The Żabikowo camp was officially called Polizeigefängnis der Sicherhaitspolizei und Arbeitserziehungslager Posen-Lenzingen (the Security Police Prison and Corrective Labour Camp Poznań-Junikowo). The camp was divided into two parts: police prison and penal camp. The Żabikowo camp of about 3.74 ha was controlled by the Gestapo from Poznań and was set up on the area of a former brickyard. It was surrounded with a double barbed, high-tension wire fencing and watchtowers. The gaps in the fencing were filled with additional barbed wire to prevent prisoners from escaping. There were separate barracks for men and women, the living conditions did not differ from the conditions in concentration camps.

The security police prison was a transit place of seclusion for people whom Germans accused of underground activity. Prisoners were kept there from several days up to several weeks.

Occasionally, however, particular prisoners stayed there for a few months. They were kept in wooden barracks (some of them remained after the former labour camp for Jews – Reichsautobahnlager Poggenburg). The Żabikowo camp was a transit camp. Prisoners were deported from there to concentration camps or occasionally released. 28 transports with prisoners were sent from Żabikowo. The first one was sent to KL Auschwitz and then to Gross-Rossen, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück.

In the penal part of the Żabikowo camp, there were people whom the Nazis convicted of common infringement of law, i.e. shirking the duty to work, not turning up in places indicated by the German Job Office (Arbeitsamt) or escaping from forced labour in the Third Reich. Initially, prisoners were detained for 14 days, then the sentence was extended to 21 days, while in 1944 they were occasionally kept for 28 and 56 days. On serving the sentence, prisoners were released or taken to concentration camps.

The camp was meant especially for Poles. However, there were also Soviet prisoners of war and escapees from labour camps, Germans – deserters from the Wehrmacht, Luxembourgers, the Dutch, Hungarians, Slovaks, citizens of the USA. There was also a separate group of prisoners called “niedzielnicy” (“Sunday prisoners”) who were detained on the basis of slanders, denunciations and administrative directives. They would be brought to the camp on Friday evening, subjected to horrific tortures and released on Monday morning.

Until January 19, 1945, there were 21 624 registered names of prisoners. In the Żabikowo camp, soldiers of the Polish Home Army (AK) in the Poznań and Pomeranian areas were executed (altogether in Żabikowo there were 1500 members of AK or the National Military Organization and Independent Poland – which later merged with AK), members of the Grey Ranks (Szare Szeregi) and the Polish Workers’ Party.

Corpses of prisoners were taken to Poznań and cremated in Collegium Anatomicum. On the basis of death certificates executed by Germans and found in the registry office, 290 names of the dead and murdered in Żabikowo were identified. Their bodies were sent with a note gestorben (deceased), without the actual cause of death.

They began to evacuate the camp at night on January 19, 1945. The first group of about 700 prisoners was transported by train to the Sachsenhausen camp. Ultimately, 408 of them got there. During its liquidation, the camp was torched. The Nazis also burnt the corpses of previously executed prisoners. Those who survived were forced to walk to the Sachsenhausen camp and only 208 of them got there. Female political prisoners were forced to walk even further, to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The weak and exhausted with marching were killed along the way.

The last group of 33 prisoners from the Maków Mazowiecki area arrived at the burnt-down camp and was executed on the Żabikowo cemetery by the SS escort. It was the last time Germans murdered prisoners. In the afternoon, January 26, 1945, Soviet forces of the 2^nd Belorussian Front entered Żabikowo, occupying Luboń and the surrounding area