Pustków, Podkarpackie Voivodeship
| Pustków | |
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| Village | |
Monument commemorating the Polish victims of German camp Heidelager, Pustków 2009
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 Pustków
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| Coordinates: 50°8′25″N 21°29′20″E / 50.14028°N 21.48889°E | |
| Country |
 Poland
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| Voivodeship |
 Subcarpathian
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| County |
 Dębica
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| Gmina | Gmina Dębica |
| Population | 2,925 |
Pustków [ˈpustkuf] is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Dębica, within Dębica County, Subcarpathian Voivodeship, in south-eastern Poland. It lies approximately 12 kilometres (7 miles) north-east of Dębica and 39 km (24 mi) west of the regional capital Rzeszów. The settlement is nearly synonymous with the adjacent Pustków Osiedle housing estate built in the 1930s for employees of the mining explosives factory of the Central Industrial Region. Total area of Pustków – the largest village in Gmina Dębica – is 2,285 hectares (5,650 acres) with 2,925 residents (2003); while the area of Pustków Osiedle – the smallest one – is 150 hectares (370 acres) with comparable number of 2,727 residents in an urban setting.
Pustków, as well as Pustków Osiedle were the location of the Nazi German troop-training facility called HL-Heidelager for the Ukrainian 14th Waffen SS Division "Galician", as well as other collaborationists military formations including Estonian. Their training, included also killing operations inside the camps and Jewish ghettos in the vicinity of Pustków and in the town itself, most notably, at the Pustków and Szebnie concentration camp nearby.
Locals who lived in the vicinity were evicted already in mid-1940. The HL-Heidelager Military Training Base known in German as the SS-Truppenübungsplatz Heidelager eventually, was set up north-east of Dębica not far from Blizna using slave labor from the neighboring concentration camp located beneath Królowa Góra mountain, which held 7,000 Jews, 5,000 Soviet POWs, and 3,000 Poles (most of them annihilated before July 1944). The training range was in use since the fall of 1941 under the command of SS Oberführer Werner von Schele. The title Heidelager was adjusted from the original SS TruppenÜbungsPlatz "Ostpolen" on August 25, 1943. The last commandant of the training base was SS Oberführer Bernhardt Voss until the summer of 1944.
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Wikipedia