Qualla: Rescue of Stutthof Victims in Denmark

Rescue of Stutthof Victims in Denmark: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ipigott, Public domain. "Go down to the harbour and see the floating coffin." That is how Hermine Schmidt remembered the local newspaper putting it, the morning after her barge reached Denmark. She had been a prisoner at Stutthof, the concentration camp near Danzig (now Gdańsk), held for her beliefs as a Jehovah's Witness. On 5 May 1945 — the day Denmark was liberated from German occupation — the barge carrying her and 369 others was towed into Klintholm Havn, a small fishing village on the south coast of the island of Møn. The people who read that line in the paper were already at the quay. They had been there since the day before.

Image: Ipigott | Public domain

Rescue of Stutthof Victims in Denmark: Set Adrift

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ipigott, Public domain. On 25 April 1945, with Soviet forces closing on the area around Stutthof, those running the camp marched the remaining prisoners to the coast and ordered them onto river barges — flat-bottomed craft built for canals and estuaries, not for open water. After a few days the prisoner...

Image: Ipigott | Public domain

Rescue of Stutthof Victims in Denmark: Who Was on Board

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ipigott, CC0. They were, almost all of them, political prisoners, and most had been taken for resistance work. Among them were several Jehovah's Witnesses, a faith the Nazi regime had banned outright. Danish Red Cross archives, drawing on an analysis made by Zygmunt Szatkowski — himself one of...

Image: Ipigott | CC0

Rescue of Stutthof Victims in Denmark: What a Village Could Do in a Day

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit E.jansen, CC BY 3.0. Rasmus Fenger, the local doctor, went aboard almost as soon as the barge was tied up, and what he found was dysentery, typhus, tuberculosis and starvation, in a population that also had fleas to a person. The first day's problem was simply food and clean water for 370 people in a...

Image: E.jansen | CC BY 3.0

Rescue of Stutthof Victims in Denmark: The Nineteen

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Buzer, Public domain. Nineteen people could not be saved. They died over the following days of disease and starvation, having survived the camp, the march, the barge and the Baltic, and having reached help too late for it to matter. Some of them lie in the churchyard at Magleby, a few kilometres inlan...

Image: Buzer | Public domain

Rescue of Stutthof Victims in Denmark: An Outstretched Hand

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ipigott, Public domain. A memorial stone stands on the shore at Klintholm Havn, at the point where the barge came in. It was raised on 5 May 1995, fifty years to the day. The Danish inscription reads: Fra sult og nød, tortur og død / De mødte på en fremmed kyst / I hjælpsom ånd, en udstrakt hånd — from ...

Image: Ipigott | Public domain