Places of Interest - Poland

Inner city:

The biggest attraction in Wroclaw is the main market square and surrounding area (Rynek); the square is Poland's second largest (after Krakow) and a real gem. The "Ratusz", centrally located on the square, is the beautiful 13th century Gothic town hall which occupies a whole block. It took about 2 centuries to make the very beautiful building and the result is magnificent. Around the town hall square are also beautiful merchant houses - in 1240 began the construction of the wooden patrician houses that later all have been replaced by stone specimens. Many houses were badly damaged during the battle of the city in WWII but have all been restored. Different in style and color, the square and adjacent buildings are really a must see when visiting Wroclaw. Further on, the city is blessed with many beautiful churches and a walk in the historic city is a real quest for "Art Nouveau" and "Gothic" architecture lovers. Finally, there is the "Cathedrals island" or actually they consist of more little islands - a number of islands north of the center where many churches and a cathedral can be found between parts of the river of the Oder. On some of them are new apartment complexes, yet another is designed as a city park (with a nice view of the old town).

Concentration camp "Gross RoBen"

Albert Speer would pick out his new concentration camp near the quarry in "Lower Silesia". The granite would be used for the construction of the new capital of the Great German Empire "Germania". On the 2nd of August about one and a half hour driving by car southwest of the then German "Breslau" opened the camp "GroB RoBen", then subcamp of "Sachsenhausen". Whereas in the first two years mainly Jews were stationed in the camp, in 1942 it became a "nacht-und-nebel" camp so political prisoners were sent here without anyone knowing they were here. The camp is sometimes called the most cruel camp of all because of the small chance of survival. The German strategy gradually changed during the war. In the beginning it was to destroy as many and as quickly as possible "opponents". New prisoners were told that they would stay alive for about 90 days in "GroB Rosen" - often this would not be more than a few weeks because of the heavy work that had to be done here. When the war lasted longer than the Germans expected and hoped for, the prisoners had to be kept alive for a longer period because they were deemed necessary for the war industry. Those who were too weak to work, but changes were there they would be around for a while, were transported to Dachau with so-called Invalid transports. The total embezzlement prisoners that finally arrived here where even scary tos ome of the other prisoners and SS guards there. At the end of the war, prisoners came from other evacuated camps, such as Jews from Auschwitz, in Groß-Rosen. Despite the short stay, this was for many the most dramatic period of their imprisonment. 

The quarry was the most painfull job there was - often the "slaves" lived no longer than 5 weeks. Incidentally, there was collaboration with German citizens in the quarry. These civilians could see with their own eyes the daily deaths as a result of club parties and the very rapid physical decline as a result of the hunger diet. In the second half of 1944, workplaces for the company Siemens und Halske from Berlin appeared in the camp. The office and warehouse of this company were in the SS section of the camp. For Siemens, 425 detainees and sixteen civilians worked just before the evacuation of the camp. In the workshop for Blaupunkt, capacitors were manufactured. The workers received two weeks of training. 30 to 200 people worked here. Finally, in the weaving mill, people worked in two shifts of twelve hours each. Weakened prisoners were put to work here. Eventually, the camp consisted of about sixty subcamps, spread all over Lower Silesia in the then eastern Germany and the nearby Sudetenland. In total, nearly 125,000 people were held in Groß-Rosen. Due to the heavy physical work in the quarry and the poor treatment in nutrition and health care, 40,000 of them died before the Red Army liberated the concentration camp on 14 February 1945.

In the course of the 15th century the independence of Bohemia weakened and in 1526 the Bohemian kingship came into the hands of the Habsburg dynasty. In 1633 the city would lose much of its power by looting in the emerged and brutal Thirty Years' War. Half of the population died of the plague and the city, with the surrounding country, sank into a long period of stagnation, which, incidentally, did not stand in the way of a flourishing of (German-speaking) literature and art. In 1741 Frederick the Great of Prussia conquered Silesia, a liberation for the Lutheran majority and not too great a defeat for the Catholics, who remained in the possession of the churches, which the Habsburgs had previously taken from the Protestants. Throughout the 18th century, Silesia remained a theater of war between Prussia and Austria, and again it would be that when Napoleon laid his base against Russia and Austria in this strategic transit area. Because Poland, because of the 'divisions of het country', then largely fell under Russia, where the Polish national consciousness was oppressed, Breslau would develop a retreat for Polish national exiles. After two centuries of stagnation, or at least very slow growth, Breslau would develop in the 19th century as an industrial city and that brought the population - the third in size of the German Reich - from a hundred thousand to a half million.

Until 1945, Breslau belonged to Germany and was the capital of the province of Lower Silesia with about 650,000 inhabitants. Until the battle of the city, the city was almost undamaged because of the war because the Allied bombers could not reach the city. As a result, many government seats had come to Breslau. The Nazis decided to baptize the important industrial city as a fortress, and in the months before the battle, large defenses around the city were erected by mostly forced laborers. When the city was surrounded by the Russians it was bombarded with artillery for months and at the order of Gauleiter "Hanke" a large part of the old town was pulled down to act as a runway for plains. After the flight of the Nazi summit, the population seized the opportunity to escape Soviet revenge by fleeing to the nearby Giant Mountains (Karkonosze). Three quarters sought a shelter there and many returned when the Soviet occupation of Silesia was a fact. In the summer of 1945 there were still three hundred thousand inhabitants, half of the original number, in the city. Immediately at the end of the war, the city underwent a major metamorphosis - the Nazi Breslau changed into the communist Wroclaw where the first objective was to absorb the new inhabitants from the areas annexed by Russia (mainly from Lvov) and the other Germans were hunted and chased out. Everything that was German was brought down and distilled. Whether the rapes of German girls and women were not enough, the food supply to the Germans was also stopped to promote emigration. The deportations of Breslau's German residents took place until about 1947, in which the German officials of public utilities and public transport, and specialists in the industry, were still being deprived of expulsion for the time being to keep the city running as well as possible. They had to wear a white band with black mark N to be recognizable as a German. Eighty percent of its building material was lost or seriously damaged at the end of the war, and decay would continue in the first years after the war. It was not until the 1950s that a comprehensive restoration program was taken up, when it was definitively established that Breslau would become the Polish city of Wrocław. Half a century after the war, there were as many people again as in the pre-war period. They have partly rebuilt the old town after it had been in ruins for years and had even been demolished to obtain stones for the reconstruction of Warsaw.