From Schmelt Camp to “Little Auschwitz”: Blechhammer’s Role in the Holocaust is the first in-depth study of the second largest Auschwitz subcamp, Blechhammer (Blachownia Śląska), and its lesser known yet significant prehistory as a so-called Schmelt camp, a forced labor camp for Jews operating outside the concentration camp system. Drawing on previously untapped archival documents and a wide array of survivor testimonies, the book provides novel findings on Blechhammer’s role in the Holocaust in Eastern Upper Silesia, a formerly Polish territory annexed to Nazi Germany in the fall of 1939, where 120, 000 Jews lived.
Established in the spring of 1942 to construct a synthetic fuel plant, the camp’s abhorrent living conditions led to the death of thousands of young Jews conscripted from the ghettos or taken off deportation convoys from Western Europe. Blechhammer was not only used for selecting parts of the Jewish ghetto population for Auschwitz, but also for killing pregnant women and babies. As an Auschwitz satellite, Blechhammer became the scene of brutal executions and massacres of prisoners refusing to go on the Death March. This microhistory unearths the far-reaching complicity of often overlooked perpetrators, such as the industrialists, factory guards, policemen, and “ordinary” civilians in these atrocities, but more importantly, it focuses on the victims, reconstructing the prisoners’ daily life and suffering, as well as their survival strategies.
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Preface
Introduction
1. Building the “Tower of Babel”: The Oberschlesische Hydrierwerke as a Beneficiary of Jewish Forced Labor
2. Establishing a Reign of Terror: The First Schmelt Camp in Blechhammer, March–September 1942
3. A New Camp, New Prisoners, New Dimensions of Brutality
4. “Rationalization” or Annihilation? The Camp at the Intersection of Two Conflicting Policies in 1943
5. Blechhammer’s New Role in the Holocaust in Eastern Upper Silesia
6. Becoming “Little Auschwitz”: The Takeover of Blechhammer in April 1944
7. Life Under the SS
8. Exposure to Allied Bombings and the Exacerbation of Violence in Summer 1944
9. Hangings Without a Witness? On the Vicissitudes of Relating Traumatic Memories
10. “A Cynical Joke”: Enforced Theatrical and Musical Performances
11. The Massacres of January 1945
12. The Death March
Epilogue: Surviving Blechhammer — A Look at Collective and Individual Strategies
Conclusion
Abbreviations
Notes
Unpublished Sources
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
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Susanne Barth received a Ph D in history from Oldenburg University (Germany) and currently is a Thesaurus Poloniae Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the International Cultural Center in Kraków, Poland. Her research was funded by a Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies and a European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Fellowship at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. Her articles have appeared in Shofar; S:I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation; and European History Quarterly.
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