Groß-Rosen Concentration Camp

Scope and content

The collection contains among others:

General camp correspondence, prisoner cards, prisoner lists, names register of surviving prisoners, documents concerning ill-prisoner barracks, transfer lists, transport lists, death lists, documents on work deployments, camp reports, execution protocols, medical pamphlets, death books, Gestapo-personnel files of prisoners, registers of personal effects, disinfection protocols, station records, testimonies and reports of former prisoners, exhumation protocols, acknowledgements of receipt from the IRC

History of Concentration Camp Groß-Rosen 1940-1945:

Concentration Camp Groß-Rosen was built in August 1940 approx. 60 km south-west of Breslau in the immediate vicinity of a granite quarry at first as an external camp of Concentration Camp Sachsenhausen. When the camp was converted into an autonomous concentration camp on 1 April 1941, there were 722 inmates there, mostly Poles, Czechs and German “protective custody prisoners” as well as “asocials”. In summer of that same year, the enlargement of the camp began, with the plan of reaching an absorption capacity of 15,000 to 20,000 inmates. In 1944 another expansion followed, in order to accommodate a total of 45,000 prisoners. Furthermore, approx. 100 satellite camps arose during the last years of the war. The prisoners there primarily had to first mine the granite needed for the planned monumental structures in German cities. When as of 1943 the imminent military defeat was becoming ever more evident, the prisoners in Groß-Rosen were also put to work predominantly in the defense industry. The work and living conditions were horrific. Twelve hours at a time of hard labor in the quarry, being subjected to abuse by the SS-guard units, hunger and illness determined the everyday life of the prisoners. The result of these tortures was an extremely high mortality rate among the inmates. Regardless of the many deaths, there was a drastic increase in prisoner numbers, especially towards the end of the war, as more and more camps and prisons in the east were disbanded. Over the course of 1944 some 90,000 prisoners were brought to Groß-Rosen, in January 1945 a large number of “evacuated” inmates also arrived from Auschwitz. A total of some 120,000 captives, the majority of them of Polish nationality, were deported to Groß-Rosen and its outside camps. In the satellite camps the proportion of Jewish prisoners was very high, at almost 60,000 persons it was 50 percent of the total number. The proportion of the prisoners who were female, amounting to approx. 26,000 women, was also considerable. From the end of 1944, under chaotic conditions, the prisoners of Concentration Camp Groß-Rosen were also transported in stages to the interior areas of the Reich. On 13 February 1945 units of the Red Army reached the vacant camp. During the five years Concentration Camp Groß-Rosen and its satellite camps existed, at least 40,000 people died there.

Source: Distel, Barbara: Groß-Rosen, Artikel in: Lexikon des Holocaust, ed. by Wolfgang Benz, München 2002, p. 92 and http://www.memorialmuseums.org/denkmaeler/view/82/Museum-Groß-Rosen [Latest access 2012-08-01].