Nazi Crimes Against Ethnic Poles - Concentration Camps

Concentration Camps

Main article: Nazi concentration camps See also: German camps in occupied Poland during World War II

Hundreds of thousands of Poles were prisoners in the extensive concentration camp system in German-occupied Poland and the Reich. An estimated 30,000 Poles died at Mauthausen-Gusen; 150 000 at Auschwitz, 20,000 each at Sachsenhausen and Gross-Rosen; 17,000 at Neuengamme and 10,000 at Dachau. About 17,000 Polish women died at Ravensbrück. A major concentration camp complex at Stutthof, east of Gdańsk, existed from September 2, 1939, to the end of the war, where an estimated 20,000 Poles died. Many Poles died in Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin. In addition, tens of thousands of Polish people were executed or found their deaths in the dozens of other camps, prisons and other places of detention inside and outside Poland. There were even special camps for children such as the Potulice concentration camp. According to some modern research, in the years 1943–1944, the Warsaw concentration camp was used as a death camp in an attempt to depopulate the Polish capital Warsaw.

Auschwitz became the main concentration camp for Poles on June 14, 1940. By March 1941, 10,900 prisoners were registered at the camp, most of them gentile Poles. In September 1941, 200 ailing prisoners, most of them Poles, along with 650 Soviet POWs, were killed in the first Zyklon-B gassing experiments. Beginning in 1942, Auschwitz's prisoner population became much more diverse, as Jews and other "enemies of the state" from all over German-occupied Europe were deported to the expanding camp. Franciszek Piper, the chief historian of Auschwitz, estimates that 140,000 to 150,000 Poles were brought to that camp between 1940 and 1945, and that 70,000 to 75,000 died there as victims of executions, human experimentation, starvation and disease.