Susanne Barth is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oldenburg (Germany) where she also received a Master’s Degree in History and Political Sciences. At the Netherland’s Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) she will be conducting research for her dissertation project: ‘The Oberschlesische Hydrierwerke AG and the Auschwitz subcamp of Blechhammer, 1939-1945′.

Blechhammer was a complex of labour camps belonging to the synfuel plant Oberschlesische Hydrierwerke AG, established in 1939-1940 in Upper Silesia. Nearly 50,000 forced labourers from all over Nazi-occupied Europe, prisoners-of-war and at least 5,000 Jewish concentration camp prisoners were confined to this place. In April 1944, the camp for Jews at Blechhammer was turned into a subcamp of Auschwitz.

The research project investigates the plant’s ideological function and its co-operation with the Auschwitz extermination camp, while at the same time trying to reconstruct the daily life and suffering of prisoners at Blechhammer.

During her tenure at the NIOD, Ms. Barth will analyze witness testimonies and a diary from Dutch survivors of Blechhammer camp as well as transport lists of the ‘death march’ to Gross-Rosen, mainly using the Institute‘s archival collections 244/1486, 250d, 444 and 979. She speaks English, German and French as well as some Hebrew and Russian.

Ms. Barth was at the NIOD in June 2012.