Forced Labor camp located in a suburb of Cracow. Plaszow was established in the summer of 1942; in January 1944 it became a Concentration Camp.
Plaszow was situated within Cracow's city limits, on land made up of two Jewish cemeteries, other property belonging to the Jewish community, and the private property of Poles who had been evicted from their homes. Plaszow was divided into various sections: housing for the Germans; factories where the prisoners were forced to work; and the prisoners' living quarters, divided into sections for men and women and subsections for Jews and Poles. Every once in a while the camp was expanded; at its largest, in 1944, it covered 200 acres. The campsite was surrounded by an electrified barbed-wire fence 2.5 miles long.
The Germans liquidated the Cracow Ghetto on March 13--14, 1943. Some 2,000 Jews were murdered in the streets of Cracow, and buried in a mass grave at Plaszow. Of the surviving Jews, most were deported to Belzec, while about 8,000 were imprisoned in Plaszow.
In July 1943 the Germans set up a separate camp at Plaszow for Polish prisoners who had been arrested for disciplinary or political violations. According to the Germans, these prisoners were to be "retrained by work." In fact, those prisoners who had been charged for discipline were kept at the camp for a few months, while the political prisoners were kept there indefinitely. This Polish camp also held dozens of Gypsy families, including their small children.
The number of prisoners interned at Plaszow went up over the years: before the liquidation of the Cracow Ghetto there were 2,000 prisoners, while during the second half of 1943 there were 12,000 prisoners. By May and June 1944 Plaszow contained its peak number of prisoners: 22,000--24,000, including 6,000--8,000 Jews from Hungary. The number of Polish prisoners also rose, from 1,000 early on to 10,000 after the Warsaw Polish Uprising in late summer 1944.
Some German criminal prisoners were also detained at Plaszow; they were made to do various jobs around the camp. Of those, some 25,000 were considered to be "permanent prisoners" and given personal numbers. Beyond that, there was an unknown number of other "temporary" prisoners.
Five men served as camp commandant at Plaszow during its two and a half years of existence. Amon Goeth, who held the position from February 1943 to September 1944, was considered to be the most cruel and inhumane. He encouraged Selektionen, mass murders, and working the prisoners so hard that they died. He was also personally responsible for the deaths of many prisoners.
From 1942 to 1944, when Plaszow was a designated forced labor camp, most of the camp's guards were Ukrainians working for the Nazis. When Plaszow became a concentration camp, 600 SS men from the Death'S Head Units stepped in. After the SS men came in, while most prisoners still worked at forced labor, mass numbers of Jews were murdered. In addition, Poles who had been condemned for participating in patriotic Polish activities were brought to Plaszow and shot. In all, about 8,000 people were murdered at Plaszow, whether as individuals or as groups. Some 900 prisoners worked for Oskar Schindler, in whose factory they were protected from the horrors of the camp.
By the summer of 1944 the Soviet army was approaching. The Germans began taking apart the camp and sending prisoners to other camps, including Extermination Camps. Among those, 2,000 Jews were sent to their deaths at Auschwitz in May 1944. In September the Polish section of Plaszow was also eliminated. The Germans then tried to destroy the evidence of mass murder at the camp: they dug up mass graves, took out the corpses, and burned them in huge piles. The last prisoners were removed from Plaszow on January 14, 1945 and deported to Auschwitz.
