Legacy Library

The liberation of Praust on 19 March 1945 by Soviet forces revealed the final and most extreme phase of violence in the N**i camp system. Praust was a subcamp of Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig (today Pruszcz Gdański, Poland). Most prisoners were Jewish women from Hungary and Poland, forced to work in brickworks in freezing conditions. The work was exhausting, and guards regularly beat prisoners for small mistakes, such as dropping bricks.

As the Soviet army advanced in early 1945, the SS began evacuating the camp. Around 3,000 women were forced on a death march to the Baltic coast. There, they were loaded onto barges, taken out to sea, and the vessels were deliberately sunk. Most prisoners died in this process, though about 200 survived by jumping into icy water and reaching shore.

When Soviet troops liberated Praust, they found only a small number of survivors. Around 90 women had been left behind because they were too weak to march. They survived by hiding in a potato cellar until they were discovered.

Praust is important because it shows how the SS used the Baltic Sea for mass killings during the final months of the war, trying to destroy evidence of their crimes. It represents one of the last large-scale massacres before Germany’s surrender in May 1945, showing that the violence continued right up to the end.

The liberation of Brünnlitz on 8 May 1945, the same day as VE Day, marked the end of one of the most unusual subcamps in the N**i system. Brünnlitz was a subcamp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp complex, located in what was then Czechoslovakia. It was connected to the factory operated by industrialist Oskar Schindler.

When Soviet forces reached the site, they found around 1,200 Jewish prisoners still alive. These men and women had been transferred from Schindler’s enamelware factory after he deliberately moved them away from Auschwitz and other killing centers. Schindler had spent much of his fortune bribing SS officials to keep his workers off deportation and ex*****on lists.

By the time of liberation, SS guards had already fled. Schindler himself left the camp on 7 May and reportedly told his workers, “You are free.” Inside the factory, prisoners had also carried out quiet sabotage, producing defective artillery shells that could not be used effectively by the German military.

Brünnlitz is significant because it was one of the very few camps where all registered prisoners survived until liberation. It demonstrates that individual action, even within a vast system of terror, could still save lives. The story later became widely known through the film Schindler’s List, and the factory site has since been preserved as a museum.