As the Red Army swept relentlessly westward during the harsh winter of 1944–45, the Nazi regime evacuated thousands of inmates. A vast array of captives—prisoners of war, political and religious opponents, forced laborers, Jews and Roma targeted for extermination as racial enemies, and gay men incarcerated because of their sexuality—were forced to march.
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These columns zigzagged across Central Europe, trying to stay ahead of the Soviets (similar evacuations happened later as the Western Allies advanced into Germany) under the guns of the SS and the German armed forces. The stories emerging from these chaotic flights, which continued into May 1945, are absolutely harrowing.
Stutthof concentration camp was among the sites of horror caught up in this large crescendo to Adolf Hitler's war for racial supremacy. Its history is bound up with Nazi Germany's expansion into Eastern Europe and the detestable dreams of Lebensraum (“living space”) for ethnic Germans at the expense of Slavs, Jews, and Rome. Since the camp was one of those liberated by the Red Army, it still tends to be unknown to most of the Anglophone world. This article is an attempt to integrate Stutthof into mass, popular awareness of the Holocaust.[
The Stutthof camp came about with the attack on Poland in September 1939. Originally, the Germans set it up immediately after the invasion as an internment camp about 20 miles east of Danzig (present-day Gdansk, Poland, where the German navy initiated hostilities on September 1, 1939), formerly a “free city.”
Erected in a wooded area, its purpose was to hold primarily non-Jewish Poles deemed politically suspect. As such, Stutthof formed part of the Nazi campaign targeting Polish elites (politicians, nobles, clergy, professors, journalists) described thoroughly by Alexander Rossino and other scholars.[ii] Jurisdiction of it fell under the control of the German police chief in Danzig in reconstituted West Prussia.
Stutthof stood apart from most Nazi incarceration and annihilation sites due to its proximity to so many bodies of water. To its west flowed the Vistula River, east was Vistula Bay, and north lay the Bay of Danzig and the Baltic Sea. During World War II, inmates were brought to and evacuated from Stutthof by sea. It did resemble concentration camps like Dachau and Sachsenhausen in the proximity to a major urban center (Danzig had more than 400,000 inhabitants, overwhelmingly German, when the war began).
The Nazis spent little time introducing terror into the operation of Stutthof. In a grisly episode from World War II's first months, the SS forced Polish political prisoners to participate in the murder of mental patients.
Henry Friedlander documented how in October and November 1939, these inmates were forced to dig mass graves in a forest near the West Prussian town of Neustadt for some 3,500 patients, all German nationals, transported from mental hospitals in Pomerania, in northern Germany, and from Danzig itself.[iii] SS men under the command of Kurt Eimann executed the victims—women and men—with a shot to the back of the neck and then ordered the Stutthof inmates to fill in the graves.