...As a result, Polish children were refused admission to public Polish-language schools and premises were not allowed to be rented to Polish schools and preschools. Due to such policies, only 8 Polish-language public schools existed in the city, and the Poles managed to organize 7 more private Polish schools. However, in 1937, Poles who sent their children to private Polish schools were demanded to transfer children to German schools, under threat of police intervention, and attacks were carried out on Polish schools and Polish youth.
When Danzig united with Germany in September 1939, only 1,600 Jews were left in the city. Emigration continued until the fall of 1940 and at the end of February 1941, the city's remaining 600 Jews were deported to their deaths in Poland.
In September 1939, the Germans established the Stutthof camp in a wooded area west of Stutthof, a town about 22 miles east of Danzig.
The camp was established in connection with the ethnic cleansing project that included the liquidation of Polish elites such as members of the intelligentsia as well as religious and political leaders.
The camp staff consisted of SS guards and, after 1943, Ukrainian auxiliaries.
The SS in Stutthof began conscripting women from Danzig and the surrounding cities in June 1944, to train as camp guards because of their severe shortage after the women's subcamp of Stutthof called Bromberg-Ost was set up in the city of Bydgoszcz. One such woman became Wanda Kalacinski. After she finished school in 1938, Wanda worked in a jam factory until 1942. The same year she married Willy Klaff and became a housewife and then a tram conductor. This changed in 1944 when she became a guard in Praust, the subcamp of the Stutthof.
She held the same position at Russoschin, another Stutthof's subcamp, where she arrived on the 5th of October 1944. In both camps Klaff became infamous for her brutal treatment of prisoners whom she would beat and kick without any reason at all until they lay still. When she was in particularly bad mood, she would drown the female inmates in mud or club them to death.
Wanda Klaff had escaped from the camp in early 1945. In June of the same year, she was arrested at her parents' home and soon after, she fell ill from typhoid fever in prison.
Klaff was then tried at the First Stutthof trial which began on the 25th of April 1946. During the trial she said: "I am very intelligent and I was very devoted to my work in the camps. I struck at least two prisoners every day." Having made this statement, she was probably the only one to think so.
The trial ended on the 31st of May and Wanda Klaff was sentenced to death by hanging.
Her execution was held publicly and became a theater of horror which was recorded by official press photographers.
When Danzig united with Germany in September 1939, only 1,600 Jews were left in the city. Emigration continued until the fall of 1940 and at the end of February 1941, the city's remaining 600 Jews were deported to their deaths in Poland.
In September 1939, the Germans established the Stutthof camp in a wooded area west of Stutthof, a town about 22 miles east of Danzig.
The camp was established in connection with the ethnic cleansing project that included the liquidation of Polish elites such as members of the intelligentsia as well as religious and political leaders.
The camp staff consisted of SS guards and, after 1943, Ukrainian auxiliaries.
The SS in Stutthof began conscripting women from Danzig and the surrounding cities in June 1944, to train as camp guards because of their severe shortage after the women's subcamp of Stutthof called Bromberg-Ost was set up in the city of Bydgoszcz. One such woman became Wanda Kalacinski. After she finished school in 1938, Wanda worked in a jam factory until 1942. The same year she married Willy Klaff and became a housewife and then a tram conductor. This changed in 1944 when she became a guard in Praust, the subcamp of the Stutthof.
She held the same position at Russoschin, another Stutthof's subcamp, where she arrived on the 5th of October 1944. In both camps Klaff became infamous for her brutal treatment of prisoners whom she would beat and kick without any reason at all until they lay still. When she was in particularly bad mood, she would drown the female inmates in mud or club them to death.
Wanda Klaff had escaped from the camp in early 1945. In June of the same year, she was arrested at her parents' home and soon after, she fell ill from typhoid fever in prison.
Klaff was then tried at the First Stutthof trial which began on the 25th of April 1946. During the trial she said: "I am very intelligent and I was very devoted to my work in the camps. I struck at least two prisoners every day." Having made this statement, she was probably the only one to think so.
The trial ended on the 31st of May and Wanda Klaff was sentenced to death by hanging.
Her execution was held publicly and became a theater of horror which was recorded by official press photographers.
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:00The 1st of September, 1939.
00:09After a false accusation that the Poles attacked a German radio station, Nazi Germany launches
00:14a retaliatory campaign against Poland, triggering World War II.
00:19Poland finds itself fighting a two-front war when it's invaded by the Soviet Union from
00:23the East on the 17th of September.
00:26Warsaw officially surrenders to the Germans on the 28th of September, and one day later,
00:31in accordance with a secret protocol to their non-aggression pact, Germany and the Soviet
00:35Union partition Poland.
00:38After defeating the Polish army, the Germans ruthlessly suppress the Poles, whom they consider
00:43to be racially inferior, and in the weeks following the German attack on Poland, German
00:47SS, police, and military units shoot thousands of Polish civilians, including many members
00:53of the Polish nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia.
00:58Approximately 1.8 million Jews remaining within the area occupied by Germany are imprisoned
01:03in ghettos, and after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, over 3 million
01:09Polish Jews are deported to Nazi concentration camps.
01:13One such camp is Stutthof, and one of its most infamous guards becomes Wunderklopf.
01:20Wunderklopf was born on the 6th of March, 1922, as Wunder Kalachinsky in Danzig, today's
01:27Gdansk, which then belonged to a city-state named the Free City of Danzig.
01:32Her parents were of German nationality, and her father Ludwig Kalachinsky was a railway
01:37worker.
01:38The Free City of Danzig was created following World War I.
01:42In the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the victorious powers, the United States, Great Britain,
01:48France, and other allied states imposed punitive territorial, military, and economic treaty
01:53terms on the defeated Germany.
01:56One provision required Germany to cede West Prussia, including Danzig, to the newly reconstructed
02:01state of Poland, which was given certain rights pertaining to port facilities in the city.
02:06Danzig, largely an ethnically German city, became a free city under the protection of
02:11the League of Nations, but with special administrative ties to Poland.
02:16The League of Nations was the first worldwide intergovernmental organization whose principal
02:20mission was to maintain world peace.
02:23However, Germany resented the loss of this largely German city, and after Adolf Hitler
02:27and his Nazi party came into power in January 1933, he was determined to overturn the military
02:33and territorial provisions of the Versailles Treaty.
02:37After, in May 1933, the Nazi party became the leading power in Danzig, anti-Polish sentiment
02:43increased and both Germanization and segregation policies intensified.
02:49Political opposition to the Nazis was repressed with several politicians being imprisoned
02:53and murdered.
02:54The rights of local Poles were commonly violated and limited by the local administration.
02:59As a result, Polish children were refused admission to public Polish-language schools
03:04and premises were not allowed to be rented to Polish schools and preschools.
03:09Due to such policies, only eight Polish-language public schools existed in the city, and the
03:14Poles managed to organize seven more private Polish schools.
03:17However, in 1937, Poles who sent their children to private Polish schools were demanded to
03:22transfer their children to German schools, under the threat of police intervention, and
03:27attacks were carried out on Polish schools and Polish youth.
03:31In 1935, the Jewish community of Danzig turned to the League of Nations for help, but by
03:36that time, the organization was too weak to have enough influence.
03:40From 1937, the employment of Poles by German companies was prohibited and already employed
03:46Poles were fired.
03:48The use of Polish in public places was banned and the Poles were not allowed to enter several
03:52restaurants, in particular those owned by Germans.
03:56After the Kristallnacht Pogrom of November 1938, which was a series of coordinated violent
04:01riots against the Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently incorporated territories, the
04:06Nuremberg Race Laws were put into effect with just a few changes.
04:11As the anti-Jewish legislation became more severe, most of the Jews of Danzig emigrated,
04:16leaving only 4,000.
04:18The Jewish community and the government decided to cooperate with regard to Jewish emigration
04:23and on the 17th of December 1938, the Jews announced publicly that they were willing
04:28to leave.
04:30When the war broke out on the 1st of September 1939, the Polish military forces in the city
04:36held out until the 7th of September.
04:39Up to 4,500 members of the Polish minority were arrested, with many of them executed.
04:44In the city itself, hundreds of Polish prisoners were subjected to cruel executions and experiments,
04:50which included castration of men and sterilization of women considered dangerous to the purity
04:55of Nordic race and beheading by guillotine.
04:59The judicial system was one of the main tools of extermination policy towards Poles led
05:03by Nazi Germany in the city and verdicts were motivated by statements that Poles were subhuman.
05:09When Danzig united with Germany in September 1939, only 1,600 Jews were left in the city.
05:17Emigration continued until the fall of 1940 and at the end of February 1941, the city's
05:22remaining 600 Jews were deported to their deaths in Poland.
05:27In September 1939, the Germans established the Stutthof camp in a wooded area west of
05:32Stutthof, a town about 22 miles east of Danzig.
05:36The original camp, known as the Old Camp, was surrounded by barbed wire fences and eight
05:41barracks for the inmates built by prisoners in 1940.
05:45The camp was established in connection with the Ethnic Cleansing Project that included
05:49the liquidation of Polish elites such as members of the intelligentsia as well as religious
05:54and political leaders.
05:55Even before the war, the Germans had created lists of people to be arrested and the Nazi
06:00authorities were secretly reviewing suitable places to set up concentration camps in their
06:05area.
06:06Originally, Stutthof was a civilian internment camp under the Danzig police chief before
06:11its subsequent massive expansion.
06:13In November 1941, it became a labor education camp for political prisoners and persons accused
06:19of violating labor discipline administered by the SD, German security police.
06:24Finally, in January 1942, Stutthof became a regular concentration camp under the jurisdiction
06:30of the SS.
06:32In 1943, the camp was enlarged and a new camp was constructed alongside the earlier one.
06:38It contained 30 new barracks and was surrounded by electrified barbed wire fences.
06:43A crematorium and gas chamber were added in 1943, just in time to start mass executions
06:49when Stutthof was included in the final solution in June 1944.
06:54The maximum capacity of the gas chamber was 150 people per execution.
06:59Eventually, the Stutthof camp system became a vast network of forced labor camps.
07:04105 Stutthof sub-camps were established throughout northern and central German-occupied Poland.
07:10Tens of thousands of people, perhaps as many as 100,000, were deported to the Stutthof
07:15camp.
07:16The prisoners were mainly non-Jewish Poles.
07:20Conditions in the camp were brutal.
07:22Many prisoners died in typhus epidemics that swept the camp in the winter of 1942 and again
07:27in 1944.
07:29Those whom the SS guards judged too weak or sick to work were gassed in the gas chamber.
07:35Gassing with Zyklon B gas began in June 1944.
07:384,000 prisoners, including Jewish women and children, were killed in a gas chamber before
07:44the evacuation of the camp.
07:46Camp doctors also killed sick or injured prisoners in the infirmary with lethal injections of
07:51phenol.
07:52More than 60,000 people died in Stutthof concentration camp and its sub-camps.
07:58Until 1942, nearly all of the prisoners were Polish.
08:02The number of inmates increased considerably in 1944, with Jews forming a significant proportion
08:07of the newcomers.
08:09The first contingent of 2,500 Jewish prisoners arrived from Auschwitz in July 1944.
08:16In total, 23,566 Jews, including 21,817 women, were transferred to Stutthof from Auschwitz.
08:26The camp staff consisted of SS guards and, after 1943, Ukrainian auxiliaries.
08:32The SS in Stutthof began conscripting women from Danzig and the surrounding cities in
08:37June 1944 to train as camp guards because of their severe shortage after the women's
08:42of Stutthof, called Bromberg Ost, were set up in the city of Bydgoszcz.
08:47One such woman became Wanda Kaleciński.
08:50After she finished school in 1938, Wanda worked in a jam factory until 1942.
08:57The same year, she married Willi Klaff and became a housewife and then a tram conductor.
09:03This changed in 1944 when she became a guard in Proust, the sub-camp of Stutthof.
09:08She held the same position at Drusocin, another Stutthof sub-camp, where she arrived on the
09:135th of October 1944.
09:15In both camps, Klaff became infamous for her brutal treatment of prisoners, whom she would
09:20beat and kick without any reason at all until they lay still.
09:25When she was in a particularly bad mood, she would drown the female inmates in mud or club
09:30them to death.
09:32The evacuation of prisoners from the Stutthof camp system in northern Poland began in January
09:371945.
09:39When the final evacuation began, there were nearly 50,000 prisoners in the Stutthof camp
09:43system, the overwhelming majority of them Jews.
09:47About 5,000 prisoners from the Stutthof sub-camps were marched to the Baltic Sea coast, forced
09:52into the water and machine-gunned.
09:55The rest of the prisoners were marched in the direction of Lauenburg, in eastern Germany,
10:00but after they were cut off by advancing Soviet forces, the Germans forced the surviving prisoners
10:05back to Stutthof.
10:07Being in severe winter conditions and treated brutally by the SS guards, thousands died
10:12during the march.
10:14In late April 1945, the remaining prisoners were removed from Stutthof by sea, since Stutthof
10:19was completely encircled by Soviet forces.
10:22Again, hundreds of prisoners were forced into the sea and shot.
10:27It has been estimated that over 25,000 prisoners, one in two, died during the evacuation from
10:33Stutthof and its sub-camps.
10:35When Soviet forces liberated Stutthof on the 9th of May 1945, they found only about 100
10:42prisoners who had managed to hide during the final evacuation of the camp.
10:46Wanda Klaff had escaped from the camp in early 1945.
10:50In June of the same year, she was arrested at her parents' home and soon after she
10:54fell ill from typhoid fever in prison.
10:58Klaff was then tried at the first Stutthof trial, which began on the 25th of April 1946.
11:04During the trial, she said,
11:06"...I am very intelligent and I was very devoted to my work in the camps.
11:10I struck at least two prisoners every day."
11:14Having made this statement, she was probably the only one to think so.
11:18The trial ended on the 31st of May and Wanda Klaff was sentenced to death by hanging.
11:24Her execution was held publicly and became a theatre of horror, which was recorded by
11:29official press photographers.
11:31After World War II, only three public executions of war criminals were carried out in Poland.
11:37One of them took place at Biskupia Górka Hill near Gdansk, former Danzig.
11:43When on the 4th of July 1946, eleven Nazi criminals from the Stutthof concentration
11:48camp, including Wanda Klaff, were hanged from the gallows, 200,000 people were watching.
11:55On that day, Biskupia Górka Hill experienced a real siege.
12:00Three days earlier, the newspapers had reported the date of the execution.
12:05Workplaces announced a day off and provided employees with transport to the event.
12:10Everyone could come to witness the execution.
12:13The security forces feared that a lynching might occur at any moment and the militia
12:18and the army had difficulty controlling the huge crowd.
12:21The 4th of July was very warm, the sun was shining.
12:25Punctually at 5pm, eleven open trucks brought the prisoners to the execution ground, their
12:30hands and legs tied with cords.
12:33On the platform of each of the eleven trucks stood a convict, six men and five women in
12:39total.
12:40The trucks were backed under the gallows and the condemned made to stand on the tailboards
12:45or on the chairs on which they had been sitting.
12:48Former Stutthof prisoners, dressed in striped uniforms, volunteered to serve as executioners
12:53and put a simple cord noose around the convicts' necks.
12:56Unlike the other four Stutthof female guards, Wunder Klaff, then 24 years old, was hanged
13:01by a woman.
13:03The execution was planned in such a way that after each truck would be driven forward,
13:08the eleven convicts were left suspended and their bodies would not fall from too great
13:12a height.
13:13As a result, the nooses did not break their necks and did not cause an instant death.
13:19This short-drop method of hanging resulted in a torturous death by strangulation of each
13:24of the criminals, lasting anywhere from ten to twenty long minutes.
13:29When the driver of the first truck, Karin Johann Pauls, former commandant of the guards
13:33in Stutthof, started the engine and moved slowly forward, Pauls, before sliding off
13:38the platform and hanging on the rope, managed to shout,
13:41Heil Hitler!
13:42He was answered by the insults of the crowd.
13:45As Pauls' body went still, another truck started moving and another criminal began
13:50what those present at the execution described as a rope dance.
13:54As the trucks moved, the other convicts had the opportunity to take a good look at what
13:59awaited them in a few moments.
14:02When one truck driver failed to start the engine several times, a former Stutthof prisoner
14:06pushed the convict off the platform.
14:09The crowd waved and the people shouted,
14:11For our husbands!
14:13For our children!
14:15When the last convict died, the security forces allowed the crowd to the gallows.
14:20People ripped off buttons, cut off pieces of fabric and kicked and smashed the corpses.
14:26The gathered people were then chased away and the bodies were removed from the gallows.
14:30They were then taken to the Medical University of Gdansk to be used as a teaching aid in
14:34anatomy classes.
14:37There were no tears shed for Wunderkloff.
14:45For more UN videos visit www.un.org