KL Groß-Rosen : bath house

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The first kommandant of Gross Rosen, Arthur Rödl, commanded all prisoners to be scrupulously clean - somewhat difficult given the conditions that existed in the camp. The bath house shown here was not built until 1943 when Arthur Rödl had been replaced by Wilhelm Gideon as kommandant.

Gross Rosen (Groß-Rosen) was set up in the summer of 1940 as a satellite camp to Sachsenhausen, and became an independent camp on 1 May 1941. Initially, work was carried out in the camp's huge stone quarry, owned by the SS-Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH (SS German Earth and Stone Works) which had been acquired from the private Hay company. Some of the specialist staff of that company were kept on by the SS. As the complex grew, many inmates were put to work in the construction of the subcamps' facilities.

In October 1941 the SS transferred about 3,000 Soviet POWs to Gross-Rosen for murder by shooting.

Gross-Rosen was known for its brutal treatment of NN (Nacht und Nebel) prisoners, especially in the stone quarry. In 1942, for political prisoners, the mean survival time was less than two months.

Due to a change of policy in August 1942, prisoners were likely to survive longer because they were needed as slave workers in German industries.

Among the companies that benefited from the slave labour of the concentration camp inmates were German electronics manufacturers such as Blaupunkt, Osram, Siemens, Dynamit and others. Some prisoners who were not able to work and not yet dying within a few days, were sent to Dachau in so-called invalid transports. One of these, Willem Lodewijk Harthoorn, an inmate from the end of April to mid-August 1942, wrote an account of his experiences, Verboden te sterven (in Dutch, meaning Forbidden to Die). The largest population of inmates, however, were Jews, initially from the Dachau and Sachsenhausen camps, and later from Buchenwald. During the camps existence, the Jewish inmate population came mainly from Poland and Hungary; others were from Belgium, France, Netherlands, Greece, Yugoslavia, Slovakia, and Italy.

At its peak activity in 1944, the Gross-Rosen complex had up to sixty subcamps located in eastern Germany and occupied Poland. In its final stage, the population of the Gross-Rosen camps accounted for 11% of the total inmates in Nazi concentration camps at that time. A total of 125,000 inmates of various nationalities passed through the complex during its existence, of whom an estimated 40,000 died on site and in evacuation transports. The camp was liberated on 14 February 1945, by the Red Army.

A total of over 500 female camp guards were trained and served in the Gross Rosen complex. Female SS staffed the women's subcamps of Brünnlitz, Graeben, Gruenberg, Gruschwitz Neusalz, Hundsfeld, Kratzau II, Oberalstadt, Reichenbach, and Schlesiersee Schanzenbau.

A subcamp of Gross-Rosen situated in the Czech town of Brünnlitz was a location where Jews rescued by Oskar Schindler were interned.

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Education

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• Gruenberg