The 1st of September 1939. After a false accusation that the Poles attacked a
German radio station, Nazi Germany launches a “retaliatory” campaign against Poland triggering
World War 2. Poland finds itself fighting a two front war when it is invaded by the Soviet Union
from the east on the 17th of September. Warsaw officially surrenders to the Germans on the 28th
of September and one day later in accordance with the secret protocol to their non-aggression pact,
Germany and the Soviet Union partition Poland. After defeating the Polish army, the Germans
ruthlessly suppress the Poles whom they consider to be racially inferior and, in the weeks,
following the German attack on Poland, German SS, police, and military units shoot thousands
of Polish civilians, including many members of the Polish nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia.
Approximately 1,8 million Jews remaining within the area occupied by Germany are
imprisoned in ghettos and after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941,
over 3,000,000 Polish Jews are deported to Nazi concentration camps. One such
camp is Stutthof and one of its most infamous guards becomes Wanda Klaff.
Wanda Klaff was born on the 6th of March 1922 as Wanda Kalacinski in Danzig, today’s Gdańsk,
which then belonged to a city state named “The Free City of Danzig”.
Her parents were of German nationality and her father, Ludwig Kalacinski, was a railway worker.
The Free City of Danzig was created following World War I. In the 1919 Treaty of Versailles,
the victorious powers - the United States, Great Britain, France, and other allied states imposed
punitive territorial, military, and economic treaty terms on the defeated Germany. One
provision required Germany to cede West Prussia including Danzig to the newly reconstructed state
of Poland which was given certain rights pertaining to port facilities in the city.
Danzig, largely an ethnically German city, became a "free city" under the
protection of the League of Nations but with special administrative ties to Poland.
The League of the Nations was the first worldwide intergovernmental organization
whose principal mission was to maintain world peace.
However, Germany resented the loss of this largely German city and after
Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power in January 1933,
he was determined to overturn the military and territorial provisions of the Versailles treaty.
After in May 1933 the Nazi Party became the leading power in Danzig, anti-Polish sentiment
increased and both Germanisation and segregation policies intensified. Political opposition
to the Nazis was repressed with several politicians being imprisoned and murdered.
The rights of local Poles were commonly violated and limited by the local administration. 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.
In 1935 the Jewish community of Danzig turned to the League of Nations for help,
but by that time the organization was too weak to have enough influence.
From 1937, the employment of Poles by German companies was prohibited,
and already employed Poles were fired. The use of Polish in public places was banned
and the Poles were not allowed to enter several restaurants, in particular those owned by Germans.
After the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, which was a series of coordinated
violent riots against the Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently incorporated territories,
the Nuremberg Race Laws were put into effect, with just a few changes. As the anti-Jewish
legislation became more severe, most of the Jews of Danzig emigrated, leaving only 4,000.
The Jewish community and the government decided to cooperate with regard to Jewish emigration, and on
the 17th of December 1938, the Jews announced publicly that they were willing to leave.
When the war broke out on the 1st of September 1939 the Polish military forces in the city held
out until the 7th of September. Up to 4,500 members of the Polish minority were arrested
with many of them executed. In the city itself hundreds of Polish prisoners were subjected
to cruel executions and experiments, which included castration of men and sterilization
of women considered dangerous to the "purity of Nordic race" and beheading by guillotine.
The judicial system was one of the main tools of extermination policy towards Poles
led by Nazi Germany in the city and verdicts were motivated by statements that Poles were subhuman.
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 original camp, known as the old camp, was
surrounded by barbed-wire fences and 8 barracks for the inmates built by prisoners in 1940.
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.
Even before the war, the Germans had created lists of people to be arrested, and the Nazi authorities
were secretly reviewing suitable places to set up concentration camps in their area.
Originally, Stutthof was a civilian internment camp under the Danzig police chief, before its
subsequent massive expansion. In November 1941, it became a "labor education" camp
for political prisoners and persons accused of violating labor discipline, administered by the
SD - German Security Police. Finally, in January 1942, Stutthof became a regular concentration
camp under the jurisdiction of the SS. In 1943, the camp was enlarged and a new
camp was constructed alongside the earlier one. It contained 30 new barracks and was
surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences. A crematorium and gas chamber were added in 1943,
just in time to start mass executions when Stutthof was included in the "Final Solution"
in June 1944. The maximum capacity of the gas chamber was 150 people per execution.
Eventually, the Stutthof camp system became a vast network of forced-labor camps. 105
Stutthof subcamps were established throughout northern and central German-occupied Poland.
Tens of thousands of people, perhaps as many as 100,000, were deported to the Stutthof
camp. The prisoners were mainly non-Jewish Poles. Conditions in the camp were brutal.
Many prisoners died in typhus epidemics that swept the camp in the winter of 1942 and again
in 1944. Those whom the SS guards judged too weak or sick to work were gassed in the gas
chamber. Gassing with Zyklon B gas began in June 1944. 4,000 prisoners, including Jewish
women and children, were killed in a gas chamber before the evacuation of the camp.
Camp doctors also killed sick or injured prisoners in the infirmary with lethal
injections of phenol. More than 60,000 people died in Stutthof concentration camp and its subcamps.
Until 1942, nearly all of the prisoners were Polish. The number of inmates increased
considerably in 1944, with Jews forming a significant proportion of the newcomers.
The first contingent of 2,500 Jewish prisoners arrived from Auschwitz in July 1944. In total,
23,566 Jews including 21,817 women were transferred to Stutthof from Auschwitz.
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.
The evacuation of prisoners from the Stutthof camp system in northern Poland began in January 1945.
When the final evacuation began, there were nearly 50,000 prisoners in the Stutthof camp system, the
overwhelming majority of them Jews. About 5,000 prisoners from Stutthof subcamps were marched to
the Baltic Sea coast, forced into the water, and machine gunned. The rest of the prisoners
were marched in the direction of Lauenburg in eastern Germany but after they were cut off by
advancing Soviet forces, the Germans forced the surviving prisoners back to Stutthof. Marching in
severe winter conditions and treated brutally by the SS guards, thousands died during the march.
In late April 1945, the remaining prisoners were removed from Stutthof by sea, since Stutthof was
completely encircled by Soviet forces. Again, hundreds of prisoners were forced into the sea
and shot. It has been estimated that over 25,000 prisoners, one in two, died during the evacuation
from Stutthof and its subcamps. When Soviet forces liberated Stutthof on the 9th of May 1945, they
found only about 100 prisoners who had managed to hide during the final evacuation of the camp.
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. After World War II, only three public executions of war
criminals were carried out in Poland. One of them took place at Biskupia Górka Hill near Gdańsk,
former Danzig. When on the 4th of July 1946, 11 Nazi Criminals from the Stutthof concentration
camp including Wanda Klaff were hanged from the gallows, 200,000 people were watching.
On that day Biskupia Górka Hill experienced a real siege. Three days earlier,
the newspapers had reported the date of the execution. Workplaces announced a day off and
provided employees with transport to the event. Everyone could come to witness the execution.
The security forces feared that a lynching might occur at any
moment and the militia and the army had difficulty controlling the huge crowd.
The 4th of July was very warm, the sun was shining.
Punctually at 5 PM, eleven open trucks brought the prisoners to the execution ground,
their hands and legs tied with cords. On the platform of each of the eleven trucks stood
a convict, six men and five women in total. The trucks were backed under the gallows and
the condemned made to stand on the tailboards or on the chairs on which they had been sitting.
Former Stutthof prisoners, dressed in striped uniforms, volunteered to serve
as executioners and put a simple cord noose around convicts’ necks. Unlike the other
four Stutthof female guards, Wanda Klaff, then 24 years old, was hanged by a woman.
The execution was planned in such a way that after each truck would be driven forward,
the 11 convicts were left suspended, and their bodies would not fall from
too great a height. As a result, the nooses did not break their necks and did not cause
an instant death. This short-drop method of hanging resulted in a torturous death
by strangulation of each of the criminals lasting anywhere from 10 to 20 long minutes.
When the driver of the first truck carrying Johann Pauls, former commandant of the guards
in Stutthof, started the engine and moved slowly forward, Pauls,
before sliding off the platform and hanging on the rope, managed to shout "Heil Hitler!". He was
answered by the insults of the crowd. As Pauls' body went still, another truck started moving
and another criminal began what those present at the execution described as a "rope dance".
As the trucks moved, the other convicts had the opportunity to take a good look
at what awaited them in a few moments. When one truck driver failed to start
the engine several times, the former Stutthof prisoner pushed the convict off the platform.
The crowd waved and the people shouted "For our husbands, for our children".
When the last convict died, the security forces allowed the crowd to the gallows.
People ripped off buttons, cut off pieces of fabric and kicked and smashed corpses.
The gathered people were then chased away, and the bodies were removed from the gallows. They were
then taken to the Medical University of Gdańsk to be used as a teaching aid in anatomy classes.
There were no tears shed for Wanda Klaff.
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