When the
last two evacuation transports left Stutthof about 150 prisoners remained in
the camp, among them a 30-person group with engineer Hans Vey in the machine
factory owned by G. Epp, a group that escaped from the last evacuation
transport from Mikoszewo. Some of them operated the machines in the camp,
others who were very ill stayed in the barracks in the Old Camp. After the last
transport of prisoners left, P. Ehle ordered to blow up the crematorium
building.
Before Ehle
left the camp with a group of SS men, he gave some prisoners certificates of
liberation form the camp with the date of 15 April 1945, that is according to
the decision of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate to close the camp. The
certificates were given out to the prisoners by Ehle himself in the commander’s
office. Their text was copied and the names of the prisoners (without their
numbers) were written on a typewriter. A seal of the third guard company of KL
Stutthof was affixed to the document.
P. Ehle left
Stutthof probably on 5 May 1945 in the night. According to the former prisoner
Marian Pawlaczyk, Ehle was still in the camp on 5 May because on that same day
he organized a farewell dinner in the commander’s office, on which he invited
several prisoners employed in the office and offered them also to go with him
from Hel to Germany on a motor boat. None of the prisoners accepted that offer,
which was as dangerous as immoral. The power in the camp was given to Wehrmacht
under the command of a major, commander of the unit which stationed in
Stutthof.
On 26 April
1945, the Soviet armies landed in the Vistula Split. Moving forward was
hindered by difficult terrain conditions between Vistula, Nogat and the Vistula
Lagoon. Germans destroyed the irrigation systems in Żuławy which lead to
flooding a big part of the region and significantly delayed the liberation of
this territory. The 2nd Guards Army attacked from Piława (currently Yantarny)
along the Split, while the 48th Army of the 3rd Belorussian Front stroke from
Nowy Dwór Gdański. 60.000 German soldiers and several dozen forced workers,
prisoners of war and civilians were surrounded by the Soviet armies. Most of the
civilians, soldiers and prisoners found themselves in the Stutthof camp in the
abandoned barracks.
On 3 May
1945, Krynica Morska was liberated. On 8 May, the Soviet armies reached
the German defense line at the beginning of the Vistula Split. About 22.000
German soldiers were taken prisoners. The remaining forces were surrounded near
Stutthof. On that same day, leaflets printed by the staff of the 2nd
Belorussian Front and signed by General K. Rokossowski were thrown down over
the camp from Soviet planes. They informed about the signing of the instrument
of unconditional surrender of the German armed forces, which took place on 8
May. The text of the leaflet ended with a call to lay down the arms till
midnight, under the threat of a general storm of the German positions.
Before
midnight, the German troops left the camp forced out towards the sea by the
Soviet forces. In the night of 8 May after the assault of the Soviet army from
Katy Rybackie and Nowy Dwór Gdański, the troops which were defending the Vistula
Spit surrendered. At 3-4 am, two Soviet scouts entered the camp and a few hours
later, between 7 and 8 am, entered the troops of Col. Siemion G. Cyplienkow
from the 48th Army of the 3rd Belorussian Front lead by Sasha Jegorow from the
3rd Battalion of the 717th Regiment. The death gate has been opened by the
second in command of the foreign affairs battalion Piotr Michajłowicz
Sliusarenko together with a group of soldiers, among who were present B. S.
Baliukowicz, A. I. Iliasow, A. K. Manochin, N. Mamedow, N. A. Barinow. A group
of 150 Stutthof prisoners and 20 000 civilians evacuated from Pomerania
and East Prussia and prisoners of war from different countries were still
present in the camp at that moment. The Stutthof prisoners cheered when the Red
Army entered the camp and they remembered this moment for a very long time.
Antoni Bizewski recalled this day in those words: “The moment of the liberation
of Stutthof was unexpected and quick. After the shellfire, which lasted for a
couple of hours, suddenly everything went silent. After a while, a Soviet
officer came up to us and said that the war was over, that we were free and we
could go home. We were extremely happy. Stutthof’s surroundings were flooded,
the only road lead to Elbląg. We found a cart and a horse and set off in that
direction…”.
Many
soldiers remember the surname of the commander of the 3rd Battalion of the
717th Regiment, Sasha Jegorow, who was the first one to enter the camp. There
were no fights in the camp, small groups of Wehrmacht still fought on the night
of 8 May near the sea and in the woods surrounding the camp. During the day,
after surrendering to the troops of the 48th Army, the German soldiers laid
down their arms in the camp in front of the commander’s office. The German prisoners
of war left the camp at 1 pm and set off to Elbląg by the only road that was
left after the Germans flooded the Żuławy region. At the same time, groups of
prisoners left the camp heading towards their homes. Some of them tried in vain
to reach Gdańsk but they had to go back and head to Elbląg because the bridges
and roads were flooded.
The
prisoners of the Stutthof camp, prisoners of war and civilians who were sick
and needed medical care were located in the field hospital no. 692 of the 48th
Army and soon transferred to the military hospital no. 4363 near Elbląg.
In the group
of about 150 prisoners who survived in Stutthof until the end of the war were
mostly Poles (women and men), some Germans, Russians and Czechs. Among them
were: Mikołaj Antoniewicz, Czesław i Jan Będzińscy, Teofil Białowąs, Antoni
Bizewski, Mieczysław Borowski, Małgorzata Chabowska, Józef Chmielewski, Edmund
Depolt, Bolesław Dobke, Piotr Drzewiecki, Władysław Dullek, Kazimierz Dymczyk,
Tadeusz Gańczarczyk, Adam Gawłowicz, Kazimiera Jackowska née Piątkowska, Zofia
Jackowska, Krystyna Jaworska, Walentyna Jaworska, Stanisław Kędzierski, Adam
Kostrzewa, Wanda Kotłowska, Jan Kroplewski, Józef Kucharski, Alfred Stefan
Kwapuliński, Zofia Lewandowska, Tadeusz Lewandowski, Irena Miller, Bogusław
Nogajski, Bronisław Nogajski, Stanisław Olczak, Bernard Opiekuński, Marian
Pawlaczyk, Zofia Piasecka, Tadeusz Płużański, Agnieszka Przybielska, Helena
Przytarska, Gertruda Puzdrowska, Rabski, Hubert Ruzicka, Stanisław Ryger,
Augustyn Sikorski, Słowiński from Łódź, Helena Stawska-Gieysztorowa, Edward
Szuta, Barbara Szymańska, Wanda Śliwińska, Henryk Smierz-Chalski, Hans Vey,
Stanisław Wawrzyniak, Maria Weiznenerowska, Franciszek Włodarczyk, Wiktor
Woźniak, Stefania Zaborowska, Zygmunt Zając, Witold Zbaraszewski.
The Soviet
forces immediately began to preserve the traces of documents found in the camp.
At the request of the Extraordinary State Commission, composed of Major General
Istimin, Major General Michalczuk, Colonel Brezgin, Colonel of the Medical
Service Firsow and Assistant of the Chief Military Prosecutor Major Swinariew,
a preliminary investigation on the crimes committed in Stutthof has been
carried out in May and June 1945. It was conducted by special commissions lead
by military doctors: the military surgeon Colonel of the Medical Service
Professor Dobyczin, the forensic medicine expert, chief of the 48th Army
pathology-anatomy laboratory Major Popow, and engineers: Major Fiedorow and
Captain Kapustin.
This special
group of investigation officers began preserving the documents and collecting
testimonies from the former prisoners of the camp. The results of the work of
this and other commissions of the 48th Army have been included in the reports
of the USSR Chief Military Prosecutor Office on the crimes committed in
Stutthof concentration camp, which in 1966 have been handed over to the
Commission for the Prosecution of Hitler's Crimes in Poland. The over 200 pages
long collection of reports, evaluations and testimonies of the former prisoners
constitutes an extremely valuable source, which documents the Nazi crimes
committed in Stutthof. It is also one of the few documents that shows how the
camp looked like during the last moments of its existence.
The
commissions began their work just three days after the cam had been taken over.
On 12 May an inspection of the concentration camp took place. The commission
drew up an examination act, which stated: “The camp consists of 139
one-storey barracks for the prisoners, of the capacity of 500-600 persons each.
Thus, the whole camp could accommodate up to 75 thousand persons. The camp was
protected by a task force of the SS. The SS-Sturmbannführer Hoppe was in charge
of the camp […] Almost all documents have been removed from the camp offices by
the Germans and among the remaining documents were found: 1) a briefcase with
the daily reports on the state and movement of the prisoners; 2) a copy of a
report addressed to the chief of the camp Sturmbannführer Hoppe and 3) several
hundreds of prisoner register cards…”
The
preliminary investigation of the Stutthof camp demonstrated that between 1940
and 1945 “the camp has been a place of mass extermination of Soviet
prisoners of war and citizens, who were forced to move to German Reich, as well
as citizens of other countries. The camp was controlled by the Gestapo and was
one of the typical «death camps» created by the German Government to
exterminate prisoners of war and citizens of the occupied countries”. To
estimate the number of crimes committed in the camp and to reveal the
names of the perpetrators, the commission agreed to send a group of
investigation officers to the camp in order to collect testimonies of the
witnesses of all the events related with the Stutthof concentration camp.
Between 17
May and 13 June 1945, a commission investigated the causes of death of the
prisoners. It proved that “the overall mortality in the camp caused by
exhaustion, diseases and different types of violent deaths was of 200-250
persons per day, an sometimes reached the number of 700 persons or more. The
high mortality in hospitals was caused not only by diseases but also was due to
violent deaths”.
Five ways of
killing the prisoners have been classified: shooting, poisoning in the gas
chamber, injecting into the body an unknown liquid due to which the person died
after 2-3 minutes, hanging and baiting in case of attempted escape.
A technical
expertise, carried out in the camp on 14 May, demonstrated the existence of
three cremation furnaces and a gas chamber, what once again confirmed that the
people imprisoned in Stutthof concentration camp were condemned to
extermination… The unsanitary conditions, the unheated barracks, the
completely insufficient and scarce alimentation, the extremely exhausting
physical work for 16-17 hours a day, the lack of appropriate clothes and shoes
especially during winter – all this lead to extreme exhaustion of people, to
creating conditions for mass extermination by using the above-mentioned
methods.
Between 9 and
11 June 1945, the Soviet commissions composed from the staff members of the
48th Army examined the bones found north-west from the camp, the piles of shoes
and the store of toxic materials.
Basing on
the examinations, documentation, testimonies of the former prisoners and other
witnesses and demonstrative evidence, the commission stated that “the
Stutthof concentration camp indeed has been a death camp”. The general
sanitary conditions in the camp were “completely insufficient”, there were
numerous typhus, dysentery and typhoid fever epidemics; ill prisoners were not
isolated from the rest of the camp which facilitated the quick spread of
diseases that killed an enormous number of prisoners. The insufficient
alimentation, exhausting work and strict discipline increased the number of
deaths.
The
prisoners were killed „ in a gas chamber, with toxic gas called «Zyklon».
The implementation of this method has been confirmed by the witnesses’
testimonies. The existence of the gas chamber has been confirmed by finding in
its surroundings empty cans of used «Zyklon», discovering in one of the
storages in the camp (…) 27 boxes with 50 empty «Zyklon» cans and one box with
opened «Zyklon» in the pharmacy”.
In the
ending part of the judgment, it is emphasized that apart from cases of natural
death caused by diseases there have been also cases of conscious and
intentional murders of the weakest and the most exhausted prisoners, which
increased even more the already high mortality in the camp.
The
Extraordinary State Commission completed the preliminary investigation of the
crimes committed in Stutthof in the last days of June 1945. The gathered
documentation and the work of the commission has been registered on film stock
and photographic film, which confirm the final conclusions of the reports. In
the last days of August 1945, on the request of the Commission for the
Prosecution of German Crimes in Poland, the commissions returned to collect
evidentiary material for the trials of the staff of the camp and other persons
responsible for the crimes committed in Stutthof.
Source: M.Orski „Ostatnie dni obozu
koncentracyjnego Stutthof” [“The last days of the Stutthoff concentration
camp”], Stutthof Museum, 1995.
Tłumaczenie:
Katarzyna Flis
