Central Labour Camp Jaworzno (Polish: Centralny Obóz Pracy w Jaworznie, COP Jaworzno) was a concentration camp in Jaworzno, Poland. It operated from 1943 until 1956, first run by Nazi Germany and then by the Soviet Union with the People's Republic of Poland. There were also two subcamps located at Chrusty and Libiąż.[1]
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The Nazi concentration camp at Jaworzno in Upper Silesia was opened on June 15, 1943, as one of many subcamps of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The SS-Arbeitslager Neu-Dachs (often also called SS-Lager Dachsgrube) provided forced labor for German companies. Inmates were primarily employed in coal mining in Jaworzno and the construction of the "Whilhelm" power plant, (later renamed "Jaworzno I"), for Albert Speer's company EnergieVersorgung Oberschlesien AG (EVO). Among the builders of the camp were British prisoners of war from the Stalag VIII-B at Lamsdorf (Łambinowice). The SS unit of about 200 to 300 guards was composed of Volksdeutsche, (ethnic Germans), from Poland and other countries and led by the camp commandant, Bruno Pfütze and his deputy Paul Weissman.
There were up to 5,000 inmates at a time in the camp, composed of various nationalities, including European Jews (about 80% of all inmates[2]), Poles, Germans and others, including Soviet prisoners of war. There were 14 reported successful escapes, among them several Soviet POWs, (who then joined the local Polish communist partisans). The camp's survival rate was low because of its lethal conditions, including starvation, disease, hard labor and wanton brutality. In effect, about 2,000 people lost their lives in the Jaworzno camp; some of them were murdered by German civilian employees of the coal mine (mostly members of the SA), who had been tasked with overseeing the prisoners at work. In addition, every month about 200 inmates who were unable to work anymore were taken by truck from Jaworzno to the gas chambers at Auschwitz II Birkenau, resulting in several thousand more deaths.
On the night of January 15, 1945, the camp was bombed by the Soviet Air Force as the front approached. The camp was evacuated two days later on January 17. At the last roll-call, the number of inmates was established at 3,664.[3] The SS executed about 40 prisoners who were unfit for transportation (400 others were left there alive) and some 3200 were marched away. Hundreds of them died on the way to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Lower Silesia, including about 300 shot dead in a massacre which occurred on the second night of this death march (in all, about 9,000 to 15,000 Auschwitz system prisoners died during the marches).[4] The abandoned camp was liberated on January 19, 1945, by the local unit of the Polish resistance organization Armia Krajowa (AK). Some 350 former prisoners were still alive when the Soviet Red Army forces arrived there a week later.
The camp had served the Soviet NKVD since February 1945 and then the Ministry of Public Security of Poland as a prison camp for so-called "enemies of the nation" (Polish: wrogowie narodu). Some of them were German POWs (separately members of the Waffen-SS) and the Nazi collaborators from all over Poland. Others were local German, Volksdeutsche and Silesian civilians from Jaworzno, nearby Chrzanów and elsewhere, they included women and children. There were also Poles who were arrested for their opposition to Stalinism, including members of the Polish non-communist resistance organizations AK and BCh, and later the anti-communist organization WiN.
The camp was soon renamed as a "Central Labor Camp" (COP), and the prisoners mostly worked on the construction of Jaworzno power plant or in nearby factories and mines. All of them were interned in separate subcamps and were guarded by more than 300 soldiers from the Internal Security Corps. One of the commandants (since 1949), was a Polish Jew called Solomon Morel, who had gained a reputation for cruelty in the Zgoda labour camp in Świętochłowice; the others included Stanisław Kwiatkowski, Ivan Mordasov and Teofil Hazelmajer. According to the (incomplete) official figures, about 1,535 people died at COP Jaworzno between 1945 and 1947 (972 of them of a typhus epidemic in the overcrowded camp), out of 6,140 who died during this period in all camps and prisons in Poland. Unofficial figures are much higher: according to modern research by the Polish prison directorate, 6,987 people died at Jaworzno and its filias as a result of murder, torture, inhuman treatment, unsanitary conditions, exhaustive work and hunger,[5] many more than in any other Polish camp (some 4,500 died at the second most-lethal Central Labour Camp Potulice). The victims were mostly German civilians and POWs who had no family on the outisde to help them with food and thus died of starvation in 1945-1946.[6]
A separate subcamp existed for the ethnic Lemko and Ukrainian prisoners. On April 23, 1947, by a decree of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Party, COP Jaworzno was selected for the detention of civilians during the Operation Vistula deportation campaign. The first transportation of 17 prisoners from Sanok reached the special subcamp of Jaworzno on May 5 and the number of these prisoners eventually totalled almost 4,000 (including nearly 1,000 women and children); the vast majority of them arrived in 1947. Most of these inmates were people suspected of sympathy towards the "bandits" of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and those otherwise selected from the Operation Vistula transports (including more than 100 Lemko intelligentsia and 25 mostly Greek Catholic priests). The Lemko and Ukrainian prisoners were gradually released from the spring of 1948 until the spring of 1949, when the last of them left Jaworzno. Most of them were deported to the new places of settlement or freed and allowed to return to their homes, however, several hundred were sent to military prisons and at least 161 died in the camp.
The camp continued to be used as a prison for Polish political prisoners. Between 1951 and 1956, it was turned into the Progressive Prison for Adolescents under the age of 21, of which some 15,000 passed through. The final closure happened during the wave of general post-Stalinist reforms, following a prison rebellion in 1955.
The former Jaworzno camp was then converted into an apartment complex, the brick barracks forming housing and educational buildings (a primary musical school and a kindergarten).
A prominent memorial to the victims of the German camp was erected on the site of the January 1945 massacre of 40 prisoners by the SS. After the fall of communism in Poland, the monument was joined by a small commemorative plinth to the inmates of the political prison in the nearby grounds of the primary school. In 1998, Polish and Ukrainian Presidents Aleksander Kwaśniewski and Leonid Kuchma also erected a memorial dedicated to "the German, Polish, and Ukrainian victims of communist terror who perished in the Central Labour Camp", which was erected on the previously unmarked site of a mass grave of 162 persons in the forest outside the camp.
In 1999, Polish authorities started an official investigation into the crimes committed in the camp against Polish citizens of Ukrainian ethnic descent.