Franz Smaka & Stutthof Concentration Camp

“I am the Polish manor house, which fights bravely and loyally stands on guard,” was written above the entrance to a manor in Pęcice in the Masovian region. This short sentence, like no other, seems to contain the key to the importance of the manors of the Polish noble and landed gentry.1a

Franz Smaka was born 29 Jun 1895, His father was August Smaka and his mother, Eva. He married Marie Helena Krause on 14 Nov 1916 in Koninsberg; we have yet to discover if they had any children; obtaining Polish records is difficult and, in a language, I cannot read. We know he was a landowner from the papers provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Polish manor houses were built on strategically significant land and built originally for the servants of the King, knights. Later as residences, manor houses were always a place for the cultivation of family traditions, noble culture, customs and the fight for the Polish identity. For the landed gentry, these estates were not just a farm to sustain and provide for themselves. Although they were focused on agricultural production, the manor house was also a family home, in most cases an ancestral seat held for many generations. The manor houses were an enduring hub of independence from the invaders in the 19th century. Poland and Prussia evolved under the Prussian, Austrian and Russian partitions, but it was the landed gentry’s manor houses that maintained distinct cultural traditions that were handed down. Manor Houses ensured that Poles were not deprived of their national identity, for they were also valuable repositories of historical artifacts and objects, works of art and libraries in almost every house. Eventually the architectural style of the local manor house was reproduced in community facilities, churches, train depots, banks and schools. The influence of landowners’ celebration customs in cuisine, drink, dress were replicated and accepted in the local community building area identity bonds.

After WWI, the number of landowners amounted to 0.7% of the entire country’s population, around 250,000. There were about 20,000 manors, palaces and castles in 1939, including one-story mansions about 16,000. 1c When Germany came to power in 1939, their initiatives included land grabs for German citizens. Any German willing to transport their family with the carrot of free land just had to raise their hand. The owners of land and the manor houses were early targets of the Third Riech.

Kristallnacht attack on Synagogue

On 9–10 November 1938, the Kristallnacht attack was carried out by the Nazi paramilitary forces; thousands of Jews holding Polish citizenship were rounded up and sent via rail to the Polish border and to the Nazi concentration camps. The round-up included 2,000 ethnic Poles living and working there. Three days prior, the first mass deportation of Polish nationals from Nazi Germany began with the eviction of Jews who settled in Germany with Polish passports. Before the invasion of Poland, the Nazis prepared a detailed list identifying more than 61,000 Polish targets (mostly civilian) by name, with the help of the Germans working and living in Poland. In total, about 150,000 to 200,000 Poles lost their lives during the one-month September Campaign of 1939, based on the published Special Prosecution list of influential Poles. Massive air raids were conducted on Polish towns which had no military infrastructure. Over 156 towns and villages were attacked by the Luftwaffe in 1939. Warsaw suffered particularly severely with a combination of aerial bombardment and artillery fire reducing large parts of the historic centre to rubble with more than 60,000 casualties. (3)

On 7 September 1939, Reinhard Heydrich stated that all Polish nobles, clergy, and Jews were to be murdered. On 12 September, Wilhelm Keitel added Poland’s intellectuals to the list. On 15 March 1940, SS chief Heinrich Himmler stated: “All Polish specialists will be exploited in our military-industrial complex. Later, all Poles will disappear from this world. It is imperative that the great German volk consider the elimination of all Polish people as its chief task.” At the end of 1940, Hitler confirmed the plan to liquidate “all leading elements in Poland”.

By 1942, the Nazis were implementing their plan to murder every Jew in German-occupied Europe and had also developed plans to eliminate the Polish people through mass murder, ethnic cleansing, enslavement and extermination through labor, and assimilation into German identity of a small minority of Poles deemed “racially valuable”. There were forced deportation of Poles and Prussians to make room for German settlers. (2)

On 26 November 1942, 47-year-old Franz Smaka was sent to Stutthof, a Nazi concentration camp established by Nazi Germany in a secluded, marshy, and wooded area near the village of Stutthof. His crime–homosexuality is clearly stamped on his papers provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Commandant of Stutthof rom August 1942- January 1945 was SS-Sturmbannführer Paul-Werner Hoppe. The camp was set up around existing structures after the invasion of Poland in 1939 and initially used for the imprisonment of Polish leaders and intellectuals. The actual barracks were built in 1940 by prisoners. Stutthof was the first German concentration camp set up outside German borders in World War II, in operation from 2 September 1939. It was also the last camp liberated by the Allies, on 9 May 1945. (1)

The camp was established for ethnic cleansing that included the liquidation of Polish elites (intellectuals, religious and political leaders). Even before the war began, the German Selbstschutz created lists of people to be arrested. The Selbstschutz were “Ethnic Guards” created after WWI to protect the Aryan Race. In the late 1920s, the German Nazis were secretly reviewing suitable places to set up concentration camps in ethnic areas.

Originally, in 1939 Stutthof was a civilian internment camp. The inmate population rose to 6,000 in the following two weeks. In November 1941, it became a “labor education” camp (like Dachau), administered by the German Security Police. Finally, in January 1942, Stutthof became a regular concentration camp. Until 1942, nearly all of the prisoners were Polish. In 1943, the camp was enlarged surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fence and contained thirty new barracks, A crematorium and gas chamber were also added in 1943. Stutthof was included in the “Final Solution” in June 1944. Mobile gas wagons were used to complement the maximum capacity of the gas chamber. The number of inmates increased considerably in 1944, with Jews forming a significant proportion of the newcomers.

A range of German organizations and businessmen used Stutthof prisoners as forced laborers. Many prisoners worked in SS-owned businesses such as heavily guarded armaments factories. Some were located inside the camp (see map) next to prisoner barracks. Other inmates labored in local brickyards, in private industrial enterprises, in agriculture, or in the camp’s own workshops. In 1944, an aircraft factory was constructed at Stutthof. Eventually, the Stutthof camp system became a network of forced-labor camps. The Holocaust Encyclopedia estimates that some 105 Stutthof subcamps were established throughout northern and central Poland.

Stutthof became the main transfer hub of Nazi prisoners receiving over 50,000 prisoners from Auschwitz and other camps in the Baltic area. Stutthof’s registered inmates included citizens of 28 countries besides Jews and Poles. It is believed that inmates sent for immediate execution were not registered–Franz Smaka was, as shown from documents saved by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

My assumption is Franz did not survive the holocaust.–we are still researching. Arriving in November of 1942, he may have been months away from the executioner’s call. The hard labor he was sentenced to may have included building the new camp, the electrified fence, the gas chamber or the crematorium. Conditions in the camp were extremely harsh; many prisoners succumbed to starvation and disease. Many 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 camp’s gas chamber. It is estimated that between 63,000 and 65,000 people died in the camp.

Commandant Hoppe joined the SS in 1933. In the spring of 1942, he received a serious leg wound in fighting the Red Army near Lake Ilmen. He was sent to Auschwitz as head of a guard detachment in July 1942, then Stutthof in August. A Stutthof evacuation order was signed by Hoppe on 25 January 1945 at 0500. The evacuation began an hour later under the command of SS-Storm Trooper Teodor Meyer. The destination for 50,000 prisoners of the “death march” was a sub-camp of Stutthof about 87 miles away. 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. Cut off by the advancing Soviet Army, the guards forced the surviving prisoners back to Stutthof. Marching in severe winter conditions and brutal treatment by SS guards led to thousands of deaths. In late April 1945, the remaining prisoners were removed from Stutthof by sea, since the camp was completely encircled by Soviet forces. Again, hundreds of prisoners were forced into the sea and shot. Over 4,000 were sent by small boat to Germany, some to the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, and some to camps along the Baltic coast. Many drowned along the way on overloaded and ill equipped boats. On 5 May 1945, a barge full of starving prisoners was towed into a Denmark harbour where 351 of the 370 on board were saved. Shortly before the German surrender, some prisoners were transferred to Sweden and released into the care of that neutral country. It has been estimated that around half of the evacuated prisoners, over 25,000, died during the evacuation from Stutthof and its subcamps.

Soviet forces liberated Stutthof on 9 May 1945, rescuing about 100 prisoners who had managed to hide.

After the mass evacuation, Hoppe became commandant of Wöbbelin concentration camp, a temporary camp set up to take prisoners evacuated from camps about to be overrun by the Red Army. Wöbbelin was only in existence from 12 February 1945 to 2 May 1945 when it was liberated by the American army. Hoppe was captured by the British in April 1946 in Holstein. He was sent to Camp 165 in Watten, Scotland in August 1947 until January 1948 when he was sent to an internment camp in Fallingbostel which was in the British zone of occupation in West Germany. While awaiting extradition to Poland, Hoppe escaped and made his way to Switzerland where he worked as a landscape gardener under a false identity for 3 years before returning to West Germany. He was arrested by the West German authorities on 17 April 1953 in Witten. He was tried and convicted as an accessory to murder in 1955. On 4 June 1957, the district court in Bochum re-sentenced Hoppe to nine years and he was released in 1966. He died July 16, 1974.

Poland held four trials against the Nazis of Stutthof, charging them with crimes of war and crimes against humanity. The first trial against 30 ex-officials and prisoner-guards of the camp were all found guilty of the charges. Eleven defendants including the first commander, Johann Pauls, were sentenced to death. The rest were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment.

The second trial was held in October 1947, before a Polish Special Criminal Court. Arraigned 24 ex-officials and guards of the Stutthof concentration camp were judged and found guilty. Ten were sentenced to death.

The third trial was held in November 1947, before a Polish Special Criminal Court. Arraigned 20 ex-officials and guards were judged; 19 were found guilty, and one was acquitted.

The fourth and final trial was also held before a Polish Special Criminal Court,also in November 1947. Twenty-seven ex-officials and guards were arraigned and judged; 26 were found guilty, and one was acquitted.

Adolf Hitler‘s plan, set out in his book Mein Kampf, to acquire “living space” included plans for expulsions and death. The WWII Nazi genocides from 1939-1945 claimed the lives of 2.7 to 3 million Polish Jews and 1.8 to 2.77 million ethnic Poles. No other country saw such mass civilian deaths. Out of 16,000 single-story mansions existing in 1939, about 3,000 retained at least the external character of its architecture. Of those, approximately 2,000 currently are in a state of advanced devastation, or only the outer walls remain. The manor homes most often belong to state or local government institutions; many are empty. To this day, there is no re-privatization act in Poland and the communist decrees of 1944-46 which expropriated landowners are still in force.4

It is doubtful that Franz Smaka survived internment at Stutthof. One wonders of his family; were his wife, Helena, and children arrested too? –most likely Krause is a German and Jewish (Ashkenazic): variant of Kraus meaning kruse ‘pitcher’, ‘jug’. Marie Helena was born on 28 Sep 1896 to Karl and Henriette Krause