Bobrek was a subcamp of Monowitz concentration camp located in or near Bobrek, Lesser Poland Voivodeship, Poland, and was part of the Auschwitz concentration camp complex. It was built by Siemens-Schuckert and held approximately 250-300 prisoners including 50 women who were used as slave labor to produce electrical parts for aircraft and U-boat submarines. The commandant of the camp was SS-Scharführer Hermann Buch. [1]
Bobrek subcamp was evacuated along with the other camps in the Auschwitz complex on January 18, 1945. The prisoners were sent on a death march to a concentration camp in Gleiwitz, Poland. Many were then transported by rail to Buchenwald concentration camp. While in Buchenwald, the former Bobrek workers were sought out by Siemens-Schuckert executives, who had them transported to the Siemens-Schuckert factory in Siemensstadt, a suburb of Berlin. [2] [3]
The Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp (Stammlager) in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labor camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben; and dozens of subcamps. The camps became a major site of the Nazis' Final Solution to the Jewish Question.
Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or suspected communists were among the first internees.
Flossenbürg was a Nazi concentration camp built in May 1938 by the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office. Unlike other concentration camps, it was located in a remote area, in the Fichtel Mountains of Bavaria, adjacent to the town of Flossenbürg and near the German border with Czechoslovakia. The camp's initial purpose was to exploit the forced labor of prisoners for the production of granite for Nazi architecture. In 1943, the bulk of prisoners switched to producing Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter planes and other armaments for Germany's war effort. Although originally intended for "criminal" and "asocial" prisoners, after Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, the camp's numbers swelled with political prisoners from Eastern Europe. It also developed an extensive subcamp system that eventually outgrew the main camp.
Mauthausen was a Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town of Mauthausen, Upper Austria. It was the main camp of a group with nearly 100 further subcamps located throughout Austria and southern Germany. The three Gusen concentration camps in and around the village of St Georgen/Gusen, just a few kilometres from Mauthausen, held a significant proportion of prisoners within the camp complex, at times exceeding the number of prisoners at the Mauthausen main camp.
Aufseherin[ˈaʊ̯fˌzeːəʁɪn] was the position title for female guards in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. Of the 55,000 guards who served in Nazi concentration camps, about 3,700 were women. In 1942, the first female guards arrived at Auschwitz and Majdanek from Ravensbrück. The year after, the Nazis began conscripting women because of a shortage of male guards. In the context of these camps, the German position title of Aufseherin translates to (female) "overseer" or "attendant". Later female guards were dispersed to Bolzano (1944–1945), Kaiserwald-Riga (1943–44), Mauthausen, Stutthof (1942–1945), Vaivara (1943–1944), Vught (1943–1944), and at Nazi concentration camps, subcamps, work camps, detention camps and other posts.
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 Union, 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".
Gross-Rosen was a network of Nazi concentration camps built and operated by Nazi Germany during World War II. The main camp was located in the German village of Gross-Rosen, now the modern-day Rogoźnica in Lower Silesian Voivodeship, Poland; directly on the rail-line between the towns of Jawor (Jauer) and Strzegom (Striegau).
Mittelbau-Dora was a Nazi concentration camp located near Nordhausen in Thuringia, Germany. It was established in late summer 1943 as a subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp, supplying slave labour from many Eastern countries occupied by Germany, for extending the nearby tunnels in the Kohnstein and for manufacturing the V-2 rocket and the V-1 flying bomb. In the summer of 1944, Mittelbau became an independent concentration camp with numerous subcamps of its own. In 1945, most of the surviving inmates were sent on death marches or crammed in ox train-cars by the SS. On 11 April 1945, US troops freed the remaining prisoners.
From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps on its own territory and in parts of German-occupied Europe.
Siemens-Schuckert was a German electrical engineering company headquartered in Berlin, Erlangen and Nuremberg that was incorporated into the Siemens AG in 1966.
On 19 April 1943, members of the Belgian Resistance stopped a Holocaust train and freed a number of Jews who were being transported to Auschwitz concentration camp from Mechelen transit camp in Belgium, on the twentieth convoy from the camp. In the aftermath of the attack, a number of others were able to jump from the train too. In all, 233 people managed to escape, of whom 118 ultimately survived. The remainder were either killed during the escape or were recaptured soon afterwards. The attack was unusual as an attempt by the resistance to free Jewish deportees and marks the only mass breakout by deportees on a Holocaust train.
The Jaworzno concentration camp was a concentration camp in WW2 German-occupied Poland and later in Communist Poland. It was first established by the Nazis in 1943 during the Second World War and was later used from 1945 to 1956 by the Soviet NKVD and then by the Ministry of Public Security and other agencies of the Polish communist regime. Today the site is an apartment complex and also houses a memorial to the camp's victims.
Monowitz was a Nazi concentration camp and labor camp (Arbeitslager) run by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland from 1942–1945, during World War II and the Holocaust. For most of its existence, Monowitz was a subcamp of the Auschwitz concentration camp; from November 1943 it and other Nazi subcamps in the area were jointly known as "Auschwitz III-subcamps". In November 1944 the Germans renamed it Monowitz concentration camp, after the village of Monowice where it was built, in the annexed portion of Poland. SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Heinrich Schwarz was commandant from November 1943 to January 1945.
The Fürstengrube subcamp was organized in the summer of 1943 at the Fürstengrube hard coal mine in the town of Wesoła (Wessolla) near Myslowice (Myslowitz), approximately 30 kilometers (19 mi) from Auschwitz concentration camp. The mine, which IG Farbenindustrie AG acquired in February 1941, was to supply hard coal for the IG Farben factory being built in Auschwitz. Besides the old Fürstengrube mine, called the Altanlage, a new mine (Fürstengrube-Neuanlage) had been designed and construction had begun; it was to provide for greater coal output in the future. Coal production at the new mine was anticipated to start in late 1943, so construction was treated as very urgent; however, that plan proved to be unfeasible.
Tadeusz Sobolewicz was a Polish actor and author. He survived six Nazi concentration camps, a Gestapo prison and a nine-day death march.
Death marches refer to the forcible movement of prisoners by Nazi Germany toward the end of World War II and the Holocaust. The marches took place mostly between the summer/autumn of 1944 and May 1945, when hundreds of thousands of prisoners, mostly Jews, from German concentration camps near the eastern front were moved to camps inside Germany away from Allied forces. The purpose of the marches was to allow the Germans to use the prisoners as slave labour, to remove evidence of crimes against humanity, and to retain control of the prisoners in case they could be used to bargain with the Allies.
Subcamps, also translated as satellite camps, were outlying detention centres (Haftstätten) that came under the command of a main concentration camp run by the SS in Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe. The Nazis distinguished between the main camps and the subcamps subordinated to them. Survival conditions in the subcamps were, in many cases, poorer for the prisoners than those in the main camps.
Boelcke-Kaserne concentration camp was a subcamp of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp complex where prisoners were left to die after they became unable to work. It was located inside a former Luftwaffe barracks complex in Nordhausen, Thuringia, Germany, adjacent to several pre-existing forced labor camps. During its three-month existence, about 6,000 prisoners passed through the camp and almost 3,000 died there under "indescribable" conditions. More than a thousand prisoners were killed during the bombing of Nordhausen by the Royal Air Force on 3–4 April 1945. Their corpses were found by the US Army units that liberated the camp on 11 April. Photographs and newsreel footage of the camp were reported internationally and made Nordhausen notorious in many parts of the world.
On 27 January 1945, Auschwitz concentration camp—a Nazi concentration camp where more than a million people were murdered—was liberated by the Red Army during the Vistula–Oder Offensive. Although most of the prisoners had been forced onto a death march, about 7,000 had been left behind. The Soviet soldiers attempted to help the survivors and were shocked at the scale of Nazi crimes. The date is recognized as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Blechhammer was the second-largest subcamp of Auschwitz concentration camp, part of the Blechhammer industrial area where several camps were located. The camp was evacuated on 21 January 1945; five days later, German forces returned to kill some survivors who had been left behind.
