Stutthof Concentration Camp
8/12/2025
Stutthof Concentration Camp and museum is almost 2 hours east of Gdansk. It is very close to the coast and only about 40km from the Baltiysk District of Russia (a part of Russia that is not connected to mainland Russia). Admission was free (yes FREE!). We, however did not understand the website and thought you were required to book a tour. So we ended up with our own private tour which cost us about $80.00. We were pretty much the only people at the camp with a guide. I guess everyone else was better able to understand the website than we were… oh well! In the end though, we felt like we got a lot more out of it than we would have without the guide, so we didn’t mind spending the money.
Stutthof was the longest running concentration camp of WWII. It started as a “civilian internment camp”. The first shipment of inmates arrived on September 2nd 1939 … one day after the Nazi’s attacked Gdansk and the war officially started. They literally started displacing Poles from their homes and lands and hauling them to Stutthof on day 2 of the war! Over the course of the war, about 100,000 prisoners passed through the camp. It was forced free labor. They made products needed by the Nazi soldiers. Clothing, shoes, belts, bricks, furniture, armaments, etc.
Although it wasn’t an “extermination camp”, about 60,000 of the 100,000 died. They had gas chambers or would shoot inmates for not following orders or not working hard enough. Additionally, a lot of inmates died from disease, starvation, or freezing to death in the winter (winter uniforms were exactly the same as those they wore in the summer).
At one point, a whole additional section was added for Jews when they had an influx of Jews that they had moved out of ghettos in other Baltic countries when the Soviets were approaching. At that point they amped up their killing regimen. They originally only had one gas chamber, so they invented a “moving gas chamber” whereby they outfitted a couple train cars to gas inmates. So clever!
Bunks were 3 high and at the height of the camps population, they slept 4 to each bed. These beds were SMALL.
This was the commander’s house. It is now a private home and not part of the complex for visitors. There were all kinds of signs… definitely “no trespassing”, not sure what else they said. It’s entirely possible I wasn’t supposed to be taking pictures.
All in all, an interesting but very sobering day. Everyone should visit a concentration camp at least once in their lifetime. The atrocities are so unbelievable. The victims deserve our recognition, respect, and sympathy. And they deserve for us to never forget what happened to them!
