In 1939/40, the SS camp in the small East Prussian town of Soldau (Polish: Działdowo) served as a prison in the course of the National Socialist persecution of the Polish elites; in 1940, it served as a killing centre as part of the »Euthanasia« programme, which entailed the murder of patients. Several monuments on the site and in nearby woods commemorate the camp's 13,000 to 20,000 victims.
History
At the beginning of the Second World War, in autumn 1939, the SS set up a transit camp for arrested Poles and Jews in the former army barracks of Soldau. In November 1939, Dr. Dr. Emil Otto Rasch arrived in Königsberg as inspector of the Security Police (SiPo) and the Security Service (SD). From January 1940 on, he was responsible for transferring prisoners – as part of the »Intelligenzaktion« against Polish elites – to Soldau. Between January and April, Rasch had at least 1,500 Poles and Jews, mostly academics, officers and priests, sentenced to death before a court-martial and executed. Single shootings took place on the premises of the camp, while mass executions were carried out in nearby forests, close to the villages of Bialutten (Białuty) and Kämmersdorf (Komorniki). In March 1940, hundreds were arrested in Płock and transferred to Soldau – among them were the 82-year old archbishop Antoni Julian Nowowiejski and suffragan bishop Leon Wetmański. Both perished at the beginning of 1941.
Already at the beginning of 1940, a special unit led by SS-Hauptsturmführer Herbert Lange murdered patients of hospitals in occupied Poland. At the end of May, the SS cleared the provincial hospitals in many East Prussian townships: the patients of the hospitals in Allenberg near Wehlau, Tapiau, Kortau and Carlshof near Rastenburg were all deported to Soldau and other facilities. Until June 8, 1940, »Sonderkommando Lange« murdered 1,558 German and up to 300 Polish disabled people in gas vans. In May 1940, the SS camp was transformed into a labour education camp which was used by all state police posts in East Prussia up until January 1945. In the spring of 1944, SS-Sonderkommando 1005 was ordered to carry out a »disinterment operation« near Soldau in order to erase the traces of the 1940/41 mass murders. On January 17, 1945, just before the Red Army reached Soldau, the SS sent the last remaining prisoners on a death march. Soon afterwards the camp was taken over by the Soviet secret service NKVD and used as a camp for Polish prisoners of war and »Volksdeutsche«, German nationals.
Victims
In total, between 20,000 and 50,000 people – possibly as many as 200,000 – passed through the Soldau camp from autumn 1939 until January 1945. The number of victims – representatives of the Polish elites, Jews as well as patients from psychiatric hospitals – is estimated to amount to 13,000 to 20,000 people.
The Second World War began in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland and the occupation of the west of the country by German troops and the east of the country by the Red Army. Persecution and terror directly followed the invasion in both parts of the country. German units massacred members of the intelligentsia, Jewish and non-Jewish civilians as well as hospital patients.
At the end of 1939 the German administration established ghettos where the Jewish population was forced to live in cramped and horrendous conditions. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, eastern Poland also fell under German control. SS Einsatzgruppen started to systematically murder Jewish men, later also women and children. In autumn 1941, local German authorities in the former west of the country began to prepare for the mass murder of Jewish ghetto prisoners using poison gas. By 1945, some three million Polish Jews had been murdered in the extermination camps at Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek or Auschwitz, starved to death in the ghettos or shot dead. In 1943 the Jews living in the Warsaw ghetto staged an uprising, which was brutally crushed by the SS.
Polish soldiers fought with the Allies on all fronts during the Second World War. Polish partisan groups, including the patriotic »Armia Krajowa« (Home Army), formed the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe. August 1, 1944 saw the start of the Warsaw Uprising, the most extensive civilian campaign against the Germans in occupied Europe. It failed also because the Red Army, already standing on the opposite side of the Vistula River, chose not to intervene. It is estimated that up to 250,000 people lost their lives in the uprising. A total of around three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death during the German occupation.
Once the Red Army had arrived on (East) Polish soil in January 1944, the troops of the Armia Krajowa were stripped of their weapons by the Soviet secret service and the officers were either shot or deported. The millions of deaths during the occupation, the permanent Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, the incorporation of former eastern German territories and the ensuing population transfers all left a traumatic political and social legacy in Poland.
Remembrance of the murder of European Jews in German extermination camps was initially marginalised in the Polish culture of memory. Although Auschwitz soon became an international symbol of the Holocaust, in Poland it was viewed for decades above all as a »site of Polish martyrdom«. However, the start of the 21st century brought about changes in this respect, due in part to the fierce debates over the Jedwabne massacre in eastern Poland. The massacre of around 340 Jews on July 10, 1941 was originally attributed to the »Gestapo and Hitler police« but had in fact been carried out by Polish »neighbours« without orders from the Germans. Debates in Poland and abroad on Polish perpetration resulted in the Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski (*1954) issuing an apology to the victims in 2001. There were increasing calls from experts, such as those from Poland’s Institute for National Remembrance, for the country to confront the most difficult chapters in its history, which also include the anti-Jewish pogroms in 1946-47 and state anti-semitism in communist Poland during the post-war period.
The Polish invests extensively in memorial culture, including grand projects with international ambition. The Warsaw Rising Museum was opened already in 2004. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened in 2013 on the territory of the former Warsaw Ghetto, a new museum dedicated specifically to the Warsaw Ghetto will follow suit in 2024. Since 2017, there is a major Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. Since the turn of the millennium, the sites of the former German extermination camps have also been converted into modern memorial sites. An ever-growing preoccupation with Poland’s Jewish and multicultural heritage can be observed in the field of culture as well.
Remembrance
After 1945, Soldau and all of southern East Prussia became part of Poland – the German residents were persecuted and driven away, while Polish expellees from the eastern part of Poland, now annexed by the Soviet Union, were resettled to this area. The newcomers discovered the mass graves of prisoners from the period between 1939 and 1944/45 in the woods near Białuty, south-east of Soldau (now called Działdowo), and in Komorniki to the north-east. Memorial sites now honour the thousands of victims. There is a further monument on the cemetery in Działdowo, where exhumed corpses were buried in eleven mass graves.
