WW2-Poland-2015

July and August 1944, the camp staff of Klooga concentration camp evacuated the majority of the inmates by sea and
sent them to Stutthof.
Conditions
Crematory building
Conditions in the camp were brutal. Many prisoners died in typhus epidemics that swept the camp in the winter of
1942 and again in 1944. Those whom the SS guards judged too weak or sick to work were gassed in the camp's small
gas chamber. Gassing with Zyklon B began in June 1944. Camp doctors also killed sick or injured prisoners in the
infirmary with lethal injections. More than 85,000 people died in the camp.
The Nazis used Stutthof prisoners as forced laborers. Some prisoners worked in SS-owned businesses such as DAW,
the heavily guarded armaments factory Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke (de) located inside the camp (see map). Other
inmates labored in local brickyards, in private industrial enterprises, in agriculture, or in the camp's own workshops.
In 1944, as forced labor by concentration camp prisoners became increasingly important in armaments production,
a Focke-Wulf aircraft factory was constructed at Stutthof. Eventually, the Stutthof camp system became a vast network
of forced-labor camps; 105 Stutthof subcamps were established throughout northern and central Poland. The major
subcamps were Thornand Elbing.
Research shows that the Stutthof concentration camp was a potential sources for human remains that Nazi Dr. Rudolf
Spanner used to make a limited quantity of soap from human fat.[5] The former prisoner of Stutthoff and Lithuanian
writer Balys Sruoga later wrote a novel Dievų miškas (The Forest of Gods) describing the everyday horrors of this camp.
Soap production from the bodies of victims
Evidence exists of small-scale soap production of soap made from human corpses in the Stutthof concentration
camp.[6] In his book Russia at War 1941 to 1945, Alexander Werth reported that while visiting Gdańsk/Danzig in 1945
shortly after its liberation by the Red Army, he saw an experimental factory outside the city for making soap from
human corpses. According to Werth it had been run by "a German professor called Spanner" and "was a nightmarish
sight, with its vats full of human heads and torsos pickled in some liquid, and its pails full of a flakey substance - human
soap".[7] This process was confirmed in 2006 by researchers from the Gdansk University of Technology[8]
Commandants
• SS-Sturmbannführer - Max Pauly - September '39 - August '42
• SS-Sturmbannführer - Paul-Werner Hoppe - August '42 - January '45
The evacuation of prisoners from the Stutthof camp system in northern Poland began in January 1945. When the final
evacuation began, there were nearly 50,000 prisoners, the majority of them Jews, in the Stutthof camp system. About
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