Qualla: Sonnenburg concentration camp

Sonnenburg concentration camp: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Scanned von Radzuweit, Public domain. The prison at Sonnenburg had been closed in 1930. Its cells were judged unfit and the building sat empty for three years. In the spring of 1933 officials of the Prussian justice ministry inspected it, recorded that the hygienic conditions were appalling, and recommended it anyway. They worked out that it could hold 941 men in what the new government called protective custody — some in single cells, others packed twenty, thirty and sixty to a room. On 3 April 1933, nine weeks after Hitler became chancellor, the first two hundred prisoners arrived from the Berlin Police Presidium with sixty SA auxiliary police as their guards. The building's unfitness was not an obstacle to the plan. It was the plan.

Image: Scanned von Radzuweit | Public domain

Sonnenburg concentration camp: The Men Berlin Wanted Quiet

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Danuta B., CC BY-SA 3.0. Sonnenburg — the town is Słońsk in Poland now — took the people the new regime most wanted removed from public life: Communist and Social Democratic officials, trade unionists, and the writers and lawyers who had been most effective at embarrassing it. Three of them had been seiz...

Image: Danuta B. | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sonnenburg concentration camp: What Happened to Them Afterwards

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. None of the three lived to see the end of it. Mühsam went from Sonnenburg to Brandenburg and then to Oranienburg, where guards beat, branded and tortured him over seventeen months before murdering him on the night of 9 July 1934; his body was found hanging in a latrine and the of...

Image: Unknown | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Sonnenburg concentration camp: Officially Closed

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. On 23 April 1934 the concentration camp was formally shut down. In practice it never stopped operating. From 1939 it ran as a Straflager, a punishment camp, for people brought from the occupied countries and labelled anti-German: Poles, French, Luxembourgers, Dutch, Danes, Norweg...

Image: Unknown | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Sonnenburg concentration camp: The Night of 30 January 1945

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Twelve years to the day after Hitler became chancellor, with the Red Army closing on the Oder a few kilometres to the west, the order came down from State Secretary Herbert Klemm. Gestapo men from Frankfurt (Oder), commanded by SS-Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Nickel, worked from a li...

Image: Unknown | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Sonnenburg concentration camp: Słońsk on the Thirtieth of January

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. The village is Słońsk today, a quiet place on the Postomia at the eastern edge of Warta Mouth National Park, ten kilometres from the ruined fortress at Kostrzyn and surrounded by wetlands full of geese. The Martyrdom Museum stands on the site of the camp, with a memorial to the p...

Image: Unknown | CC BY-SA 3.0 de