The camp was set up around existing structures after the invasion of Poland in World War II and initially used for the imprisonment of Polish leaders and intelligentsia.

It is estimated that between 63,000 and 65,000 prisoners of Stutthof concentration camp and its subcamps died as a result of murder, starvation, epidemics, extreme labour conditions, brutal and forced evacuations, and a lack of medical attention.

[3] The camp was established in connection with the ethnic cleansing project that included the liquidation of Polish elites (members of the intelligentsia, religious and political leaders) in the Danzig area and Western Prussia.

[1] Even before the war began, the German Selbstschutz in Pomerania created lists of people to be arrested,[3] and the Nazi authorities were secretly reviewing suitable places to set up concentration camps in their area.

It was also surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fence and contained thirty new barracks, raising the total area to 1.2 square kilometres (0.46 sq mi).

A crematorium and gas chamber[8] were added in 1943, just in time to start mass executions when Stutthof was included in the "Final Solution" in June 1944.

Thirty-four female guards including Becker, Bothe, Steinhoff, Paradies, and Barkmann were identified later as having committed crimes against humanity.

[13] Stutthof's registered inmates included citizens of 28 countries, and besides Jews and Poles – Germans, Czechs, Dutch, Belgians, French, Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Lithuanians, Latvians, Belarusians, Russians, and others.

There were also those classed and condemned as "vagrants who travel around after the manner of the gypsies", a category that included Romani, Sinti and Yenish people.

[14][15] Among 110,000 prisoners were Jews from all over Europe, members of the Polish underground, Polish civilians deported from Warsaw during the Warsaw Uprising, Lithuanian and Latvian intelligentsia, Latvian resistance fighters, psychiatric patients, Soviet prisoners of war,[3] and Communists (as an example of Communist deportations to Stutthof, see the Danish Horserød camp).

[citation needed] Conditions in the camp were extremely harsh;[17] tens of thousands of prisoners succumbed to starvation and disease.

In 1944, as forced labor by concentration camp prisoners became increasingly important in armaments production, a Focke-Wulf aircraft factory was constructed at Stutthof.

[20][21] Historian Joachim Neander argued that, contrary to some claims made in previous years, what the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) calls the "chemical substance which was essentially soap"[22] was the byproduct of Spanner's bone maceration processes done to create anatomical models at the Danzig Anatomical Institute, where he worked and which was not part of the Stutthof camp.

This was conflated with the separate debunked rumours of industrial production of human soap in concentration camps, which circulated during the war, and thereafter used as proof of this during the Nuremberg trials.

Semków states that the presence of human fat tissue has been confirmed in the samples of soapy grease (claimed to be "unfinished soap"[23]) from Danzig presented during the trials through analysis performed by the IPN and Gdańsk University of Technology in 2011[24][25] and 2006,[26][27] respectively, but his and Tomkiewicz research concluded that this was a byproduct stemming from Spanner's work in bone maceration at the institute unrelated to the Stutthof camp.

[20][28] It was also added that Spanner was arrested twice after the war but released after each time after explaining how he had conducted the maceration and injection process of his models and was declared "clean" by the denazification program in 1948, officially exonerated, and resumed his academic career.

[6] In late April 1945, the remaining prisoners were removed from Stutthof by sea, since the camp was completely encircled by Soviet forces.

[38] Josef Salomonovic, who arrived at Stutthof in June 1944 from Auschwitz just before his sixth birthday,[39] was the only survivor to give evidence in person at the Furchner trial.

Asia Shindelman, who arrived in Stutthof in July 1944 aged 16,[41] testified from the United States via video link to prisoners being thrown by guards into electrified fences.

[42] On 20 December 2022 Furchner, then 97, was convicted of being an accessory to murder of more than 10,000 people at Stutthof concentration camp during World War II.

A two-year suspended sentence in line with that requested by prosecutors was handed down by the Itzehoe state court in northern Germany.

[44][45] In 1999, Artur Żmijewski filmed a group of nude people playing tag in one of the Stutthof gas chambers, sparking outrage.