![]() Female guards of the Stutthof concentration camp at a trial in Gdańsk between April 25 and May 31, 1946. First row (from left): Elisabeth Becker, Gerda Steinhoff, Wanda Klaff. Second row: Johann Pauls, Erna Beilhardt, Jenny-Wanda Barkmann |
The Stutthof trials were a series of war crime tribunals held in postwar Poland for the prosecution of Stutthof concentration camp staff and officials, responsible for the murder of up to 85,000 prisoners during the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany in World War II. [1] None of the Stutthof commandants were ever tried in Poland. SS-Sturmbannführer Max Pauly was put on trial by a British military court in Germany but not for the crimes committed at Stutthof; only as the commandant of the Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg. Nevertheless, Pauly was executed in 1946. [2]
The first Polish war crimes tribunal was convened at Gdańsk, Poland, from April 25, 1946 to May 31, 1946. The next three trials took place at the same court in October 8–31, 1947, November 5–10, and in November 19–29 of that year. The fifth trial was held before the court in Toruń in 1949. The sixth and the last Stutthof trial in Poland took place in 1953 also in Gdańsk. In total, of the approximately 2,000 SS men and women who ran the entire camp complex, 72 SS officers and six female overseers were punished. [2]
During the first trial held at Gdańsk from April 25, 1946, to May 31, 1946, the joint Soviet/Polish Special Criminal Court tried and convicted of crimes against humanity a group of thirteen ex-officials and overseers of the Stutthof concentration camp in Sztutowo and its Bromberg-Ost subcamp for women located in the city of Bydgoszcz. [2] The accused were arraigned before the court and all found guilty. Twelve were sentenced to death, including the commander of the guards Johann Pauls, while the remainder were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. The death sentences were carried out on July 4, 1946 at the Biskupia Górka in Gdańsk, by short-drop hanging.
The commandant of the Stutthof and Neuengamme concentration camps SS-Sturmbannführer Max Pauly was sentenced to death in Germany at about the same time. [2] Pauly was tried by the British for war crimes with thirteen others in the Curio Haus in Hamburg which was located in the British occupied sector of Germany. The trial lasted from March 18, 1946 to May 13, 1946. He was found guilty and sentenced to death with 11 other defendants. He was executed by long-drop hanging by Albert Pierrepoint in Hamelin Prison on October 8, 1946. The second commandant SS-Sturmbannführer Paul-Werner Hoppe (August 1942 - January 1945) was apprehended in 1953 in West Germany and later sentenced to nine years imprisonment.
The second trial was held from October 8, 1947, to October 31, 1947, before a Polish Special Criminal Court. Arraigned 24 ex-officials and guards of the Stutthof concentration camp were judged and found guilty. Ten were sentenced to death. [2]
Nine SS men and the Kapo Nikolaysen were executed on October 28, 1948: [3]
The third trial was held from November 5, 1947, to November 10, 1947, before a Polish Special Criminal Court. Arraigned 20 ex-officials and guards were judged; nineteen were found guilty, and one was acquitted. [2] [4]
The fourth trial was also held before a Polish Special Criminal Court, from November 19, 1947, to November 29, 1947. Arraigned 27 ex-officials and guards were judged; 26 were found guilty, and one was acquitted. [2] [4]
The last two trials in Poland concerning two Stutthof concentration camp officials took place four years apart. In 1949, SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Jacobi, the commandant of Stutthof subcamps forming Baukommando Weichsel or OT Thorn (Organisation Todt Thorn) for women digging anti-tank ditches, [5] was tried before the criminal court in Toruń and sentenced to three years in prison. [2]
In 1953 the court in Gdańsk tried SS-man Bielawa (SS Rottenführer Paul Bielawa, a prisoner guard from the 3rd company in Stutthof between 1941–45) [1] and sentenced him to twelve years. [2] SS-Rottenführer Emil Strehlau was sentenced by the court in Torun (Wloclawek) on April 23, 1948, to death for war crimes. He was executed November 8 in Wloclawek. [6] [7]
In mid-1950s, a number of Nazi concentration camp commandants were sentenced to jail for supervising the murder of Jewish prisoners in gas chambers between 1942–1944, including Otto Knott , Otto Haupt and Bernard Lüdtke .
In 2017, the prosecution of two former Stutthof camp guards from Borken and Wuppertal commenced. [8] The Wuppertal accused denied the allegations and declared that he was not present during the killings, and did not notice anything about it. [9]
In November 2018, Johann Rehbogen from Borken was tried in court for serving at Stutthof camp from June 1942 to September 1944. [10] In December 2018, the trial was suspended, since the convict had to be hospitalized for serious heart and kidney problems. [11] On February 25, 2019, it was announced that the trial is unlikely to be restarted due to the poor health conditions of the defendant. [12]
In October 2019, Bruno Dey from Hamburg was accused of contributing to the killings of 5,230 prisoners at Stutthof camp between 1944 and 1945. However, he was tried in a juvenile court due to being about 17 at that time. [13] In July 2020, he was convicted of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder by the Hamburg state court, and was also convicted of one count of accessory to attempted murder. [14]
In 2021, Irmgard Furchner a German former concentration camp secretary and stenographer at Stutthof, where she worked for camp commandant Paul-Werner Hoppe, [15] was charged with 11,412 counts of accessory to murder and 18 additional counts of accessory to attempted murder, [16] [17] [18] On December 20, 2022 she was found guilty and sentenced to a suspended jail term of two years. [19] [20] On 20 August 2024, the German Federal Court of Justice would reject Furchner's appeal and uphold her conviction. [21] [22]
Stutthof was a Nazi concentration camp established by Nazi Germany in a secluded, marshy, and wooded area near the village of Stutthof 34 km (21 mi) east of the city of Danzig (Gdańsk) in the territory of the German-annexed Free City of Danzig. The camp was set up around existing structures after the invasion of Poland in World War II and initially used for the imprisonment of Polish leaders and intelligentsia. The actual barracks were built the following year by prisoners. Most of the infrastructure of the concentration camp was either destroyed or dismantled shortly after the war. In 1962, the former concentration camp with its remaining structures, was turned into a memorial museum.
Aufseherin was the position title for a female guard in Nazi concentration camps. Of the 50,000 guards who served in the concentration camps, training records indicate that approximately 3,500 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.
Elisabeth Becker was a Nazi concentration camp overseer in World War II. She was convicted at the Stutthof trials of crimes against humanity and executed.
Gerda Steinhoff was a Schutzstaffel (SS) Nazi concentration camp overseer following the 1939 German invasion of Poland.
Ewa Paradies was a Nazi concentration camp overseer.
Jenny-Wanda Barkmann (30 May 1922 – 4 July 1946) was a German overseer in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. She was tried and executed for crimes against humanity after the war.
Heiligenbeil was a subcamp of the German Stutthof concentration camp, operated from September 1944 to January 1945. It was named after the town Heiligenbeil.
Escape from Sobibor is a 1987 British television film which aired on ITV and CBS. It is the story of the mass escape from the Nazi extermination camp at Sobibor, the most successful uprising by Jewish prisoners of German extermination camps. The film was directed by Jack Gold and shot in Avala, Yugoslavia. The full 176-minute version shown in the UK on 10 May 1987 was pre-empted by a 143-minute version shown in the United States on 12 April 1987.
Scharführer was a title or rank used in early 20th century German military terminology. In German, Schar was one term for the smallest sub-unit, equivalent to a "troop", "squad", or "section". The word führer simply meant "leader".
The Dachau trials, also known as the Dachau Military Tribunal, handled the prosecution of almost every war criminal captured in the U.S. military zones in Allied-occupied Germany and in Allied-occupied Austria, and the prosecutions of military personnel and civilian persons who committed war crimes against the American military and American citizens. The war-crime trials were held within the compound of the former Dachau concentration camp by military tribunals authorized by the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Third Army.
A kapo or prisoner functionary was a prisoner in a Nazi camp who was assigned by the Schutzstaffel (SS) guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks.
Johann Niemann was a German SS officer and Holocaust perpetrator who was deputy commandant of Sobibor extermination camp during Operation Reinhard. He also served as a Leichenverbrenner at Grafeneck, Brandenburg, and Bernburg during the Aktion T4, the SS "euthanasia" program. Niemann was killed during the Sobibor prisoner uprising in 1943.
The SS command of Auschwitz concentration camp refers to those units, commands, and agencies of the German SS which operated and administered during World War II. Due to its large size and key role in the Nazi genocide program, the Auschwitz Concentration Camp encompassed personnel from several different branches of the SS, some of which held overlapping and shared areas of responsibility.
Adolf Theuer was an SS-Unterscharführer at Auschwitz concentration camp. He was executed after the war as a war criminal.
The Majdanek trials were a series of consecutive war-crime trials held in Poland and in Germany during and after World War II, constituting the overall longest Nazi war crimes trial in history spanning over 30 years. The first judicial trial of Majdanek extermination camp officials took place from November 27, 1944, to December 2, 1944, in Lublin, Poland. The last one, held at the District Court of Düsseldorf began on November 26, 1975, and concluded on June 30, 1981. It was West Germany's longest and most expensive trial, lasting 474 sessions.
Johann Pauls was a German SS-Oberscharführer in Stutthof concentration camp. He was executed for war crimes.
SS-UnterscharführerGustav Münzberger, born in Weißkirchlitz (Sudetenland), was a carpenter and factory worker before his involvement in the Holocaust. Following the Nazi German invasion of Poland at the onset of World War II he was posted as a serviceman in August 1940 at the Sonnenstein Euthanasia Centre at Schloss Sonnenstein in Pirna. He arrived at the Treblinka extermination camp in late September 1942 and became assistant to deputy commandant SS-Oberscharführer Heinrich Matthes, in charge of leading Jews into the gas chambers and gassing them.
Hermine Boettcher-Brueckner was a Nazi SS auxiliary guard at several concentration camps between 1942 and 1945. In 1948 she was convicted for war crimes for her role in the Holocaust, and sentenced to imprisonment; she was tried again in 1975 but acquitted on lack of evidence. Her fate after the trial remains unknown.
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