Stutthof is the German name of Sztutowo, a village on the Vistula Spit. That name became a byword for Nazi terror in northern Poland during World War II.

In the forest near the Stutthof village, which had been within the limits of the Free City of Gdańsk before the war, German Nazis established a camp in which, from 2 September 1939, they incarcerated people whom they considered to be harmful to the Third Reich. The camp was formally given the status of concentration camp on 7 January 1942, yet its murderous character had been beyond doubt since inception.

The first inmates were activists of Polish organisations from the Free City of Gdańsk, including many representatives of the intelligentsia. During the whole war, some 110,000 people of 28 nationalities were sent there. Nearly 65,000 lost their lives. In the final stages of the war, Stutthof became a site of mass extermination of European Jews. Close to 27,000 of them died in the camp.

Human tragedies played themselves out in wooden barracks beyond a barbed-wire fence every day. The inmates were physically and psychologically tortured by the camp crew and so-called prisoner functionaries helping the Nazis. The inmates were forced to work to exhaustion in weaponmanufacturing workshops or in the forest felling trees for timber. Lack of hygiene and starvation caused the spread of diseases, such as typhus. Thousands died during the evacuation of the camp, which lasted from January to May 1945. Stutthof ceased to function when units of the Red Army arrived in it on 9 May 1945.

Since 1962, the Stutthof Museum in Sztutowo has been striving to preserve the memory of the prisoners. On its site, a Monument to Struggle and Martyrdom was erected in 1968. It was designed by Wiktor Tołkin, a former prisoner of KL Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Kordian Kuczma, PhD

The obverse of the coin shows fragments of prisoner clothing bearing camp numbers and triangle badges, which the prisoners called “winkiels”. They were elements of prisoner identification: the number replaced the person’s name, the colour of the triangle meant the classification of the prisoner to one of the categories connected with the reasons for their arrest, whereas the letter in the triangle indicated the country of origin: T for Czechoslovakia, P for Poland, J meant Jewish, R – the Soviet Union.

The reverse of the coin presents an image of the so-called Death Gate, separating the parts of the camp for the SS men and for the prisoners. In the background, the pattern with camp prisoner designations is repeated.

Coins linked with an article