page_title: Jaworzno concentration camp
section_title: Stalinist era
hierarchical_section_title: Jaworzno concentration camp / Stalinist era
caption_attribution_description: English: Jaworzno camp memorial
context_page_description: The Jaworzno concentration camp was a concentration camp in WW2 German-occupied Poland and later in Communist Poland. It was first established by the Nazis in 1943 during the Second World War and was later used from 1945 to 1956 by the Soviet NKVD and then by the Ministry of Public Security and other agencies of the Polish communist regime. Today the site is an apartment complex and also houses a memorial to the camp's victims.
  Originally, it was established as a Nazi concentration camp called SS-Lager Dachsgrube also known as Arbeitslager Neu-Dachs established during World War II by the Third Reich on the territory of German-occupied Poland in Jaworzno, Lesser Poland. The camp operated under the Nazi German administration from June 1943 until its evacuation in January 1945.
  After the communist takeover of Poland, the camp was reinstated and run first by the Soviet Union and then the People's Republic of Poland till 1956, mainly to intern the local German population, who had formed the region's majority population. During this period, it was renamed as the Central Labour Camp in Jaworzno.
context_section_description: Since February 1945 the camp had served the Soviet NKVD and then the Polish Ministry of Public Security (UB) as a prison camp for the so-called "enemies of the nation" (Polish: wrogowie narodu). Some of them were German military POWs (members of the Waffen-SS were interned separately from the rest) and the Nazi collaborators from all over Poland, but most were local Germans from German Upper Silesia, Germans from Polish Polish Upper Silesia, and Silesian civilians from Jaworzno, the nearby Chrzanów, and elsewhere; they included women and children. There were also ethnic Poles who were arrested for their opposition to Stalinism, including members of the Polish non-communist resistance organizations AK and BCh, and later the anti-communist organization WiN.
  The camp for Germans was run until 1949, when the last of the were allowed to leave and emigrate from their home region to post-war Germany. 
  The camp was soon renamed as the "Central Labor Camp" (COP) and the German inscription "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work makes (you) free") was replaced by Polish "Praca uszlachetnia człowieka" ("Work ennobles man"). The prisoners mostly worked on the construction of Jaworzno power plant or in nearby factories and mines. All of them were interned in separate subcamps and were guarded by more than 300 soldiers and officers from the Internal Security Corps, aided by about a dozen civilian personnel. One of the commandants (from 1949), was a Polish Jew and communist named Solomon Morel, who had gained a reputation for cruelty in the Zgoda labour camp in Świętochłowice; the others included Włodzimierz Staniszewski, Stanisław Kwiatkowski and Teofil Hazelmajer (all answering to Jakub Hammerschmidt, later known as Jakub Halicki), as well as the Soviet NKVD officer Ivan Mordasov. There were also two satellite subcamps located at Chrusty and Libiąż.
  A separate subcamp existed for the ethnic Lemko and Ukrainian prisoners. On April 23, 1947, by a decree of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Party, COP Jaworzno was selected for the detention of civilians during the Operation Vistula deportation campaign. The first transportation of 17 prisoners from Sanok reached the special subcamp of Jaworzno on May 5 and the number of these prisoners eventually totalled almost 4,000 (including over 700 women and children); the vast majority of them arrived in 1947. Most of them were people suspected of sympathy towards the rebels of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and those otherwise selected from the Operation Vistula transports (including more than 100 Lemko intelligentsia and 25 mostly Greek Catholic priests). The Lemko and Ukrainian prisoners were gradually released from the spring of 1948 until the spring of 1949, when the last of them left Jaworzno. Most of them were deported to the new places of settlement or freed and allowed to return to their homes, but several hundred were sent to military prisons and at least 161 died in the camp.
  According to the (incomplete) official statistics from the period, 1,535 people died at COP Jaworzno between 1945 and 1947 (972 of them of a typhus epidemic in the overcrowded camp), out of at least 6,140 who died during this period in all camps and prisons in Poland. Contemporary figures are much higher. According to research conducted by Polish historians on the data released by the prison services in 1993, the list of prisoners who died at COP Jaworzno and its filias between 1945 and 1956 consists of 6,987 names, which was a figure much greater than in any other Polish detention center (for a comparison, approximately 2,915 prisoners died at the second most-lethal work camp in the Stalinist Poland, the Central Labour Camp in Potulice, mainly from typhus and dysentery). The victims were mostly the German Volksdeutsche.
  
  After the Operation Vistula was concluded in 1949, the camp continued to be used as a prison for Polish political prisoners. Between 1951 and 1956, it was turned into the "progressive prison" for adolescents under the age of 21, of which some 15,000 passed through it as 
caption: Central Labour Camp Jaworzno memorial
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