Forgotten Horrors: The Nazi sub-camp system

Former Gustav Zwilling Villa According to the Auschwitz Museum Website , Harmeze subcamp actually consisted of two subcamps located in the village of  Harmęże - called 'Harmense' by the Germans - situated about 2 kilometres from Birkenau. The Polish residents of the village were expelled prior to construction of the subcamps, the first of which was established in December 1941 in a manor house known as the Gustav Zwilling villa  -  the owner having also been expelled. Around 50 Polish prisoners were held on the second floor in rooms that were separated from the rest of the house by a barred and padlocked door. The Polish prisoners were later supplemented by other male prisoners from Germany, the Soviet Union, Romania, France and Czechoslovakia. These prisoners were then put to work on agricultural tasks, specifically, raising poultry and rabbits and looking after some fishponds. In June 1942, the prisoners were moved into the village itself, where they were held in two bu...

This is why I had to start a blog in order to complete this project - the sheer numbers of subcamps in total is stupendous, and bear in mind that in addition to concentration camps, the Holocaust was carried out in all its grisly horror in hundreds of ghettoes and execution sites all over Europe and extending into Russia. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopaedia of Camps and Ghettoes project, due to be completed in 2021, has amassed a list of over 1,100 sites, and more are being added as and when they are located and identified. Here though, the blog is merely concerned with the subcamps, which is horrifying enough in itself.# Auschwitz sub-camps Brzezinka (Birkenau i.e. Auschwitz II) will not be covered in the blog because Birkenau is usually considered to be part of the main Auschwitz complex (i.e. Auschwitz I and II) and as such has already been covered extensively across many books, TV programmes and on the internet. I may add a brief history of the main Auschwitz complex at ...

Some years ago, I happened to stumble across, on Wikipedia, the list of subcamps administered by Dachau concentration camp, near Munich, Germany, 101 of them in total. I was shocked to say the least, as, although I had obviously heard of the major Nazi concentration camps - Dachau, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Mauthausen, Sobibor, etc - I hadn't realise, until then, that several of them had subcamp systems. Nor did I realise just how many camps were in those subcamp systems.   I realised that if I myself, someone with a reasonably good knowledge of WW2 and the Holocaust, or so I thought, hadn't heard about these subcamps until now, it surely must be the case that a great many other people hadn't heard of them either. In short, this seemed to be an aspect of the Holocaust that is in danger of being forgotten. So, with these thoughts in mind, I created a website on Wix that I called 'Forgotten Horrors' . The intent of the title is not to suggest that the Holocaust i...