Jürgen Graf - Concentration Camp Stutthof : its history & function in National Socialist Jewish policy

Literature on Stutthof that is of any scientific value exists only in Poland. We will return to this Polish literature repeatedly in the present text, but, at this point, we draw the attention of the reader to the fact that this literature is heavily influenced by propaganda and is quite unreliable on decisive points.

The anthology Stutthof hitlerowksi obz koncentracyjny The Stutthof Memorial Site also publishes a periodical bearing the title Stutthof. Zeszyty Muzeum ( Stutthof. Paper of the Museum , hereafter referred to as SZM). The periodical is only concerned with events in the camp.

Polish historiography maintains that Stutthof became a makeshift extermination camp for Jews in 1944. A summary of the orthodox version was published in 1967 in the periodical of the Jewish Historical Institute located in Warsaw:

In the spring and summer of 1944, the character of Stutthof changed fundamentally; it was no longer simply a concentration camp, but simultaneously an extermination camp for tens of thousands of Jews, especially Jewish women. [] The victorious offensive of the Soviet Army forced the Hitlerites to evacuate the concentration camp and prisons in the territory of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. In connection with this, various concentration camps such as Riga-Kaiserwald, Kaunas-Prosidniszki, and a few others, were dissolved in 1944. This led to a massive transfer of prisoners of Russian, Belo-Russians, Latvian, and Lithuanian nationality, as well as many thousands of Latvian, and Lithuanian Jews, to Stutthof. Furthermore, the liquidation of Hungarian Jews that was occurring at Auschwitz at that time exceeded the capacity of Auschwitz camp. Thousands of Hungarian Jews were now sent to Stutthof and its subsidiary camps.

According to the Polish historical literature, many mostly Jewish Stutthof inmates were murdered with poison gas beginning in June or July of 1944. This allegation is also contained in several works of western Holocaust literature; namely, the anthology Nationalsozialistische Massenttungen durch Giftgas

And yet there are other historians even those who maintain the reality of a systematic extermination of Jews in the Third Reich who make no claim of any extermination of human beings at Stutthof concentration camp. Raul Hilbergs 1300-page standard work on the Holocaust make any claim of homicidal gassings at Stutthof.