Stutthof/Sztutowo
Stutthof/Sztutowo
Alternative name
Obozy (camp) was used as a temporary name for the town after the Second World War until it was officially renamed Sztutowo.
Etymology
The name is derived from ‘Stutt’, a stud farm that existed in the village from the end of the 14th century until 1660. The official name ‘Sztutowo’, which has been in use since 12 November 1946, is a phonetic neologism created as a replacement for the German name, with the addition of a Polish suffix.
Location
Approx. 35 km east of Gdańsk, on the Vistula Lagoon (Zalew Wiślany) and the Baltic Sea (54° 20′ north latitude, 19° 11′ east longitude). Near the hamlet of Bodenwinkel/Kąty Rybackie lie a nature reserve home to one of Europe’s largest cormorant colonies, the Vistula Spit/Mierzeja Wiślana nature reserve, pine forests and wide beaches
Political and administrative affiliation
Poland, Pomeranian Voivodeship (Województwo pomorskie), Tiegenhof/Nowy Dwór Gdański District, Sztutowo municipality (gmina).
Common symbolism
The municipal coat of arms, introduced in 1997, depicts a golden or yellow single-masted ship with a white sail on a white-and-blue wave against a blue background.
The municipal flag consists of three horizontal stripes of equal width in the colour sequence blue – gold – blue.
Middle Ages
![Stutthof 1600 [Photo: StA Danzig, 300 PK VII, No. 6; from Muhl 1928, p. 203].](/fileadmin/_processed/f/9/csm_Stutthof_Anno_1600_936f51f320.jpg "Stutthof in the year 1600")
The area now known as Sztutowo was ceded to the German Order by Swantopolk II the Great (before 1195–1266), Duke of Pomerania, under the terms of the Peace Treaty of 1248/49. In the 14th century, the Marienburg Commandery established an Order estate there – known from the 15th century onwards as the ‘Roteshaus’ – as well as a fisheries office and a stud farm (first mentioned in 1387). These estates supplied Marienburg/Malbork with grain, charcoal, horses and fish. The village developed near the Order’s estate and the village inn (from 1432). In return for Gdańsk’s participation on Poland’s side in the Thirteen Years’ War against the German Order, the Polish King Casimir IV the Jagiellon (Kazimierz IV Jagiellończyk, 1427–1492) promised Gdańsk all the Order’s estates in the vicinity of the city. In 1465, peace negotiations between Poland and the German Order took place in Stutthof. On the basis of the Peace of Toruń of 19 October 1466, Gdańsk formally received the territories promised by the Polish king, including Stutthof.
Modern times
Gdańsk became embroiled in a protracted conflict with Elbing/Elbląg over the territories at the mouth of the Vistula, and it was only through the decision of King Alexander the Jagiellon (Aleksander Jagiellończyk, 1461–1506) in 1505 that the two towns reached an agreement, which was formally ratified in Stutthof in 1509. Elbing recognised Gdańsk’s rights to the aforementioned territories and, in return, received privileges for Elbing merchants and fishermen. However, this did not resolve Danzig’s problems regarding ownership rights to estates. In 1505, the Bishop of Warmia, Lucas Watzenrode (1447–1512), laid claim to the territories along the Elbing Vistula (Polish: Wisła Elbląska / Szkarpawa). The conflict was settled in 1530 when the area was purchased from the Ermland Cathedral Chapter for 15,000 marks. The city of Danzig designated the estate at Stutthof as the administrative seat of its representative.
In 1626, the Swedes invaded the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and completely devastated the areas around Gdańsk. After the war ended in 1635, Gdańsk reorganised the administration of its estates and began leasing them out to individuals, whilst the estate at Stutthof remained the administrative centre. Among the tenants were Johann Schopenhauer (?–1661), the great-grandfather of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), and subsequently his maternal grandfather, Christian Heinrich Trosiener (1730–1797). In 1793, following the Second Partition of Poland–Lithuania, Danzig and its estates came under Prussian rule. The areas around the Vistula Lagoon and the Elbing Vistula were completely destroyed during the Great Northern War, the Seven Years’ War and the Napoleonic Wars, when enemy armies were stationed in Stutthof.
In the 19th century, further destruction and crises occurred as a result of a fire in 1804, a cholera epidemic in 1830 and flooding caused by the Vistula in 1813, 1844 and 1886–88.
20th century
From 1905, a narrow-gauge railway linked Stutthof with Danzig. After Danzig was granted the status of a Free City in 1920, Stutthof became a village municipality; as it was situated in the border region, a Polish customs post was established there. The population grew steadily, and Stutthof developed into the largest rural municipality in the Danzig Lowlands district. It was home to a customs office and a post office, a gendarmerie station, a court of arbitration, as well as a doctor’s surgery and a chemist’s.
In the 1930s, a drawbridge over the Königsberg Vistula (Wisła Królewiecka) was opened. Following Hitler’s rise to power, NSDAP structures quickly took shape in Stutthof; as early as October 1933, an NSDAP party cadre school was operating in Stutthof, and in 1934 the seventh company of the 71st SS Standard was stationed there.
Immediately following the annexation of Danzig into the German Reich in September 1939, the Stutthof concentration camp was established; the first prisoners arrived as early as the beginning of September 1939 and were put to work expanding the camp by ten barracks, a process that lasted until early 1940. This section was later referred to as the ‘Old Camp’. The camp was under the control of the local police and SS authorities in Danzig; its first commandant was SS-Hauptsturmführer Max Pauly (1907–1946). In the camp’s early days, the majority of prisoners were Poles from cultural and social circles, as well as members of underground organisations from Gdańsk and Pomerelia/West Prussia. On 7 January 1942, following a visit by Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) (23 November 1941), Stutthof was granted the status of a concentration camp. In the summer of 1942, a crematorium furnace was brought to Stutthof; until then, the dead had been buried in Danzig-Saspe/Zaspa. New prisoners were constantly arriving (including Soviet prisoners of war), even though the camp did not have the capacity to accommodate them.
Between 1942 and 1943, the camp was expanded by a further 30 barracks, ten of which were used as DAW (‘Deutsche Ausrüstungs-Werke’) workshops. In September 1942, SS-Hauptsturmführer Paul Werner Hoppe (1910–1974) became camp commander. By 1944, the camp garrison numbered 800 personnel, including members of the SS. From the very beginning, both direct extermination – executions by hanging or shooting – and indirect extermination were practised – gruelling physical labour beyond human endurance, beatings, starvation and poor hygiene. At the start of 1944, Stutthof’s camp records listed over 37,500 prisoners, of whom only three per cent were Jewish. This situation changed fundamentally from mid-1944 onwards. Owing to the deteriorating situation of the German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, orders were issued for the so-called ‘evacuation’ of Jewish ghettos and camps in the Baltic states, as well as of prisoners from Auschwitz concentration camp, to Stutthof. In the second half of the year, the camp held approximately 49,000 prisoners of Jewish nationality, mainly women, for whom the newly erected ‘Jewish camp’ was intended. During this period, Stutthof concentration camp became an extermination camp.
Jewish transports were sent directly to the gas chamber, and if the victims resisted, they were taken to carriages on a narrow-gauge railway and gassed there. Shootings to the back of the head and phenol injections directly into the heart were also carried out on a massive scale. The inhumane living conditions, including the overcrowding of inmates, starvation rations and the constant physical and psychological abuse, led to the complete exhaustion of the prisoners. Jews were denied any medical care; abused prisoners who were still alive were often thrown into the mortuary alongside the dead. At the end of October 1944, a typhus epidemic broke out in the camp, claiming the lives of almost 3,500 people in December 1944 alone. Sick Jewish women were taken to Block XXX, the so-called ‘Stinksaal’, where they died lying on the frozen ground. As the crematorium could not keep up with the cremation of the many dead, the bodies were piled up into heaps and burnt.
In January 1945, the camp was evacuated, initially on foot in so-called ‘death marches’, whilst several thousand sick prisoners remained behind in the camp. In early April 1945, Hoppe left the camp together with the camp garrison; command was taken over by SS-Hauptsturmführer Paul Ehle (1897–1965). On 25 April, the evacuation by sea began; the last group of prisoners left Stutthof two days later. On 9 May, Soviet troops entered Stutthof.
The estimated number of prisoners at the concentration camp was 110,000, with 85,000 fatalities. Four major trials against the camp staff took place in Poland: in 1946 and 1947, in which six and nine SS members respectively, as well as other officials, were sentenced to death, including Hauptsturmführer Theodor Meyer (1904–1948) and the commander of the ‘Jewish camp’, Oberscharführer Ewald Foth (1908–1948).
Population trends
At the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, Stutthof had a population of around 1,100. In 1924, the rural municipality of Stutthof had 2,600 inhabitants, of whom around 2,000 lived in the village. Almost all residents declared themselves to be of German nationality. After the Second World War, the composition of the village population changed fundamentally as a result of the forced resettlement of the German population and the settlement of Poles, who came mainly from the eastern Polish territories annexed by the USSR.
Economy
The stud farm’s horse breeding was significant in the early days; by the second half of the 16th century, it had a herd of around 300 horses. Alongside crafts and agriculture, the most important sources of income included fishing (sturgeon fishing) and amber extraction. In the 19th century, there were two mills and several taverns (Krüge). Thanks to its picturesque location, Stutthof later developed into a holiday resort.
History of religion
After the Reformation had taken hold in Gdańsk around 1530, the Protestant faith also came to dominate the town’s rural estates; by 1900, almost 88 per cent of the inhabitants of the Gdańsk Lowlands district, to which Stutthof belonged, were Protestant.[1] As Stutthof did not have its own church, the Protestant majority had attended the church in Steegen-Kobbelgrube/Stegna since the 16th century, whilst the Catholics went to the church in Tiegenhagen/Cyganek. In the second half of the 19th century, the Baptist congregation grew; they built their church in Stutthof between 1860 and 1878. After the Second World War, it was taken over by the Catholic Church and consecrated as St Adalbert’s Church in 1947.
Education/School
As early as the 16th century, the residents of Stutthof sent their children to the church school in Kobbelgrube for their education. The earliest records of a school building in Stutthof date from 1702. Due to the steadily growing number of pupils, a second school was built as early as 1819. In 1867, a new brick building was erected, which was extended in 1917.
4. Culture of remembrance
The Stutthof Museum (Muzeum Stutthof w Sztutowie), founded in 1962, covers part of the former camp (approx. 20 ha). Among the most important memorials are the partially preserved Old Camp, the gas chamber and the command post, including the garages. The site also includes reconstructions of the crematoria, the now undeveloped areas of the so-called ‘New Camp’ and the so-called ‘Jewish Camp’, as well as a memorial by Wiktor Tołkin (1922–2013) and a comprehensive camp archive.
5. Discourses and controversies
The court rulings handed down in the Federal Republic of Germany concerning those responsible for the crimes committed at the Stutthof concentration camp are controversial. All the sentences were lighter than those sought by the public prosecutor’s office. The camp commander, SS-Sturmbannführer Paul Werner Hoppe, was sentenced in Bochum in 1957 to just nine years’ imprisonment (initially only five years), of which he served only three, even though the prosecutor had sought a life sentence. Furthermore, no witnesses from Poland took part in the trials, nor were all those responsible whose names had been provided by the Polish authorities extradited; consequently, they did not appear before Polish courts. In particular, the non-commissioned officers were not held to account for their crimes, even though they were directly responsible for the mistreatment of their victims.
The question must also be raised as to the attitude of the local population towards the extermination carried out in the nearby concentration camp. The camp operated for almost six years in the immediate vicinity of the village. As early as 13 September 1939, the *Danziger Vorposten*, the most important Nazi newspaper in Danzig, published a comprehensive report on the construction of a camp for 2,000 men in Stutthof. The report was read by at least several tens of thousands of people. From autumn 1939 onwards, throughout the camp’s entire existence, thousands of prisoners worked on farms, in nearby companies, workshops and factories. During this time, the prisoners constantly came into contact with the local population; at times, they even lived with them. When the camp was expanded in 1944, the camp transports comprised several thousand prisoners, making it impossible not to notice them. What is more, the inhabitants of Stutthof frequently caught escaped prisoners and handed them over to the SS. Members of the SS camp garrison were also present at various village festivities and cultural events; some of them were, in fact, from Stutthof.
Bibliography
- Konrad Ciechanowski et al.: Stutthof – Hitler’s Concentration Camp. Warsaw 1988. German edition: Stutthof – The Concentration Camp. Translated from the Polish by Rita Malcher. Gdańsk 2003.
- Danuta Drywa: Stutthof – Main Camp. In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (eds.): The Place of Terror. History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. Vol. 6: Natzweiler, Groß Rosen, Stutthof. Munich 2007, pp. 475–529.
- Danuta Drywa: The Extermination of the Jews at Stutthof Concentration Camp (September 1939 – May 1945) [The Extermination of the Jews at the Stutthof Concentration Camp (September 1939 – May 1945)]. Gdańsk 2001.
- Krzysztof Dunin-Wąsowicz: The Stutthof Concentration Camp [The Stutthof Concentration Camp]. Gdańsk 1966.
- Hermann Kuhn: Stutthof. A Concentration Camp on the Outskirts of Danzig. 3rd ed. Bremen 2016.
- John Muhl: The History of Stutthof. Danzig 1928 (Sources and Accounts of the History of West Prussia 11; Studies on the History of West Prussian Estates 3).
- Marek Orski: Nazi Crimes at the Stutthof Concentration Camp: The Number of Victims in the Light of Sources and Research: An Attempt at an Assessment [Nazi Crimes at the Stutthof Concentration Camp: Victim Figures in the Light of Sources and Research – An Attempt at an Assessment]. In: Acta Cassubiana, No. 2, 2001, pp. 11–26.
- Marcin Owsiński: Stutthof: History of the Village and Municipality from the Middle Ages to May 1945 [Stutthof: History of the Village and Municipality from the Middle Ages to May 1945]. Sztutowo 2014.
- Marcin Owsiński: Polish Political Prisoners in the Stutthof Camp 1939–1945. Toruń 2001.
Notes
[1] See the relevant findings from the censuses of 1890, 1900 and 1910 in Michael Rademacher: German Administrative History from the Unification of the German Empire in 1871 to Reunification in 1990, 2006: treemagic.org/rademacher/www.verwaltungsgeschichte.de/ (accessed 20 June 2016).
Citation
Jaśmina Korczak-Siedlecka: Stutthof/Sztutowo. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2016. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p43845 (as at 27 September 2021).
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