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

Budy

School building in which female prisoners of the penal company were kept before the subcamp was created (1968)
School building in...

A sub-camp at a farm set up on agricultural land covering the localities of Budy, Bór, and, in part, Nazieleniec near Brzeszcze. In various periods, a men’s camp, women’s camp, and the women’s penal company (Strafkompanie) functioned there.

In 1941, a men’s Kommando that marched back and forth from Auschwitz I (about 5 km each way) was already working at the farm. Since the walk took too long, a sub-camp was set up in April 1942 and 40 prisoners billeted there. At the turn of 1942/1943, the sub-camp was expanded to a dozen or more barracks designated as barns, stables, livestock sheds, workshops, warehouses, and living space for prisoners. SS barracks, granary, pigsty, and rabbit pens were built outside the fence. The fencing was barbed wire hung on concrete posts. SS-Oberscharführer Hermann Ettinger held the post of Lagerführer until he was succeeded by SS-Unterscharführer Bernhard Glaue. At first only non-Jewish Poles were prisoners in the sub-camp, but later there were also Polish, Czech, and Greek Jews as well as Russians and Germans. At the beginning of 1944 there were 500 prisoners working the fields and raising pigs, cattle, horses, and sheep. On January 17, 1945, at the last roll call, 313 prisoners stood to be counted. They were evacuated from the sub-camp the following day.

In the early spring of 1943, a sub-camp for women opened in buildings formerly occupied by the women’s penal company. German women held the Kapo posts, and the prisoners were Poles, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Czechs, and Yugoslavians. The female population reached 600 that year. The directors of this sub-camp were, in succession, SS overseers Elfriede Runge, Elisabeth Hasse, and Johanna Bormann. In the second half of 1944 the women’s sub-camp was expanded with several wooden barracks, surrounded by barbed-wire fencing, being built in the vicinity of the men’s sub-camp.

The women were divided into several Kommandos for field and forest work in a forest- and fruit-tree nursery, draining the fields, cleaning and dredging ponds, cutting reeds, building dikes along the Vistula, and repairing roads. The sub-camp was evacuated probably in January 1945.

Source: Auschwitz from A to Z. An Illustrated History