The artifacts were scattered across hundreds of square yards and in some places, up to a foot deep. There were pairs of shoes, including children’s shoes, belts and remnants of the striped pajamas prisoners wore as uniforms.
According to the UK Telegraph, one witness told the TVN 24 television news network, “It’s disturbing, and it safe to say there are hundreds of square meters of forest carpeted with the soles and other bits of shoes.”
“I’ve been working here 30 years and none of the employees have ever heard of these items lying in the forest near the museum,” said Danuta Drywa, head of archives at the museum. “There are items that may have belonged to concentration camp prisoners.”
Drywa added that specialized testing would be needed to determine exactly what kinds of shoes they are, how old they are and what country they came from. But from all indications, the items are what is suspected, shoes, belts and clothing pieces that have been resting on the forest floor, waiting to be found, since the 1940s.
There are questions about why the artifacts had not been noticed before now by either museum staff or the Polish authorities. One possible explanation could be because the museum only occupies a very small part of what had been the concentration camp. Not only that, but the camp expanded and contracted in size, depending on the needs of the manufacturers who used the prisoners for slave labor.
Stutthof concentration camp opens
Before the invasion of Poland, dating back to 1936, German authorities in the Free City of Danzig had been making plans for the establishment of a camp to take care of “undesirable Polish elements.” Police officials compiled lists and other documents that were used in 1939 to arrest at least 1,500 Poles thought to be the worst enemies to Nazi Germany.
They also needed a detention camp, so in July 1939, a special SS troop was established called “Wachsturmbann Eimann,” whose main objective was to find sites for detention camps. By the middle of August that year, the site for the camp was selected. It was to be built in a secluded, wet, and wooded area near the small town of Sztutowo, about 21 miles from the Free City of Danzig.
On September 2, 1939, 150 of the 1,500 arrested Poles were sent to the Stutthof detention camp, then under the authority of the Danzig police chief, and housed in a number of buildings already on the site. It wasn’t until 1940 that the actual barracks were built by enslaved prisoners in special commando units. Stutthof has the unsavory distinction of being the first concentration camp to be built outside Germany and the last one to be liberated on May 9, 1945.
Of the over 110,000 Jewish and Polish prisoners sent to Stutthof, over 85,000 lost their lives. According to historical documents, while the first 150 prisoners arrived at the camp on Sept. 2, by Sept. 15, there were 6,000 prisoners. Most of them were shot by the S.S.
Based on the Nazi’s original plans, the camp was set up as an extermination camp for the “most aware and patriotic” of the Polish population in the Danzig and Pomorze Regions. However, by November of 1941, it was turned into a “labor education” camp, under the jurisdiction of the German Security Police. As a historical note, the German Security Police was the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party. It was the intention of this group to bring every individual within the Third Reich’s reach under “continuous supervision.”
By 1942, Stutthof had become a “regular” concentration camp and underwent a big expansion. In 1943, crematoriums and gas chambers were added, requiring an additional expansion for the mass executions that were to follow. Finally, in June 1944, Stutthof became a key player in the “Final Solution.” Because the gas chambers at Stutthof only accommodated 150 people at a time, a specialized product of the Third Reich, mobile gas wagons were also used.
The prisoners of Stutthof concentration camp
The 110,000 men, women, and children imprisoned by the Nazis in Stutthof concentration camp came from 28 countries, representing over 30 nationalities. Among them were Poles, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, White Russians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Czechs, Slovaks, Finns, Norwegians, French, Danes, Dutch, Belgs, Germans, Austrians, English, Spanish, Italians, Yugoslavs, Hungarians, and Gypsies.
These people endured forms of extreme extermination from slave-like work, malnutrition, terrible sanitation, disease, and mental and physical torture. This was in addition to the hanging, shooting and being gassed in the gas chambers, or the injections of phenol into the heart, or being driven into the Baltic Sea and then being shot.
The 70-year-old artifacts discovered in the nearby forest in Poland are more than “things.” They are a lasting reminder of man’s inhumanity to others. They are a reminder of the extent one group of people will go to eradicate another group just because they practice a different religion, are mentally disabled, or just don’t “look like us.” Yes, they are only pieces of shoes, leather belts and old prisoner uniforms, but those inanimate pieces of scrap were worn by people.
