration camp
Out of acts listed as genocide by The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1948, almost all were implemented in the Potulice camp; the sole exception was the act regarding preventing births among members of the group being subjected to genocide.
The number of children kidnapped by German authorities during their occupation of Poland in World War II in order to be Germanised ranges from over 20,000 (Heinemann) to 200,000 (Polish government). It's estimated that at least 10,000 of them were murdered as captives, and only 10-15% returned to their families after the war.
Although the Camp was formally listed as a transit camp, after the war, at the request of its victims, in the 1990s it was re-classified as a concentration camp, with the Polish Institute of National Remembrance taking the position that conditions there didn't differ from those in regular concentration camps. The decision was important for the status of compensation paid by post-war Germany towards victims of German repression in World War II.
Pabst Plan
On October 9, 1942 Heinrich Himmler ordered the creation of the Warsaw concentration camp ("Konzentrationslager Warschau - KL Warschau") which consisted of the Koło district camp ("Kriegsgefangenenlager Warschau", 1939) and two other camps in the proximity of Dworzec Zachodni (Western Train Station, 1942): the Gęsia camp (Gęsia Street Camp, 1943) and the Bonifraterska camp (Bonifraterska Street Camp, 1943). KL Warschau was functioning until August 28, 1944 when the German government of the city ordered the evacuation of its prisoners into the Third Reich, out of fear that the ongoing Warsaw Uprising might result in freeing them. The prisoners were transported to concentration camps in Third Reich: Dachau, Landsberg, Mühldorf, Kaufering, Gross-Rosen and Ravensbrück.
Potulice concentration camp
The Potulice concentration camp () was established by Nazi Germany during World War II in Potulice near Nakło on the territory of occupied Poland. Originally, until the fall of 1941 it was the subcamp of Stutthoff. In January 1942 Potulice became fully independent. It is estimated that a total of 25,000 prisoners went through the camp during its operation before the end of 1944. It became notable also as a detention centre for Polish children that underwent the Nazi experiment in forced Germanisation.
Gross-Rosen concentration camp
At its peak activity in 1944, the Gross-Rosen complex had up to 100 subcamps located in eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia, and on the territory of occupied Poland. The population of all Gross-Rosen camps at that time accounted for 11% of the total number of inmates incarcerated in the Nazi concentration camp system.
Rudolf Vrba
Daniel Brigham, the "New York Times" correspondent in Geneva, published a story on 3 July, "Inquiry Confirms Nazi Death Camps", with the subtitle "1,715,000 Jews Said to Have Been Put to Death by the Germans up to April 15", and on 6 July a second, "Two Death Camps Places of Horror; German Establishments for Mass Killings of Jews Described by Swiss". According to Fleming, the BBC Home Service mentioned Auschwitz as an extermination camp for the first time on 7 July 1944. It said that over "four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews [had been] sent to the concentration camp at Oświęcim" and that most were killed in gas chambers; it added that the camp was the largest concentration camp in Poland and that gas chambers had been installed in 1942 that could kill 6,000 people a day. Fleming writes that the report was the last of nine on the 9 pm news.
List of concentration and internment camps
During the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia (1941–1944), as many as 70 Nazi concentration camps were formed in Yugoslavia. The main victims in these camps were ethnic Serbs, Jews and Roma. It is estimated that between 1 million and 1.7 million people perished as victims of the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia.
Fort VII
Fort VII, officially Konzentrationslager Posen (renamed later), was a Nazi German death camp set up in Poznań in German-occupied Poland during World War II, located in one of the 19th-century forts circling the city. According to different estimates, between 4,500 and 20,000 people, mostly Poles from Poznań and the surrounding region, died while imprisoned at the camp.
The Holocaust in Poland
Prior to World War II, there were 3,500,000 Jews in Poland, living predominantly in cities; about 10% of the general population. Database of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews provides information on 1,926 Jewish communities across the country. Following the conquest of Poland, and the 1939 murder of intelligentsia, the first German anti-Jewish measures involved the policy of expulsion of Jews from the territories annexed by the Third Reich. The westernmost provinces of Greater Poland and Pomerelia were turned into brand new German "Reichsgaue" named Danzig-West Prussia and the Wartheland, with the intention of their complete Germanization through settler colonialism ("Lebensraum"). Annexed directly to the new "Warthegau" district, the city of Łódź absorbed the influx of some 40,000 Polish Jews forced out from the surrounding areas. A total of 204,000 Jewish people passed through the ghetto in Łódź. Initially, they were to be expelled to the "Generalgouvernement". However, the ultimate destination of the massive removal of Jews was left open until the Final Solution was set in motion two years later.
Auschwitz concentration camp
The Auschwitz concentration camp ("Konzentrationslager Auschwitz") was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of , the main camp ("Stammlager") and administrative headquarters, in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II–Birkenau, a combined concentration/extermination camp three kilometers away in Brzezinka; , a labor camp seven kilometers from Auschwitz I, set up to staff an IG Farben synthetic-rubber factory; and dozens of other subcamps.
Jaworzno concentration camp
There were up to 5,000 inmates interned in the camp at any time. The prisoners were composed of various nationalities, chiefly European Jews (about 80% of all inmates); by the time the camp begin its operation, the local Jews of Jaworzno (who numbered about 3,000 before the war) and of the rest of Poland have already been mostly exterminated. There were also Poles, Germans and others, as well as Soviet prisoners of war. There were 14 reported successful escapes (including several Soviet POWs who then joined the local Polish communist partisans). The camp's survival rate was low due to its lethal conditions, including starvation, disease, hard labor and wanton brutality. In effect, about 2,000 people lost their lives in the Jaworzno camp. Some of them were murdered not by the guards but by German civilian employees of the coal mine (mostly members of the paramilitary organization SA), who had been tasked with overseeing the prisoners at work. In addition, every month about 200 inmates who were unable to work anymore were taken by truck from Jaworzno to the gas chambers at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, resulting in several thousand more deaths.
War crimes in occupied Poland during World War II
The first German death camp in occupied Poland was established in late 1941 at Chełmno (renamed "Kulmhof"). The new killing method originated from the earlier practise of gassing thousands of unsuspecting hospital patients at Hadamar, Sonnenstein and other euthanasia centres in the Third Reich, known as Action T4. In Chełmno extermination camp, the "SS Totenkopfverbände" used mobile gas vans to murder mostly Polish Jews imprisoned at the Łódź Ghetto ("Litzmannstadt" in German). At least 152,000 people were gassed at Chełmno according to postwar verdict by West Germany, although up to 340,000 victims were estimated by the Polish Main Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland (GKBZNwP), a predecessor of the Institute of National Remembrance.
Potulice concentration camp
Following World War II, the site of the camp was used as an detention centre by Polish Communist authorities, mainly for "ethnic Germans" from the "Volksliste" (DVL) including settlers and some 180 prisoners-of-war, as well as the anti-communist Poles from the Home Army and the National Armed Forces. Renamed as the Central Labour Camp in Potulice under the management of the Stalinist Ministry of Public Security, the camp managed workshops and farms with the total area of 1,174.60 ha. According to records of the MBP Department of Corrections, some 2,915 Germans died there before the end of 1949, mainly as a result of the typhus and dysentery epidemics. According to German sources, about 3,500 ethnic Germans died in the camp in the years 1945 to 1950.
History of the Jews in Poland
Former extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Treblinka are open to visitors. At Auschwitz the Oświęcim State Museum currently houses exhibitions on Nazi crimes with a special section (Block Number 27) specifically focused on Jewish victims and martyrs. At Treblinka there is a monument built out of many shards of broken stone, as well as a mausoluem dedicated to those who perished there. A small mound of human ashes commemorates the 350,000 victims of the Majdanek camp who were killed there by the Nazis. Jewish Cemetery, Łódź is one of the largest Jewish burial grounds in Europe, and preserved historic sites include those located in Góra Kalwaria and Leżajsk (Elimelech's of Lizhensk ohel).
Holocaust tourism
Death and labor camps were built in Central Europe by the German occupational authorities in the late 1930s and early 1940s, many of them in Poland, of which Auschwitz was the first and largest. In the period between 1941 and 1944 other death camps were established by the Reich in occupied Poland including Majdanek (in Lublin); Birkenau (in Brzezinka); Treblinka (near the village of Treblinka); Bełżec (south-east of Lublin); Sobibór (near the village of Sobibor); Chełmno (near the village of Chełmno nad Nerem).
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
In 1939, German authorities began to concentrate Poland's population of over three million Jews into a number of extremely crowded ghettos located in large Polish cities. The largest of these, the Warsaw Ghetto, concentrated approximately 300,000–400,000 people into a densely packed, 3.3 km central area of Warsaw. Thousands of Jews died due to rampant disease and starvation under SS-und-Polizeiführer Odilo Globocnik and SS-Standartenführer Ludwig Hahn, even before the mass deportations from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp began.
German camps in occupied Poland during World War II
The primary function of death camps was the elimination of Jews from all countries occupied by Germany, except the Soviet Union (Soviet Jews were generally killed on the spot). Many non-Jewish Poles and other prisoners were also murdered in these camps; an estimated 75,000 non-Jewish Poles died at Auschwitz-Birkenau and up to 200,000 at KL Warschau. Most extermination camps had regular concentration camps set up along with them including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Treblinka I and Warsaw. However, these camps were "distinct from the adjoining extermination camps".
Refugees in Poland
Following World War II, Poland became a communist country, and was a major refugee destination. The communist government allowed refugees only from countries affected by "class struggle" (such as Greece, Chile or Vietnam). It is estimated that the total number of refugees and asylum seekers who came to Poland in the period 1945–1989 was around 20,000–30,000 individuals. Following the fall of communism in 1989, Poland became a more appealing destination following its liberalization and a transition towards capitalistic and democratic society. UNHCR opened an office in Poland in 1992, following Poland's accession to the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol. Among others, Poland became one of the destinations of refugees from former Soviet Union (in particular, Chechnya), Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. The number of refugees coming to Poland was still tiny compared to that coming to Western European countries; around 1,500 each year in the early 1990s. That number roughly doubled by late 1990s, and Polish government passed new laws as part of preparation for Poland's accession to the European Union. By early 2000s the number of people applying for refugee and asylum in Poland rose to 7,000. From 2010 the number has been oscillating at around 6–7,000 to 15,000: 10,000 in 2010 and 2012, 15,000 in 2013, 6,500 in 2014 and 12,000 in 2015.
Norwegian POW Museum
A prisoner-of-war camp, Stalag XXI-A, was established in some of the town buildings in Schildberg, in Nazi occupied Poland during 1940. In 1943, the camp was renamed Oflag XXI-C for the imprisonment of 1,150 military officers transferred from Norway. On August 16, 1943 the German Wehrmacht arrested all Norwegian officers who were still in Norway. Of the approximately 1,500 officers who were detained, probably one third were sent home the following week because of age, illness, etc. The remainder were to become prisoners of the Nazis in Poland.
The Holocaust in Poland
The Bełżec extermination camp, set up near the railroad station of Bełżec in the Lublin District, began operating officially on March 17, 1942, with three temporary gas chambers later replaced with six made of brick and mortar, enabling the facility to handle over 1,000 victims at one time. At least 434,500 Jews were exterminated there. The lack of verified survivors however, makes this camp much less known. The bodies of the dead, buried in mass graves, swelled in the heat as a result of putrefaction making the earth split, which was resolved with the introduction of crematoria pits in October 1942.
Janowska concentration camp
After the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland at the beginning of World War II, the city of Lwów in the Second Polish Republic (now Lviv, Ukraine) was occupied in September 1939 by the Soviet Union under the terms of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. At that time, there were over 330,000 Jews residing in Lwów, including over 90,000 Jewish children and infants. Over 150,000 of them were refugees from the German-occupied western part of Poland. In June 1941, the German Army took over Lwów in the course of the initially successful attack on the Soviet positions in eastern Poland, known as Operation Barbarossa. Almost no Jews of Lwów were alive at the end of the war, many being horrifically tormented and tortured before they were murdered.
World War II casualties of Poland
The main causes of these losses are as follows.During the occupation many Non-Jewish ethnic Poles were killed in mass executions, including an estimated 37,000 Poles at the Pawiak prison complex run by the Gestapo. Polish researchers of the Institute of National Remembrance have estimate about roughly 800,000 ethnic Polish victims during the German occupation including 400,000 in prisons, 148,000 killed in executions and 240,000 deaths among those deported to concentration camps, including 70-75,000 at Auschwitz. During the occupation, communities were held collectively responsible for Polish attacks against German troops and mass executions were conducted in reprisal. Many mass executions took place outside prisons and camps such as the Mass murders in Piaśnica. Psychiatric patients were executed in Action T4. Farmers were murdered during pacifications of villages.
Nazi crimes against the Polish nation
The Holocaust in German-occupied Poland involved the implementation of German Nazi policy of systematic and mostly successful destruction of the indigenous Polish Jewish population, whom the Nazis regarded as "subhuman" ("Untermenschen"). Between the 1939 invasion of Poland, and the end of World War II, over 90% of Polish Jewry perished. Six extermination camps (Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka) were established in which the mass murder of millions of Polish Jews and various other groups, was carried out between 1942 and 1944. The camps were designed and operated by Nazi Germans and there were no Polish guards at any of them. Of Poland's prewar Jewish population of 3,500,000, only about 50,000–120,000 Jews survived the war.
Nazi concentration camps
Historians have divided the Nazi concentration camps into a series of major categories based on purpose, administrative structure, and inmate-population profiles. The system of camps preceded the onset of World War II by several years and evolved gradually. None of the categories are independent - one could classify many camps as a mixture of several of the above. All camps had some of the elements of an extermination camp, but systematic extermination of new arrivals by gas chambers only occurred in specialized camps. These were extermination camps, where all new-arrivals were simply killed—the "Aktion Reinhard" camps (Treblinka, Sobibór and Belzec), together with Chelmno. Two others (Auschwitz and Majdanek) operated as combined concentration- and extermination-camps. Others like Maly Trostenets were at times classified as "minor extermination camps".
History of Wrocław
In addition, a network of concentration camps and forced labour camps, or Arbeitslager, was established in the district around Breslau, to serve the city's growing industrial concerns, including FAMO, Junkers and Krupp. The total number of prisoners held at such camps exceeded many tens of thousands. Official Nazi estimates reported 43,950 forced labourers in 1943 and 51,548 in 1944, most of them being Poles. At the end of 1944 between 30,000 and 60,000 captured Poles were sent to Breslau after the defeat of Warsaw Uprising
German camps in occupied Poland during World War II
The Gross-Rosen concentration camp located in Rogoźnica, Poland (part of the German Silesia in World War II), was surrounded by a network of 97 satellite camps ("Aussenlager") populated with Polish nationals expelled from Nazi "Wartheland" in the process of ethnic cleansing. By October 1943, most inmates were Polish Jews including nearly 26,000 women. There were similar camps, built locally, at Budzyń, Janowska, Poniatowa, Skarżysko-Kamienna (HASAG), Starachowice, Trawniki and Zasław servicing Nazi German startups which ballooned during this period. War profiteers set up camps in the vicinity of the ghettos via "Arbeitsamt", as in Siedlce, the Mińsk Ghetto (Krupp), and numerous other towns with virtually nothing to eat.
Jaworzno concentration camp
According to the (incomplete) official statistics from the period, 1,535 people died at COP Jaworzno between 1945 and 1947 (972 of them of a typhus epidemic in the overcrowded camp), out of at least 6,140 who died during this period in all camps and prisons in Poland. Contemporary figures are much higher. According to research conducted by Polish historians on the data released by the prison services in 1993, the list of prisoners who died at COP Jaworzno and its filias between 1945 and 1956 consists of 6,987 names, which was a figure much greater than in any other Polish detention center (for a comparison, approximately 2,915 prisoners died at the second most-lethal work camp in the Stalinist Poland, the Central Labour Camp in Potulice, mainly from typhus and dysentery). The victims were mostly the German "Volksdeutsche".
Holocaust victims
Hans Frank said in 1940, "Poles may have only one master—a German. Two masters cannot exist side by side, and this is why all members of the Polish intelligentsia must be killed." Thomas J. Craughwell wrote that from 1939 to 1945, an estimated 3,000 members of the Polish clergy (18 percent) were murdered; of these, 1,992 died in concentration camps. According to the "Encyclopædia Britannica", 1,811 Polish priests died in Nazi concentration camps. Among the persecuted resisters was Irena Sendlerowa, head of the children's section of Żegota, who placed more than 2,500 Jewish children in convents, orphanages, schools, hospitals, and homes. Captured by the Gestapo in 1943, Sendlerowa was crippled by torture.
Treblinka extermination camp
Treblinka () was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was located in a forest north-east of Warsaw, south of the Treblinka train station in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship. The camp operated between 22 July 1942 and 19 October 1943 as part of Operation Reinhard, the deadliest phase of the Final Solution. During this time, it is estimated that between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were killed in its gas chambers, along with 2,000 Romani people. More Jews were killed at Treblinka than at any other Nazi extermination camp apart from Auschwitz.
Auschwitz concentration camp
After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, sparking World War II, the Germans converted Auschwitz I from an army barracks to hold Polish political prisoners. The first prisoners, German criminals brought to the camp as functionaries, arrived in May 1940, and the first gassing of prisoners took place in block 11 of Auschwitz I in September 1941. Auschwitz II–Birkenau went on to become a major site of the Nazis' Final Solution to the Jewish Question. From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews from all over German-occupied Europe to the camp's gas chambers. Of the estimated 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, at least 1.1 million died, around 90 percent of them Jews; approximately one in six Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp. Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 non-Jewish Poles, 23,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 400 Jehovah's Witnesses, tens of thousands of others of diverse nationalities, and an unknown number of gay men. Many of those not killed in the gas chambers died because of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments.
History of Poznań
During the Nazi occupation some 100,000 inhabitants were expelled to the central Polish General Government. Many people were murdered, executed, tortured or detained in inhumane conditions, particularly at the notorious Fort VII concentration camp, set up in one of the late 19th-century defensive forts, and later at the camp in Żabikowo. Many others were sent to central Germany as forced labour or conscripted into the German army. Poznań's Jewish population, which had numbered 2,000 in 1939, was largely murdered in the Holocaust. Property belonging to expelled or murdered Poles and Jews was often given to Volksdeutsche resettled from Baltic States, Eastern Europe and central Germany. Figures for 1944 show 94,000 Germans living in Poznań.
The Holocaust in Poland
Massacres were committed in over 30 locations across the formerly Soviet-occupied parts of Poland, including in Brześć, Tarnopol, and Białystok, as well as in prewar provincial capitals of Łuck, Lwów, Stanisławów, and Wilno (see Ponary). The survivors of mass killing operations were incarcerated in the new ghettos of economic exploitation, and starved slowly to death by artificial famine at the whim of German authorities. Because of sanitation concerns, the corpses of people who had died as a result of starvation and mistreatment were buried in mass graves in the tens of thousands. Gas vans were made available in November 1941. By December, over 439,800 Jewish people had been murdered, both in the eastern half of Poland and in the Soviet westernmost republics. The 'war of destruction' policy in the east against 'the Jewish race' became common knowledge among the Germans at all levels. Within two years, the total number of shooting victims in the east had risen to between 618,000 and 800,000 Jews. Entire regions behind the German–Soviet Frontier were reported to Berlin by the Nazi death squads to be ""Judenfrei"".
The Holocaust in Poland
The Auschwitz concentration camp was the largest of the German Nazi extermination centers. Located west of Kraków, Auschwitz processed an average of 1.5 Holocaust trains per day. The overwhelming majority of prisoners deported there were murdered within hours of their arrival. The camp was fitted with the first permanent gas chambers in March 1942. The extermination of Jews with Zyklon B as the killing agent began in July. At Birkenau, the four killing installations (each consisting of coatrooms, multiple gas chambers and industrial-scale crematoria) were built in the following year. By late 1943, Birkenau was a killing factory with four so-called 'Bunkers' (totaling over a dozen gas chambers) working around the clock. Up to 6,000 people were gassed and cremated there each day, after the ruthless 'selection process' at the "Judenrampe". Only about 10 percent of the deportees from transports organized by the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) were registered and assigned to the Birkenau barracks.
Debbie Schlussel
the feigned shock and fake moralizing over his comments, yesterday, about German Nazi death camps in Poland being a Polish death camp ... Poles murdered millions of Jews, they maintained several death camps, and they wiped out almost all of both sides of my family, as well as those in hundreds of thousands of other Jewish families. This wasn't just the Nazis. It was tens of thousands of eager Poles and more.
Polesie National Park
After the invasion of Poland, Nazi Germany planned to set up a "Jewish reservation" in the Polesie National Park known for its swampy nature. Adolf Eichmann was assigned the task of removing all Jews from Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to this reservation. The first short-term plan to be implemented was to concentrate the Jews around Nisko. Deportations began in October 1939. The "Nisko Plan" initially intended to remove 80,000 Jews from the so-called Greater German Reich, was scrapped in April 1940. By that time 95,000 Jews chiefly from Poland were already deported to this area. They were pressed to work in the RSHA camps of "Generalplan Ost". By mid-October however, the idea of a "Jewish reservation" was revived. Resettlement actions connected to this plan continued until January 1941 under Globocnik, and included both Jews and Poles. Some 51 camps were created, but further plans of deporting up to 600,000 additional Jews to the Lublin reservation failed because of logistical factors. Notably, in less than two years the whole district would lend itself to the industrialized murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews during Operation Reinhard.
Responsibility for the Holocaust
Nonetheless, due to its European centrality, available rail networks, and proximity to Nazi avenues of control, Poland was the nation where German persecution policies against the Jews were played out in full. Poland was the country with the most ghettos, the only camps designed exclusively for extermination, and trains from all across northern, southern, and western Europe carried Jewish deportees into the country. There were over 450 extermination, concentration, labor, and prisoner-of-war camps in Poland. It was also the nation where the infamous killing centers of Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau were located. Before the killing came to its conclusion, upwards of ninety-percent of all Poland's Jews—amounting to some three-million persons in total—were murdered by the Nazis.
Nazi concentration camps
Though most Nazi concentration and extermination camps were destroyed after the war, some of them were turned into permanent memorials. In Communist Poland, some camps such as Majdanek, Jaworzno, Potulice and Zgoda were used by the Soviet NKVD to hold German prisoners of war, suspected or confirmed Nazis and Nazi collaborators, anti-Communists and other political prisoners, as well as civilian members of the German-speaking, Silesian and Ukrainian ethnic minorities. Currently, there are memorials to the victims of both Nazi and communist camps at Potulice; they have helped to enable a German-Polish discussion on historical perceptions of World War II. In East Germany, the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen were used for similar purposes. Dachau concentration camp was used as a detention centre for the arrested Nazis.Organization
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
Although Germany used forced labourers in most occupied countries, Poles and other Slavs were viewed as inferior by Nazi propaganda, thus, better suited for such duties. Between 1 and 2.5 million Polish citizens were transported to the Reich for forced labour, against their will. All Polish males were required to perform forced labour. While ethnic Poles were subject to selective persecution, all ethnic Jews were targeted by the Reich. In the winter of 1939–40, about 100,000 Jews were thus deported to Poland. They were initially gathered into massive urban ghettos, such as 380,000 held in the Warsaw Ghetto, where large numbers died of starvation and diseases under the harsh conditions therein, including 43,000 in the Warsaw Ghetto alone. Poles and ethnic Jews were imprisoned in nearly every camp of the extensive concentration camp system in German-occupied Poland and the Reich. In Auschwitz, which began operating on 14 June 1940, 1.1 million people perished.
Ethnic cleansing of Zamojszczyzna by Nazi Germany
The camp in Zamość , located on S. Okrzei street, served as the transit point for selections and further deportations. In the first month of Action Zamość the camp processed 7,055 Polish inhabitants of 62 villages. People were divided into four main categories with the following code letters: "WE" (re-Germanization), "AA" (transport to the Reich), "RD" (farm-work for the settlers), "KI" ("Kindertransport"), "AG" (work in the General Government); and finally, "KL" (concentration camp). Those expelled from Zamojszczyzna to perform slave labour in Germany were loaded onto trains departing for temporary displacement camps governed by main resettlement HQ in Łodź. People from the last group were sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek.
German camps in occupied Poland during World War II
On 20 September 2001 the Sejm of the Republic of Poland introduced a special bill devoted to commemoration of Poland's citizens subjected to forced labour under German rule during World War II. The bill confirmed various categories of camp victims as defined during the founding of the Institute of National Remembrance (Dz.U.97.141.943), but most importantly, named every Nazi German concentration camp and subcamp with Polish nationals in them. The list was compiled for legal purposes as reference for survivors seeking international recognition and/or compensation action. It included Soviet and Stalinist places of detention as well. Among the Nazi German camps were 23 main camps with Polish prisoners, including 49 subcamps of Auschwitz, 140 subcamps of Buchenwald, 94 subcamps of KZ Dachau, 83 subcamps of KZ Flossenbürg, 97 subcamps of Gross-Rosen, 54 subcamps of KZ Mauthausen, 55 subcamps of Natzweiler, 67 subcamps of KZ Neuengamme, 26 subcamps of Ravensbrück, 55 subcamps of KZ Sachsenhausen, 28 subcamps of Stutthof, 24 subcamps of Mittelbau and others. Without exception, they were set up by the Germans for the abuse and exploitation of foreign nationals.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft
In a June 4, 2012, Huffington Post article in which he defended President Obama's reference to "a Polish death camp" at a Presidential Medal of Freedom presentation as "an innocent phraseological error," Rosensaft, citing a publication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, wrote that "thousands of Polish political, religious and intellectual leaders were also killed by the Germans during World War II" alongside millions of Jews, and that "Between 70,000 and 75,000 non-Jewish Poles are estimated to have perished at Auschwitz alone." In the same Huffington Post article, Rosensaft pointed out that Polish government officials "have a valid historiographical point" in insisting that German annihilation and concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka not be referred to as "Polish death camps," and he noted that in 2006, he had "publicly supported the Polish Government's request that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization formally change the name of the site of the most notorious of the World War II camps on UNESCO's World Heritage List from 'Auschwitz Death Camp' to 'former Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp.'"
List of Nazi concentration camps
Extermination camps were designed and built exclusively to kill prisoners on a massive scale, often immediately upon arrival. The extermination camps of Operation Reinhard such as Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka served as "death factories" in which German SS and police murdered nearly 2,700,000 Jews by asphyxiation with poison gas, shooting, and extreme work under starvation conditions.
List of Nazi concentration camps
Concentration camps served primarily as detention and slave labor exploitation centers. An estimated 15 to 20 million people were imprisoned in 42,500 camps and ghettos, and often pressed into slavery during the subsequent years, according to research by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum conducted more recently. The system of about 20,000 concentration camps in Germany and German-occupied Europe played a pivotal role in economically sustaining the German reign of terror. Most of them were destroyed by the Germans in an attempt to hide the evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity; nevertheless tens of thousands of prisoners sent on death marches were liberated by the Allies afterward.
War crimes in occupied Poland during World War II
It was not only Polish citizens who died at the hands of the occupying powers but many others. Tadeusz Piotrowski estimates that two million people belonging to fifty different nationalities from 29 countries were exterminated by the Germans in occupied Poland. This includes one million foreign Jews transported from across Europe to die in the Nazi extermination camps on Polish soil, along with 784,000 Soviet POWs and 22,000 Italian POWs.
Poland
Nazi forces under orders from Adolf Hitler set up six German extermination camps in occupied Poland, including Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz. The Germans transported Jews from across occupied Europe to murder them in the camps.
Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church in Poland
Total numbers are difficult to assert, for some clergy were not recognised as such by the camp authorities, and some - particularly Poles - did not wish to be identified as such, fearing they would be mistreated. But by far the greatest number of clerical prisoners came from Poland - in all some 1,748 Polish Catholic clerics, of whom some 868 died in the camp. From 1940, Dachau became the concentration point for clerical prisoners. Priests were gathered in Blocks 26, 28 - and 30, though only temporarily. 26 became the international block and 28 was reserved for Poles - the most numerous group.
German camps in occupied Poland during World War II
The new extermination policy was spelled out at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin in January 1942, leading to the attempt at "murdering every last Jew in the German grasp" thereafter. In early 1942 the German Nazi government constructed killing facilities in the territory of occupied Poland for the secretive Operation Reinhard. The extermination camps ("Vernichtungslager") were added to already functioning extermination through labor systems, including at Auschwitz "Konzentrationslager" and Majdanek; both operating in a dual capacity until the end of the war. In total, the Nazi German death factories ("Vernichtungs- oder Todeslager") designed to systematically kill trainloads of people by gassing under the guise of a shower, included the following:
List of subcamps of Auschwitz
The Auschwitz concentration camp complex was a system of concentration camps run by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland from 1940–1945. The main camp (German: "Stammlager") was Auschwitz I. Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, was a concentration and extermination camp, and became the most notorious of the camps. Auschwitz III, or Monowitz, was a labour camp.
The Holocaust
Killing on a mass scale using gas chambers or gas vans was the main difference between the extermination and concentration camps. From the end of 1941, the Germans built six extermination camps in occupied Poland: Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chełmno, and the three Operation Reinhard camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka II. Maly Trostenets, a concentration camp in the Reichskommissariat Ostland, became a killing centre in 1942. Gerlach writes that over three million Jews were murdered in 1942, the year that "marked the peak" of the mass murder of Jews. At least 1.4 million of these were in the General Government area of Poland.
Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland
In total, according to archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "The Germans established at least 1000 ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone." The list of locations of the Jewish ghettos within the borders of pre-war and post-war Poland is compiled with the understanding that their inhabitants were either of Polish nationality from before the invasion, or had strong historical ties with Poland. Also, not all ghettos are listed here due to their transient nature. Permanent ghettos were created only in settlements with rail connections, because the food aid (paid by the Jews themselves) was completely dependent on the Germans, making even the potato-peels a hot commodity. Throughout 1940 and 1941, most ghettos were sealed off from the outside, walled off or enclosed with barbed wire, and any Jews found outside them could be shot on sight. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in all of Nazi-occupied Europe, with over 400,000 Jews crammed into an area of , or 7.2 persons per room. The Łódź Ghetto was the second largest, holding about 160,000 inmates. In documents and signage, the Nazis usually referred to the ghettos they created as "Jüdischer Wohnbezirk" or "Wohngebiet der Juden", meaning "Jewish Quarter". By the end of 1941, most Polish Jews were already ghettoized, even though the Germans knew that the system was unsustainable; most inmates had no chance of earning their own keep, and no savings left to pay the SS for further deliveries. The quagmire was resolved at the Wannsee conference of 20 January 1942 near Berlin, where the "Final Solution" (die Endlösung der Judenfrage) was set in place.
History of Poland (1939–1945)
Tens of thousands were murdered in the German campaign of extermination of the Polish intelligentsia and other elements thought likely to resist (e.g. Operation Tannenberg and Aktion AB). Catholic clergy were commonly imprisoned or otherwise persecuted and many ended up sent to their death in concentration camps. Tens of thousands of members of the resistance and others were tortured and executed at the Pawiak prison in Warsaw. From 1941, disease and hunger also began to reduce the population, as the exploitation of resources and labor, terror and Germanisation reached greater intensity after the attack on the Soviet Union. Poles were also deported in large numbers to work as forced labor in Germany, or taken to concentration camps. About two million were transported to Germany to work as slaves and many died there. "Łapanka" or random roundup, on streets or elsewhere, was one of the methods practiced by the Nazis to catch prisoners for labor. Several hundred Wehrmacht brothels, for which local non-German women were forcibly recruited, operated throughout the Reich. In contrast to Nazi policies in occupied Western Europe, the Germans treated the Poles with intense hostility and all Polish state property and private industrial concerns were taken over by the German state. Poland was plundered and subjected to extreme economic exploitation throughout the war period.
War crimes in occupied Poland during World War II
Citizens of Poland, but especially ethnic Poles and Polish Jews, were imprisoned in nearly every camp of the extensive concentration camp system in German-occupied Poland and in the Reich. A major labour camp complex at Stutthof, east of Gdańsk/Danzig was begun as an internment camp in September 1939. An estimated 20,000 Poles died there as a result of hard labour, executions, disease and starvation. Some 100,000 Poles were deported to Majdanek concentration camp with subcamps in Budzyn, Trawniki, Poniatowa, Kraśnik, Puławy, as well as the "Airstrip", and Lipowa added in 1943. Tens of thousands of prisoners died there. An estimated 20,000 Poles died at Sachsenhausen outside Poland, 20,000 at Gross-Rosen, 30,000 at Mauthausen, 17,000 at Neuengamme, 10,000 at Dachau, and 17,000 at Ravensbrück. In addition, tens of thousands of Polish people were executed or died in their thousands at other camps, including special children's camps such as in Łódź and its subcamp at Dzierżązna, in prisons and other places of detention inside and outside Poland.
Warsaw concentration camp
On August 5, 1944, during the first days of the Warsaw Uprising, an assault group of Armia Krajowa (AK) stormed the Gęsiówka sub-camp using a captured German tank, setting free the remaining 360 men and women, before the AK were forced to withdraw. On August 21, after a failed insurgent attack on Pawiak, the Germans executed almost all (except seven) of the remaining inmates, and the prison was blown up.
After the Soviet takeover of Warsaw in January 1945, the remnants of the camp were used as a POW camp and a place of detention of the "enemies of the people's power" political prisoners by the Soviet NKVD and then by the Polish MBP until 1954 (the last prisoners left in 1956). It was the second biggest prison after the Mokotów Prison.
Treblinka, Masovian Voivodeship
Treblinka was the location of Treblinka extermination camp where an estimated 850,000 people were systematically murdered during the Holocaust in Poland. About 800,000 of them were Polish Jews. The first deportations took place in the course of the "Grossaktion Warsaw" with about 254,000 Warsaw Ghetto inmates brought in to their deaths in Holocaust trains in the summer of 1942. At the layover yard of Treblinka railway station the wagons waiting for "processing" were witnessed by Franciszek Ząbecki. During the early period of the camp's operation, thousands of dead bodies of victims left unburied had accumulated to such a point that the putrid odor of decaying human remains could be smelled for approximately in every direction. It was evident that mass extermination was taking place at the camp, which caused panic among the villagers.
History of Poland
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, at least 3 million Polish Jews and at least 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians were killed. According to the historians Brzoza and Sowa, about 2 million ethnic Poles were killed, but it is not known, even approximately, how many Polish citizens of other ethnicities perished, including Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Germans. Millions of Polish citizens were deported to Germany for forced labor or to German extermination camps such as Treblinka, Auschwitz and Sobibór. Nazi Germany intended to exterminate the Jews completely, in actions that have come to be described collectively as the Holocaust. The Poles were to be expelled from areas controlled by Nazi Germany through a process of resettlement that started in 1939. Such Nazi operations matured into a plan known as the "Generalplan Ost" that amounted to displacement, enslavement and partial extermination of the Slavic people and was expected to be completed within 15 years.
Mielec forced labor camp
The forced labor camp on the outskirts of Mielec, Poland was established by the Nazi occupation authorities in 1941 at the site of the former Polish airplane factory known as the "Mielec" "Heinkel Flugzeugwerke" built in anticipation of World War II. This was a forced labor camp for Polish Jews during the war which eventually turned into an SS Concentration Camp until it was liquidated in 1944. There is no Nazi documentation that says the exact number of prisoners that were at the camp throughout the war or when it switched from a labor camp to a concentration camp, and testimonies of Jews in the camps are conflicting.
Zdzisław Łukaszkiewicz
Judge Zdzisław Łukaszkiewicz was a member of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland () upon the conclusion of World War II. The Commission has been replaced, upon the collapse of the Soviet-imposed communism in Poland, with the government-affiliated Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) serving similar purpose at present. Łukaszkiewicz was the author of the first historical research into the Nazi German extermination camps including Majdanek and Treblinka, on the territory of occupied Poland during the genocidal Operation Reinhard of the Holocaust. 
Łukaszkiewicz conducted his research at the time when virtually nothing was known about the scale and the exact way in which these atrocities were committed. He published his first findings already in 1946 along with the results of legal and medical inquiries, sworn affidavits of land surveyor T. Trautsolt, Dr H. Wakulicz, the evidence collected by railway workers but most importantly, the testimonies of former prisoners of Treblinka extermination camp who managed to survive the revolt and took part in the Commission's forensic work. Łukaszkiewicz examined the selected graves exhumed at Treblinka I "Arbeitslager". His estimate of the total number of the victims of gassing was based on the already proven record of 156 transports with an average of 5,000 prisoners each. Many published results of his enquiries are still considered paramount to the understanding of the Final Solution, even though some specifics have also been revised by modern science. Łukaszkiewicz is being quoted by the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, the Britannica Polish edition, and the Polish Nowa Encyklopedia Powszechna PWN among others. Also, many professional historians including Wolfgang Scheffler and Czesław Rajca used his publications as the source of pertinent data.
Sztutowo
At the beginning of World War II in 1939, the Nazis (Germans) built the Stutthof concentration camp nearby, which received its first prisoners on September 2 of that year. The camp eventually developed into a huge complex with branches throughout northern Poland by the time it was liberated in May 1945 by the Red Army. More than 110,000 persons of twenty-five nationalities from nineteen countries were imprisoned, and it is estimated that more than 85,000 of them perished here. Located to the west of the current village, the site is now a Polish national museum.
Holocaust victims
The Nazi occupation of Poland was among the most brutal of the war, resulting in the death of more than 3 million ethnic Poles and about 3 million Polish Jews. The six million Jewish, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Poles represented nearly 17 percent of the country's population. Poles were one of Hitler's first extermination targets, as he outlined in a 22 August 1939 speech to Wehrmacht commanders before the invasion. Intelligentsia, socially prominent, and influential people were primarily targeted, although ethnic Poles and other Slavic groups were also killed "en masse". Hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholic and Orthodox Poles were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps, and the intelligentsia were the first targets of the "Einsatzgruppen" death squads. The anti-Polish campaign culminated in the near-complete destruction of Warsaw, ordered by Hitler and Himmler in 1944. The original assumptions of Generalplan Ost were based on plans to exterminate around 85% (over 20 million) of ethnically Polish citizens of Poland, with the remaining 15% to be used as slaves.
Jewish ghettos in Europe
Nearly complete genocidal destruction of the Polish Jewish community took place during the German and Soviet occupation of Poland and the ensuing Holocaust. The World War II ghetto-system had been imposed by Nazi Germany roughly between October 1939 and July 1942 in order to confine Poland's Jewish population of 3.5 million for the purpose of persecution, terror, and exploitation. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in all of Nazi occupied Europe, with over 400,000 Jews crammed into an area of , or 7.2 persons per room. The Łódź Ghetto (set up in the city of Łódź, renamed "Litzmannstadt", in the territories of Poland annexed by Nazi Germany) was the second largest, holding about 160,000 inmates. Over three million Polish Jews perished in World War II, resulting in the destruction of an entire civilization.
Genocides in history
This gives a total of over 3.8 million; of these, 80–90% were estimated to be Jews. These seven camps thus accounted for half the total number of Jews killed in the entire Nazi Holocaust. Virtually the entire Jewish population of Poland died in these camps.
Occupation of Poland (1939–1945)
Following the invasion of Poland in 1939 most of the approximately 3.5 million Polish Jews were rounded up and put into newly established ghettos by Nazi Germany. The ghetto system was unsustainable, as by the end of 1941 the Jews had no savings left to pay the "SS" for food deliveries and no chance to earn their own keep. At the 20 January 1942 Wannsee Conference, held near Berlin, new plans were outlined for the total genocide of the Jews, known as the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question". The extermination program was codenamed Operation Reinhard.
Three secret extermination camps set up specifically for Operation Reinhard; Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. In addition to the Reinhard camps, mass killing facilities such as gas chambers using Zyklon B were added to the Majdanek concentration camp in March 1942 and at Auschwitz and Chełmno.
Soldau concentration camp
The Soldau concentration camp established by Nazi Germany during World War II was a concentration camp for Polish and Jewish prisoners. It was located in Działdowo (), a town in north-eastern Poland, which after the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939 was annexed into the Province of East Prussia.
Lesser Poland
In Lesser Poland, like in all provinces of the occupied country, the Nazis ruled with savage brutality, killing hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, both Polish and Jewish (see: World War II crimes in Poland, Occupation of Poland (1939–1945), Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland, Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles, German AB-Aktion in Poland, Sonderaktion Krakau). The Auschwitz concentration camp, located at the border of Lesser Poland and Upper Silesia, was opened on 14 June 1940, and on 1 October 1941, the Germans opened Majdanek concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin. The third concentration camp in Lesser Poland was in Kraków's district of Płaszów. In late 1939 and early 1940, in Lesser Poland's spa of Zakopane, and in Kraków, several Gestapo–NKVD Conferences took place, during which the mutual cooperation between Nazi Germany and Soviet Union was discussed.
Poniatowa concentration camp
Poniatowa concentration camp in the town of Poniatowa in occupied Poland, west of Lublin, was established by the "SS" in the latter half of 1941 initially, to hold Soviet prisoners of war following Operation Barbarossa. By , about 20,000 Soviet POWs had perished there from hunger, disease and executions. The camp was known at that time as the "Stalag 359 Poniatowa". Afterwards, the "Stammlager" was redesigned an expanded as a concentration camp to provide slave labour supporting the German war effort, with workshops run by the "SS Ostindustrie" (Osti) on the grounds of the prewar Polish telecommunications equipment factory founded in the late 1930s. Poniatowa became part of the Majdanek concentration camp system of subcamps in the early autumn of 1943. The wholesale massacre of its mostly Jewish workforce took place during the "Aktion Erntefest", thus concluding the Operation Reinhard in General Government.
Majdanek concentration camp
After the camp takeover, in August 1944 the Soviets protected the camp area and convened a special Polish-Soviet commission, to investigate and document the crimes against humanity committed at Majdanek. This effort constitutes one of the first attempts to document the Nazi war crimes in Eastern Europe. In the fall of 1944 the Majdanek State Museum was founded on the grounds of the Majdanek concentration camp. In 1947 the actual camp became the monument of martyrology by the decree of Polish Parliament. In the same year, some 1,300 m³ of surface soil mixed with human ashes and fragments of bones was collected and turned into a large mound. Majdanek received the status of the national museum in 1965.
Some Nazi personnel of the camp were prosecuted immediately after the war, and some in the decades afterward. In November and December 1944, four SS Men and two kapos were placed on trial; one committed suicide and the rest were hanged on December 3, 1944. The last major, widely publicized prosecution of 16 SS members from Majdanek ( in German) took place from 1975 to 1981 in West Germany. However, of the 1,037 SS members who worked at Majdanek and are known by name, only 170 were prosecuted. This was due to a rule applied by the West German justice system that only those directly involved in the murder process could be charged.
Jaworzno concentration camp
Originally, it was established as a Nazi concentration camp called SS-Lager Dachsgrube ("SS Camp Dachsgrube) also known as Arbeitslager Neu-Dachs ("Work Camp Neu-Dachs") established during World War II by the Third Reich on the territory of German-occupied Poland in Jaworzno, Upper Silesia. The camp operated under the Nazi German administration from June 1943 until its evacuation in January 1945.
Majdanek concentration camp
Majdanek, or KL Lublin, was a German concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. Although initially purposed for forced labor rather than extermination, the camp was used to kill people on an industrial scale during Operation Reinhard, the German plan to murder all Jews within their own General Government territory of Poland. The camp, which operated from October 1, 1941, until July 22, 1944, was captured nearly intact, because the rapid advance of the Soviet Red Army during "Operation Bagration" prevented the "SS" from destroying most of its infrastructure, and the inept Deputy Camp Commandant Anton Thernes failed in his task of removing incriminating evidence of war crimes. Therefore, Majdanek became the first concentration camp discovered by Allied forces. Also known to the "SS" as "Konzentrationslager (KL) Lublin", Majdanek remains the best-preserved Nazi concentration camp of the Holocaust.
German camps in occupied Poland during World War II
The Germans established several camps for prisoners of war (POWs) from the western Allied countries in territory which before 1939 had been part of Poland. There was a major POW camp at Toruń (Thorn, called Stalag XX-A) and another at Łódź with hundreds of subsidiary "Arbeitskommandos"; Stalag VIII-B, Stalag XXI-D, plus a network of smaller ones including district camps. Many Soviet prisoners-of-war were also brought to occupied Poland, where most of them died in slave labor camps. The POW camp in Grądy (Stalag 324) held 100,000 Soviet prisoners; 80,000 of them perished. The Germans did not recognise Soviets as POWs and several million of them died in German hands. They were fed only once a day, and the meal would consist of bread, margarine and soup.
Nazi concentration camps
After September 1939, with the beginning of the Second World War, concentration camps became places where millions of ordinary people were enslaved as part of the war effort, often starved, tortured and killed. During the war, new Nazi concentration camps for "undesirables" spread throughout the continent. According to statistics by the German Ministry of Justice, about 1,200 camps and subcamps were run in countries occupied by Nazi Germany, while the Jewish Virtual Library estimates that the number of Nazi camps was closer to 15,000 in all of occupied Europe and that many of these camps were run for a limited amount of time before they were closed. Camps were being created near the centers of dense populations, often focusing on areas with large communities of Jews, Polish intelligentsia, Communists or Romani. Since millions of Jews lived in pre-war Poland, most camps were located in the area of the General Government in occupied Poland, for logistical reasons. The location also allowed the Nazis to quickly remove the German Jews from within Germany proper.
Łowicz
In 1940, during the Nazi Occupation of Poland, German authorities established a Jewish ghetto in Łowicz, in order to confine its Jewish population for the purpose of persecution and exploitation. The ghetto was liquidated in March 1941, when all its 8,000–8,200 inhabitants were transported in cattle trucks to Warsaw Ghetto, the largest ghetto in all of Nazi occupied Europe with over 400,000 Jews crammed into an area of . From there, most victims were sent to Treblinka extermination camp.Łowicz is twinned with:
Internment
During the 20th century, the arbitrary internment of civilians by the state reached its most extreme form with the establishment of the Nazi concentration camps (1933–45). The Nazi concentration camp system was extensive, with as many as 15,000 camps and at least 715,000 simultaneous internees. The total number of casualties in these camps is difficult to determine, but the conscious policy of extermination through labor in at least some of the camps ensured that the inmates would die of starvation, untreated disease and summary executions. Moreover, Nazi Germany established six extermination camps, specifically designed to kill millions, primarily by gassing.
As a result, some say that today the term "concentration camp" may be conflated with the concept of "extermination camp" and historians debate whether the term "concentration camp" or "internment camp" should be used in order to describe other examples of civilian internment, such as the United States government's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the Australian government's immigrant detention facilities, and South Korea's detention camps for "undesirables" in the 1970s and 1980s.
Warsaw Ghetto
The Warsaw Ghetto (, officially , "Jewish Residential District in Warsaw"; ) was the largest of all the Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Europe during World War II. It was established by the German authorities in the neighborhood of the Polish capital between October and November 16, 1940; within the new General Government territory of German-occupied Poland. There were over 400,000 Jews imprisoned there, at an area of , with an average of 9.2 persons per room, barely subsisting on meager food rations. From the Warsaw Ghetto, Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps and mass-killing centers. In the summer of 1942 at least 254,000 Ghetto residents were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp during under the guise of "resettlement in the East" over the course of the summer. The ghetto was demolished by the Germans in May 1943 after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprisings which had temporarily halted the deportations. The total death toll among the Jewish inhabitants of the Ghetto is estimated to be at least 300,000 killed by bullet or gas, combined with 92,000 victims of rampant hunger and hunger-related diseases, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the casualties of the final destruction of the Ghetto.
German camps in occupied Poland during World War II
The Germans pressed large numbers of Poles and Polish Jews into forced labour. The labourers, imprisoned in German "Arbeitslager" camps and subcamps across Poland and the Reich, worked for a broad range of war-related industries from armaments production and electronics to army uniforms and garments. At most camps, including Buchenwald, the Poles and Polish Jews deported from Pomerania and Silesia were denied recognition as Polish nationals. Their true numbers can never be known. Only 35,000 Poles who were still alive in 1945 came back to Poland and registered as Buchenwald survivors, others remained in the West.
The Gross-Rosen population accounted for 11% of the total number of inmates in Nazi concentration camps by 1944, and yet by 1945 nothing remained of it due to death march evacuation. Auschwitz run about 50 subcamps with 130,000-140,000 Poles on record, used as slave labour. Over half of them perished there; others were shipped to other complexes. There were hundreds of "Arbeitslager" camps in operation, where at least 1.5 million Poles performed hard labour at any given time. Many of the subcamps were transient in nature, being opened and closed according to the labour needs of the occupier. There were also around 30 "Polenlager" camps among them, formally identified in Silesia as permanent (see list) such as Gorzyce and Gorzyczki. Many of the 400,000 Polish prisoners of war captured by Germans during the 1939 invasion of Poland were also imprisoned in these camps, although many of them were sent as forced labourers to the heartland of Germany. Several types of labor camps in this category were distinguished by German bureaucracy.
Pruszków
During the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the Nazis created a large transit camp ("Durchgangslager") in Pruszków on the site of the Train Repair Shops (Zakłady Naprawcze Taboru Kolejowego) to intern the evacuees expelled from the capital. Around 550,000 Warsaw residents and approximately 100,000 more from its outskirts were incarcerated in the "Durchgangslager 121" (Dulag 121) set up for this purpose. The SS and Gestapo segregated the victims before transport. Approximately 650,000 Poles passed through the Pruszków camp in August, September and October 1944. Approximately 55,000 were sent to concentration camps, including 13,000 to Auschwitz. They included people from a variety of social classes and occupations (government officials, scholars, artists, physicians, merchants, and blue-collar workers), in varying physical conditions (the injured, the sick, invalids, and pregnant women), and of various ages from infants only a few weeks old to the elderly, aged 86 or more. In a few cases, these were also people of different ethnic backgrounds including Jews living on "Aryan papers."
Polish Home Army Museum, Orchard Lake, Michigan
The second room of the museum is dedicated to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and the suffering of the Polish people under the German and Soviet occupation of Poland. The Nazi concentration camps built by the Nazis on Polish territory were first occupied by Christian Poles, many of whom perished and later by the Jewish population, most of whom perished. The work of ‘Zegota’, a secret department of the Polish Underground State, dedicated to saving thousands of Jews, especially children, from the Nazi persecution, is described.
Nazi crimes against the Polish nation
Almost immediately following the invasion, both Germany and the Soviet Union began setting up camps in occupied Poland, which included POW camps for some 230,672 Polish soldiers captured during the September campaign of 1939. Within a short period of time, the German zone of partitioned Poland became a virtual prison-island with more than 430 complexes of state organized terror. It is estimated that some 5 million Polish citizens went through them while serving . The Occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union began in September 1939.
The majority of 50,000 Poles imprisoned at Mauthausen-Gusen perished mostly in Gusen; 150,000 at Auschwitz, 20,000 at Sachsenhausen, 40,000 at Gross-Rosen; 17,000 at Neuengamme and 10,000 at Dachau. About 17,000 Polish women died at Ravensbrück. A major concentration camp complex at Stutthof (east of Gdansk), was launched no later than 2 September 1939 and existed till the end of the war with 39 subcamps. It is estimated that 65,000 Poles died there. The total number of Polish nationals who met their deaths in the camps, prisons and places of detention inside and outside Poland exceeds 1,286,000. There were special camps for children such as the Potulice concentration camp, the "Kinder-KZ Litzmannstadt" for Polish boys, and the forced-labour camp for Polish girls at Dzierżązna (Dzierzazna). According to IPN investigation, in the years 1943–1944, the Warsaw concentration camp was also used in an attempt to depopulate the Polish capital with the number of prisoner victims, according to unofficial reports ranging from 40,000 (claimed by a German member of staff) up to 200,000 proposed by the Society for the Construction of Memorial to the Camp Victims ("Stowarzyszenie Komitetu Budowy Pomnika Ofiar Obozu Zaglady KL Warschau").
Nazi crimes against the Polish nation
The Nazis took hostages by the thousands at the time of the invasion and throughout their occupation of Poland. Hostages were selected from among the most prominent citizens of occupied cities and villages: priests, professors, doctors, lawyers, as well as leaders of economic and social organizations and the trade unions. Often, however, they were chosen at random from all segments of society and for every German killed a group of between 50 and 100 Polish civilians were executed. About 20,000 villagers, some of whom were burned alive, were killed in large-scale punitive operations targeting rural settlements suspected of aiding the resistance or hiding Jews and other fugitives. Seventy-five villages were razed in these operations. Poland was the only country in occupied Europe where the penalty for hiding a Jew was death for everyone living in the house; other laws were similarly ruthless.
The Holocaust in Poland
Auschwitz II extermination program resulted in the death of 1.3 to 1.5 million people. Over 1.1 million of them were Jews from across Europe including 200,000 children. Among the registered 400,000 victims (less than one-third of the total Auschwitz arrivals) were 140,000–150,000 non-Jewish Poles, 23,000 Gypsies, 15,000 Soviet POWs and 25,000 others. Auschwitz received a total of about 300,000 Jews from occupied Poland, shipped aboard freight trains from liquidated ghettos and transit camps, beginning with Bytom (February 15, 1942), Olkusz (three days of June), Otwock (in August), Łomża and Ciechanów (November), then Kraków (March 13, 1943), Sosnowiec, Będzin, Dąbrowa (June–August 1943), and several dozen other metropolitan cities and towns, including the last ghetto left standing in occupied Poland, liquidated in August 1944 at Łódź. Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria were blown up on November 25, 1944, in an attempt to destroy the evidence of mass killings, by the orders of SS chief Heinrich Himmler.
German camps in occupied Poland during World War II
The German camps in occupied Poland during World War II were built by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945 throughout the territory of the Polish Republic, both in the areas annexed in 1939, and in the General Government formed by Nazi Germany in the central part of the country "(see map)". After the 1941 German attack on the Soviet positions in eastern Poland, a much greater system of camps was established, including the world's only industrial extermination camps constructed specifically to carry out the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.
Attack on the NKVD Camp in Rembertów
"In this place, on the grounds of the former factory "Pocisk" the following camps were located: from September 1941 until the beginning of 1944, a Nazi labor camp for Soviet prisoners of war, Komando Stalag 333; from July 1944 until September 1944, a Nazi labor camp for Polish prisoners; from September 1944 until July 1945, Soviet NKVD special camp No.10. (The monument is dedicated to) the soldiers of the partisan unit of the Home Army from Camp "Mewa-Kamień", Mińsk Mazowiecki, who under the command of 2nd Lieutenant Edward Wasilewski "Wichura", overran the special NKVD camp No.10 in Rembertów on the night of 20/21 May 1945. Over 500 prisoners were freed from the camp and this action interrupted the deportation of the prisoners to the East. (This monument is dedicated to) prisoners of the NKVD camp No.10 in Rembertów, soldiers and activists of the Polish Underground State, repressed and murdered, whose remains lay on the grounds of former factory "Pocisk" and in the lands of the Soviet empire".
Ryszard Piotrowski
After a 63-day fight, Piotrowski was captured and sent to the first of 5 camps he would be imprisoned at; Lamsdorf, a German prisoner of war camp which housed Polish prisoners from the German September 1939 offensive. More than 100,000 prisoners from Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, France, Greece, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and the United States passed through this camp. He was later transferred to another German prisoner-of-war camp, Luckenwalde, located in Brandenburg, 52 kilometers (32 miles) south of Berlin. At its height in May 1944, a total of 48,600 POW's were registered there. Piotrowski was held there until the end of the war.
The Holocaust in Poland
The Holocaust in German-occupied Poland was marked by the construction of death camps by Nazi Germany in Poland. The Third Reich's World War II genocide, known as the Holocaust, took the lives of three million Polish Jews, half of all Jews killed during the Holocaust. Scholars disagree on whether to also classify up to three million ethnic-Polish victims of German genocide as Holocaust victims.
The extermination camps played a central role in Germany's systematic murder of over 90% of Poland's Jewish population.