Rescue of Stutthof victims in Denmark

The rescue of Stutthof victims in Denmark took place on 5 May 1945 at Klintholm Havn, a small fishing village on the south coast of the island of Møn, when a barge full of famished Nazi concentration camp prisoners was towed into harbour.

On 5 May 1945, the day Denmark was liberated from German occupation during World War II, a barge with 370 starving prisoners from the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig (now Gdansk) was brought into Klintholm Havn. When Russian forces moved into the areas close to Stutthof on 25 April 1945, those in control of the concentration camp forced the remaining prisoners to march to the coast and then commanded them to board river barges. After a few days, they were taken ashore in Rügen, Germany, but then were again forced onto another barge on 3 May. This was allowed to drift across the Baltic Sea until it was finally towed into the harbour at Klintholm Havn by a German tug two days later.

Fortunately the local inhabitants managed to rescue 351 of the prisoners. The other 19 could not be saved and died of disease or starvation during the next few days. Some of them are buried in nearby Magleby churchyard.

The prisoners on the barge were nearly all political prisoners, most of whom had been involved in resistance operations. There were also several members of Jehovah's Witnesses which had been banned by the Nazi regime. Danish Red Cross archives, which draw on an analysis undertaken by Zygmunt Szatkowski (one of the prisoners), show that the majority of the prisoners were Poles followed by a large number of Russians. There were also small numbers of Czechoslovakians, Germans, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Turks and Frenchmen as well as a few citizens from the Free State of Danzig. One of the Poles had a U.S. passport.

...
Wikipedia