Central Labour Camp Jaworzno
Encyclopedia
Central Labour Camp 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
.
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), 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. 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). 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.
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, 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.
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 prisoner
s. 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.
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.
Bogusław Kopka, Polski Gułag, Wprost
, No. 12/2002 (1008) Mateusz Wyrwich, Obóz wyjątkowy, Tygodnik Solidarność
, No. 47/2003 Roman Drozd, Явожно– трагічний символ акції «Вісла», Наше Слово, No. 18, 2004
Jaworzno
Jaworzno is a city in southern Poland, near Katowice. The east district of the Upper Silesian Metropolitan Union - metropolis with the population of 2 millions. Located in the Silesian Highlands, on the Przemsza river ....
, Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
. It operated from 1943 until 1956, first run by Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
and then by the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
with the People's Republic of Poland
People's Republic of Poland
The People's Republic of Poland was the official name of Poland from 1952 to 1990. Although the Soviet Union took control of the country immediately after the liberation from Nazi Germany in 1944, the name of the state was not changed until eight years later...
. There were also two subcamps located at Chrusty
Chrusty
Chrusty may refer to:Places:*Chrusty, Aleksandrów County in Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship *Chrusty, Chełmno County in Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship *Chrusty, Łask County in Łódź Voivodeship...
and Libiąż
Libiaz
Libiąż is a town in Chrzanów County, Lesser Poland Voivodeship, Poland, with 17,671 inhabitants ....
.
German occupation
The Nazi concentration camp at Jaworzno in Upper SilesiaUpper Silesia
Upper Silesia is the southeastern part of the historical and geographical region of Silesia. Since the 9th century, Upper Silesia has been part of Greater Moravia, the Duchy of Bohemia, the Piast Kingdom of Poland, again of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown and the Holy Roman Empire, as well as of...
was opened on June 15, 1943, as one of many subcamps of the Auschwitz concentration camp
Auschwitz concentration camp
Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...
. The SS
Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...
-Arbeitslager
Arbeitslager
Arbeitslager is a German language word which means labor camp.The German government under Nazism used forced labor extensively, starting in the 1930s but most especially during World War II....
Neu-Dachs (often also called SS-Lager Dachsgrube) provided forced labor for German companies. Inmates were primarily employed in coal mining
Coal mining
The goal of coal mining is to obtain coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its energy content, and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from iron ore and for cement production. In the United States,...
in Jaworzno and the construction of the "Whilhelm" power plant, (later renamed "Jaworzno I"), for Albert Speer
Albert Speer
Albert Speer, born Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer, was a German architect who was, for a part of World War II, Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich. Speer was Adolf Hitler's chief architect before assuming ministerial office...
's company EnergieVersorgung Oberschlesien AG (EVO). Among the builders of the camp were British prisoners of war from the Stalag VIII-B
Stalag VIII-B
Stalag VIII-B Lamsdorf was a notorious German Army prisoner of war camp, later renumbered Stalag-344, located near the small town of Lamsdorf in Silesia. The camp initially occupied barracks built to house British and French prisoners in World War I...
at Lamsdorf (Łambinowice). The SS unit of about 200 to 300 guards was composed of Volksdeutsche
Volksdeutsche
Volksdeutsche - "German in terms of people/folk" -, defined ethnically, is a historical term from the 20th century. The words volk and volkische conveyed in Nazi thinking the meanings of "folk" and "race" while adding the sense of superior civilization and blood...
, (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), 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
Sturmabteilung
The Sturmabteilung functioned as a paramilitary organization of the National Socialist German Workers' Party . It played a key role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s...
), 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
Soviet Air Force
The Soviet Air Force, officially known in Russian as Военно-воздушные силы or Voenno-Vozdushnye Sily and often abbreviated VVS was the official designation of one of the air forces of the Soviet Union. The other was the Soviet Air Defence Forces...
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. 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
Gross-Rosen concentration camp
KL Gross-Rosen was a German concentration camp, located in Gross-Rosen, Lower Silesia . It was located directly on the rail line between Jauer and Striegau .-The camp:...
in Lower Silesia
Lower Silesia
Lower Silesia ; is the northwestern part of the historical and geographical region of Silesia; Upper Silesia is to the southeast.Throughout its history Lower Silesia has been under the control of the medieval Kingdom of Poland, the Kingdom of Bohemia and the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy from 1526...
, including about 300 shot dead in a massacre which occurred on the second night of this death march
Death march
A death march is a forced march of prisoners of war or other captives or deportees. Those marching must walk over long distances for an extremely long period of time and are not supplied with food or water...
(in all, about 9,000 to 15,000 Auschwitz system prisoners died during the marches). The abandoned camp was liberated on January 19, 1945, by the local unit of the Polish resistance
Polish resistance movement in World War II
The Polish resistance movement in World War II, with the Home Army at its forefront, was the largest underground resistance in all of Nazi-occupied Europe, covering both German and Soviet zones of occupation. The Polish defence against the Nazi occupation was an important part of the European...
organization Armia Krajowa
Armia Krajowa
The Armia Krajowa , or Home Army, was the dominant Polish resistance movement in World War II German-occupied Poland. It was formed in February 1942 from the Związek Walki Zbrojnej . Over the next two years, it absorbed most other Polish underground forces...
(AK). Some 350 former prisoners were still alive when the Soviet Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
forces arrived there a week later.
The Stalin era
The camp had served the Soviet NKVDNKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
since February 1945 and then the Ministry of Public Security of Poland
Ministry of Public Security of Poland
The Ministry of Public Security of Poland was a Polish communist secret police, intelligence and counter-espionage service operating from 1945 to 1954 under Jakub Berman of the Politburo...
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
Waffen-SS
The Waffen-SS was a multi-ethnic and multi-national military force of the Third Reich. It constituted the armed wing of the Schutzstaffel or SS, an organ of the Nazi Party. The Waffen-SS saw action throughout World War II and grew from three regiments to over 38 divisions, and served alongside...
) and the Nazi collaborators from all over Poland. Others were local German, Volksdeutsche and Silesian civilians from Jaworzno, nearby Chrzanów
Chrzanów
Chrzanów is a town in south Poland with 39,704 inhabitants . It is situated in the Lesser Poland Voivodeship and is the capital of Chrzanów County.- To 1809:...
and elsewhere, they included women and children. There were also Poles who were arrested for their opposition to Stalinism
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
, 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
Zgoda labour camp
The Zgoda labour camp was a concentration camp for Germans, Silesians and Poles, set up in 1945 by the Soviet NKVD in Świętochłowice, Silesia. It was controlled by the communist secret police until its closure by the Stalinist authorities of Poland in November of the same year.Between 1943 and...
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
Typhus
Epidemic typhus is a form of typhus so named because the disease often causes epidemics following wars and natural disasters...
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, many more than in any other Polish camp (some 4,500 died at the second most-lethal Central Labour Camp Potulice
Central Labour Camp Potulice
Central Labour Camp Potulice was a detention centre for Germans and anti-communist Poles established by Polish Communist authorities after the end of World War II in Potulice, in place of the former German Nazi Potulice concentration camp. The camp was in operation since 1945 until 1950.A total of...
). 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.
Lemkos
Lemkos , one of several quantitatively and territorially small ethnic groups who also call themselves Rusyns , are one of the ethnic groups inhabiting the Carpathian Mountains...
and Ukrainian
Ukrainians
Ukrainians are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Ukraine, which is the sixth-largest nation in Europe. The Constitution of Ukraine applies the term 'Ukrainians' to all its citizens...
prisoners. On April 23, 1947, by a decree of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee
Central Committee
Central Committee was the common designation of a standing administrative body of communist parties, analogous to a board of directors, whether ruling or non-ruling in the twentieth century and of the surviving, mostly Trotskyist, states in the early twenty first. In such party organizations the...
of the Polish Workers' Party
Polish Workers' Party
The Polish Workers' Party was a communist party in Poland from 1942 to 1948. It was founded as a reconstitution of the Communist Party of Poland, and merged with the Polish Socialist Party in 1948 to form the Polish United Workers' Party.-History:...
, COP Jaworzno was selected for the detention of civilians during the Operation Vistula deportation campaign. The first transportation of 17 prisoners from Sanok
Sanok
Sanok is a town in south-eastern Poland with 39,110 inhabitants, as of 2 June 2009. It's the capital of Sanok County in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship. Previously, it was in the Krosno Voivodeship and in the Ruthenian Voivodeship , which was part of the Lesser Poland province...
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
Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church , Ukrainska Hreko-Katolytska Tserkva), is the largest Eastern Rite Catholic sui juris particular church in full communion with the Holy See, and is directly subject to the Pope...
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.
Political prisoner
According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, a political prisoner is ‘someone who is in prison because they have opposed or criticized the government of their own country’....
s. 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
Polish October
Polish October, also known as October 1956, Polish thaw, or Gomułka's thaw, marked a change in the Polish internal political scene in the second half of 1956...
, following a prison rebellion in 1955.
Aftermath
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
Aleksander Kwasniewski
Aleksander Kwaśniewski is a Polish politician who served as the President of Poland from 1995 to 2005. He was born in Białogard, and during communist rule he was active in the Socialist Union of Polish Students and was the Minister for Sport in the communist government in the 1980s...
and Leonid Kuchma
Leonid Kuchma
Leonid Danylovych Kuchma was the second President of independent Ukraine from 19 July 1994, to 23 January 2005. Kuchma took office after winning the 1994 presidential election against his rival, incumbent Leonid Kravchuk...
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.
Literature
Jerzy Zwiastowski and others, Jaworzno: Zarys Dziejów w Latach 1939-1990, Kraków 1996 Kazimierz Miroszewski, Zygmunt Woźniczka, Obóz dwóch totalitaryzmów. Jaworzno 1943-1956, Jaworzno 2007External links
Było takie miejsce..., The Pontifical Academy of TheologyThe Pontifical Academy of Theology
The Pontifical University of John Paul II is an academic institution located in Kraków, Poland, that offers graduate degrees in theology, philosophy, and church history. It derived from the theology faculty of Jagiellonian University established in 1397. The theology faculty was expelled from...
Bogusław Kopka, Polski Gułag, Wprost
Wprost
Wprost is a weekly newsmagazine in Poland. It was founded on December 5, 1982 as a regional magazine in Greater Poland, but since 1989 it has been distributed nationwide. The editorial office is currently located in Warsaw. Wprost is an opinion weekly focused on politics and society. Marek Król is...
, No. 12/2002 (1008) Mateusz Wyrwich, Obóz wyjątkowy, Tygodnik Solidarność
Tygodnik Solidarnosc
Tygodnik Solidarność is Polish conservative newspaper. Started and published by the Solidarity movement on 3 April 1981, it was banned by the People's Republic of Poland following the martial law declaration from 13 December 1981 and the thaw of 1989...
, No. 47/2003 Roman Drozd, Явожно– трагічний символ акції «Вісла», Наше Слово, No. 18, 2004