Work camp Gleiwitz II was a subcamp of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. In this camp carbon black was manufactured for Deutsche Gasrusswerke, a subsidiary of Degussa (Deutsche Gold- und Silberscheideanstalt). More than 1000 prisoners of this camp had to work in this factory. They were primarily Jewish men, but also women from Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Greece, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, and Germany.

For Poland, the Second World War started on 1 September 1939 at 4:45 am with the attack by the German battleship the Schleswig-Holstein on the Polish military base in Westerplatte in Danzig. This was preceded one day earlier by the “Gliwice (Gleiwitz) provocation” - Germans pretended to be Poles and attacked a radio transmitter in Gliwice. In this way the Germans tried to make the Poles guilty of the outbreak of the war. The invasion of Poland developed into a real campaign that lasted more than a month. The Poles resisted fiercely despite the superior numbers of the German army.