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The German camps in occupied Poland during World War II were built by Nazi Germany in the course of its Occupation of Poland (1939–1945) both in areas annexed by Germany and in General Government. A system of camps of various kinds was established across the entire country, including extermination camps, concentration camps, labour, and POW camps.
German occupied Poland was a prison-like territory. It contained more than 430 camp complexes. Some of the major ones, such as Stutthof and Auschwitz consisted of dozens of subsidiary camps scattered over a broad area. The number of subcamps under Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II (Birkenau), and Auschwitz III (Monowitz) was forty-eight (48). Their detailed description is provided by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.[1][2]
The camp system was one of the fundamental institutions of the Nazi regime, and with the invasion of Poland became the backbone of German war economy and the state organized terror. The racist policies of the Third Reich against Slavs and other "undesirables" filled the labor and concentration camps from the first days of occupation. The deliberate maltreatment, starvation, overwork and executions of prisoners amounted to ethnic cleansing. Between 1941–1942, the concerted effort to destroy the Polish Jews including those of other European nationalities led to the creation of death camps, constructed for the sole purpose of extermination. It was only after the majority of Jews from all Polish ghettos were annihilated that the gas chambers and crematoria were blown up in a systematic attempt to hide the evidence of the crimes. The Nazi Germans turned Auschwitz Konzentrationslager into a major death camp by expanding its extermination facilities. The ovens working around the clock till November 25, 1944; were blown up by the orders of SS chief Heinrich Himmler himself.[2][3]
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The German Nazi government established extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) in Poland (see: the Holocaust in Poland) after the Final Solution was already in place. The extermination facilities were added to existing camps, including at Majdanek. Some camps operated in this dual capacity until the end of the war. The Nazi German death factories (Todeslager) as of 1942 included:
The primary function of death camps was the elimination of Jews from all the countries occupied by Germany, except the Soviet Union (Soviet Jews were generally killed on the spot). Many non-Jewish Poles and other prisoners were also killed in these camps; an estimated 75,000 non-Jewish Poles died at Auschwitz-Birkenau and up to 200,000 at Warschau. Most extermination camps had regular concentration camps set up along with them including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Treblinka and Warsaw. However, these camps were distinct from the adjoining extermination camps.
The Nazi concentration camps (Konzentrationslager, KL or KZ) were designed to exploit the labor of prisoners rather than to exterminate them, although the majority of prisoners eventually died due to disease and exhaustion, starvation diet, and regular executions. In Germany before 1939, concentration camps housed mainly Jews and political enemies of the Nazi regime.[2]
Many concentration camps set up in German occupied Poland served as transit points to the extermination camps, and partly so that the Jews could be worked to death. This policy was called Vernichtung durch Arbeit (annihilation through work). Large numbers of non-Jewish Poles were also imprisoned in these camps, as were various prisoners from other countries. For example, at the beginning Stutthof labor camp near Gdańsk was set up for the extermination of Polish elites. The major concentration camps in occupied Poland were:
Another camp, Gross-Rosen (now Rogoźnica) in German Silesia (now part of Poland), was surrounded with a number of satellite camps (Aussenlager) to which prisoners were sent to work on various German state projects. There were also concentration camps at: Budzyń, Janowska, Poniatowa, Skarżysko-Kamienna, Starachowice, and Trawniki.
The Germans pressed large numbers of Poles into forced labour. These labourers were confined in camps known in German as Polenlager, such as Gorzyce and Gorzyczki, both in Germany and in Poland. One estimate is that there were about 440 of these camps, where at least 1.5 million Poles were set to hard labour. Many of these camps were transient in nature, being opened and closed according to the labour needs of the occupiers. Many of the 400,000 Polish prisoners of war captured by Germans during the 1939 invasion of Poland were also confined in these camps, although many of them were also sent as forced labourers in Germany. Several types of labor camps were distinguished by German bureaucracy.
The Germans established several camps for prisoners of war (POWs) from the western Allied countries in territory which before 1939 had been part of Poland. There was a major POW camp at Toruń (Thorn) and another at Łódź, plus a number of smaller ones. Many prisoners of war from the Soviet Union were also brought to Poland, where most of them died in labor camps. The Germans did not recognise Soviets as POWs and several million of them died in German hands. They were fed only once a day, and the meal would consist of bread, margarine and soup.
The Polish nation lost the largest portion of its pre-war population during World War II. Out of Poland's pre-war population of 34,849,000, about 6,000,000 - constituting 17% of its total - perished during the German occupation. There were 240,000 military deaths, 3,000,000 Polish-Jewish Holocaust victims, and 2,760,000 civilian deaths (see World War II casualties backed with real research and citations).
The Polish government has issued a number of decrees, periodically updated, providing for the surviving Polish victims of wartime (and post-war) repression, and has produced lists of the various camps where Poles (defined both as citizens of Poland regardless of ethnicity, and persons of Polish ethnicity of other citizenship) were detained either by the Nazis or by the Soviets.
Nazi camps were liberated by the Red Army and Polish Army in 1944 or 1945. A number of camps were subsequently used by the Soviets or Polish communist regime as POW or labor camps for Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, eg.: Zgoda labour camp, Central Labour Camp Potulice, Łambinowice camp.