KL Gusen in the Context of the Nazi Germany Policies toward the Polish Citizens in the First Year of War

Abstract

The aim of this article is not to study the history of the Gusen camp, but to demonstrate its part in the implementation of the Nazi German policies toward Poland and the Polish citizens in the first year of the Second World War. The text is an edited and typeset paper delivered at the conference “The Onset of the New Order: Europe 1939–1940,” held in Warsaw between 17 and 19 September 2019. Narrowing the scope to a single year corresponds to the timespan which was the subject of said conference. The paper was an analysis of the circumstances surrounding the establishment of the camp and of the situation of the Polish inmates of KL Mauthausen and KL Gusen in the first year of the war. The Gusen camp has been largely forgotten, rarely studied, and barely present in social perception, both in Poland and other countries. In recent years, it has received somewhat greater attention, but rather in the context of the present state of the grounds of the former camp than in reference to the historical circumstances of its functioning. The article is an attempt to show the context of the foundation of the camp and address the question of whether it can be considered a unique node in the network of the Third Reich’s camps. From its very establishment, its prisoners were predominantly Poles, which means that its status is special from the perspective of remembering the fates of the Poles during the Second World War. In this article, the history of the camp is analyzed against the backdrop of Germany’s military goals, and in particular the provisions of the occupation policy in the Polish territories.