The camp in the village of Płaszów was founded in December 1941 in the southern suburbs of Krakow, Poland. Commanding the camp was Amon Goeth, a sadistic SS General from Vienna. Under him were his staff of SS men and a few SS women, including Gertrud Heise, Luise Danz, Alice Orlowski and Anna Gerwing. After the war Plaszow prisoners recalled Alice Orlowski as the "picture book SS-woman, five feet tall, blond, beautiful." They also told about her whippings, especially to young women across their eyes. She gained some sort of pride from doing this. At roll call she would walk through the lines of women and when she thought someone was talking the inmates would hear the howl of her whip as it hit the back of some poor prisoner. A former prisoner commented after the war that she was put on a train in Plaszow and an SS woman hit her over the head. "You would think because they're women that they would be nice, but most of them were big and fat and ugly."-One former prisoner testified.
The camp was known as a slave labor camp, supplying manpower to several armaments factories and a stone quarry. The death rate in the camp was very high. Many prisoners, including many children and women died of typhus, starvation and executions. Płaszów camp became particularly infamous for both individual and mass shootings carried out there.
In January 1945, the last of the inmates and camp staff who remained left the camp on a death march to Auschwitz. Many of those who survived the march were killed upon arrival. The Red Army liberated the, now empty, camp on January 20, 1945.
On September 4, 1944, with the Soviet army approaching Krakow, this sub-camp was closed by the Nazi authorities and the Jews were forced to move to the Plaszow camp.
When Plaszow itself was shut down on October 15, 1944, Schindler managed to establish his famous list of Jews that were not to be murdered, but instead sent to a new kriegswichtige (war-essential) factory at Brunnlitz in Czechoslovakia.
On September 13, 1944 Göth was relieved of his position as Commandant of Plaszow and was assigned to the SS Office of Economics and Administration.
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