Qualla: Soldau Concentration Camp

Soldau Concentration Camp: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Poeticbent after GringoPL, crop of the subject area with increased brightness, contrast and resolution, CC BY-SA 3.0. The forest near Białuty held its secret for almost eighty years. Then in 2019, archaeologists from Poland's Institute of National Remembrance began digging, and by July 2022 they had located two mass graves containing roughly seventeen tonnes of human ashes — the cremated remains of at least eight thousand people. Most of them had been prisoners of a small concentration camp the Germans called Soldau, established by Nazi Germany after the September 1939 invasion in the town of Działdowo, then annexed into the Province of East Prussia.

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Soldau Concentration Camp: The Camp Few Have Heard Of

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Poeticbent after GringoPL, crop of the subject area with increased brightness, contrast and resolution, CC BY-SA 3.0. Soldau is not a name most people recognize. It lacks the grim renown of Auschwitz or Treblinka. Yet the International Tracing Service, in its first postwar accounting, classified it as a Vernichtungslager — an extermination camp — because of how many people died there. Polish off...

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Soldau Concentration Camp: The Gas Van Experiments

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Poeticbent after GringoPL, crop of the subject area with increased brightness, contrast and resolution, CC BY-SA 3.0. From May 21 to June 8, 1940, the Lange Commando — an SS unit under Herbert Lange — used a sealed truck rigged with rerouted exhaust to murder 1,558 patients taken from psychiatric hospitals across East Prussia and the Regierungsbezirk Zichenau. They were victims of Action T4, the...

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Soldau Concentration Camp: Children, Women, and the Sub-Camps

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Beax, CC BY-SA 2.5 pl. By the summer of 1941, the Germans reorganized Soldau as an Arbeitserziehungslager — a labor education camp. Three sub-camps spread across the region. At Iłowo-Osada and Mławka and Nosarzewo Borowe, prisoners built and maintained Truppenübungsplatz Mielau, a 300-square-kilometer ...

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Soldau Concentration Camp: Names Worth Remembering

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Poeticbent after GringoPL, crop of the subject area with increased brightness, contrast and resolution, CC BY-SA 3.0. Among those murdered at Soldau in 1941 were two Catholic bishops: Antoni Julian Nowowiejski, born in 1858, and Leon Wetmański, born in 1886 — both later beatified by the Catholic Church. They were part of the broader Nazi campaign against the Polish intelligentsia, the Intelligen...

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