store military equipment, which is why the Soviet air forces carried out several bombardments of the camp in March 1945. On 25 and 27 April, Germans evacuated the camp by sea. The prisoners walked or were sent in trains to the mouth of the Wisła River in the area of Mikoszewo, from where they were transported to the Hel Peninsula. 70 ill prisoners were shot in Mikoszewo. The remaining inmates were put on riverboats, unsuitable for sea cruises, and sent from Hel to the German Reich. A half of all prisoners died while travelling in these “death boats.” Their bodies were stripped naked and thrown into the sea. One of the boats was sent to Klintholm, a small fishing port in the Danish island of Mön, most probably due to chaos and panic caused by the approaching Soviet forces in the German territory. The prisoners were taken care of by a unit of the Danish resistance movement commanded by Niels Rosenkrantz. They were later given aid by the Danish Red Cross. Some of the former inmates of KL Stutthof died in Danish hospitals of camp diseases and exhaustion caused by the travel. Among the 229 surviving prisoners who had arrived to the Mön island, over 70% were Polish, 25% were Russian and Lithuanian, while the remaining 5% were individual prisoners of various nationalities.
KL Stutthof was open throughout the entire course of the war in Europe. Soviet soldiers entered the camp on 9 May 1945, where they saw only individual prisoners on the brink of death, left behind during the process of evacuation. The commandants of the camp were SS Hauptsturmführer Max Pauly (from 2 September 1939 until 31 August 1942), who went on to serve as the commandant of the KL Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg until 1945, and SS Sturmbannführer Paul Werner Hoppe (from September 1942 until May 1945), who had earlier been the officer of SS Totenkopfverbände in the staff of the KL Dachau concentration camp near Munich. The selection to the gas chambers was carried out by the camp physician SS Hauptsturmführer Otto Heidl. No indictments for war crimes and genocide in KL Stutthof were issued in the Nuremberg trials. Nonetheless, Polish and Soviet authorities tried 85 out of almost 2,000 members of the KL Stutthof staff in the period of 25 April – 31 May 1946 in Gdańsk. SS Oberscharführer Johann Paulus, along with ten prisoners with official functions and kapos, were sentenced to death. The sentences were executed in public on 4 July 1946 in Gdańsk. The remaining defendants were given prison sentences ranging from several months to life.
Commission examining war crimes at the crematory in the former German concentration camp in Stutthof photo: PAP/Mikołaj Sprudin 78