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MEMORIAL AND MUSEUM AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU FORMER GERMAN NAZI
CONCENTRATION AND EXTERMINATION CAMP

Babitz

Building in which female prisoners lived (1993)
Building in which...
A sub-camp in the depopulated village of Babice (German: Babitz), opened in the first half of May 1943. About 180 women were placed in the former school building, and an equal number of men in a nearby wooden barracks. The windows of the building occupied by the women were walled up or secured with barbed wire. Inside were sleeping rooms with bunk beds, offices for the SS men and female overseers, a first-aid room, a washroom, and a kitchen. Food was delivered from the Birkenau camp. Two barns, a stable, storage sheds, and a shed for harnesses were built inside the barbed-wire fence. 
 
The women prisoners were employed caring for and milking cows, clamping potatoes, spreading manure, and weeding and earthing up cabbages and beets. The male prisoners groomed the horses, plowed, mowed hay, and harvested. When the army requisitioned some of the horses in the spring of 1944, women prisoners were harnessed to the plows with long ropes. The supervisors of the women’s Kommando were SS Aufseherinnen Erna Kuck and Johanna Bormann, in turn; SS-Oberscharführer Rosenoff was director of the men’s Kommando. The women’s Kommando was liquidated and the women transferred to Birkenau in July; the men’s Kommando remained in Babitz until January 1945.