Forgotten Horrors: The Nazi sub-camp system

  The cream-coloured building in the picture above was used as Altdorf sub camp    Altdorf was a small sub-camp in Stara Wieś near Pszczyna, which operated from mid-November 1942 to April 1943, although there was a break in operations from mid-January to early March 1943. It contained between 15 and 30 Jewish prisoners from Poland and various other European countries, accommodated in the cellars of an apartment building located in the middle of the village. There were two rooms in these cellars. The larger room contained bunk beds with blankets and straw mattresses, while the other room served as a kitchen with two stoves. Meals consisted of a crust of bread with pieces of sausage, black pudding or cheese. The cellars were locked at night to prevent escapes, with an SS guard on the cellar stairs and another patrolling around the building. The prisoners worked for the Pszczyna Forest Authority ( Oberforstamt Pless ) in nearby woodland, digging up ...

  Porombka was located at Międzybrodzie Bialskie in southern Poland, around 35 kilometres south of Oświęcim in the Little Beskid mountains, above a dam and lake. It was also known as Solahutte and was more of a working party (Kommando) than a camp. Therefore, there was no barracks or electrified barbed wire fences or guard towers. There isn’t much documentation containing information about the camp either, but the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) discovered photographs in the album of SS-Obersturmführer Karl Höcker, adjutant of the commander of Auschwitz, and SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer (known as the Höcker album), depicting SS men spending leisure time at this location. The album was donated to USHMM by an anonymous American counter-intelligence officer and contains 116 black-and-white photographs, mostly taken during the summer of 1944. The SS men depicted in these photographs were mostly officers from Auschwitz and most of them were taken at the Solahütt...