of fellow inmates. Sanitation was sorely lacking to the extent that hungry and drained prisoners were decimated by outbreaks of infectious diseases, and the lack of hygiene gave way to infestations of lice and fleas. In particular, a typhus epidemic in January and February 1944 decreased the prison population by two-thirds, though the sanitary situation improved somewhat by the time the leadership was changed and the camp's construction was finished. The camp infirmary, according to Felician Loth, was "a parody of a sick ward", and patients who were unable to continue work were usually killed. For these reasons, almost 75% of original prisoners have died by March 1944, reducing the camp's population to around 1,000 inmates. This prompted the Germans to supply about 3,000 Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz. Just as the Jews in other concentration camps, the inmates in KL Warschau were forced to wear and wooden clogs. The former had the Star of David badge sewn on it and a Latin letter marking the inmate's provenance. The newly arrived prisoners had their hair cut shortly and then underwent a procedure of bathing and disinsectisation, which, before the bathhouse was built in the camp, was happening in Pawiak prison. Prisoner functionaries, however, were treated differently – they lived in a separate barrack (with the exception of the Blockältester), could wear civilian clothes, bear arms, and were even sometimes allowed to go outside the camp's premises. Jewish inmates speaking German and/or Polish also had slightly better conditions, the former because they could easily understand the guards' orders and communicate with them, while the latter could barter more efficiently with the Polish workers. Executions In 1943–1944, camp inmates, Polish Jews caught hiding on the "Aryan side" of Warsaw or in the ghetto's ruins, Polish political prisoners (Pawiak inmates) and Polish hostages captured during the street roundups (łapanki) were executed in the ruins of the former ghetto, which surrounded the camp. These executions took place almost daily and in some days, dozens or even hundreds of Poles and Jews were executed there. The bodies were then burnt, first in open air pyres and later in the camp's crematorium. The ruins of the ghetto supplanted previous execution sites, which were operating in the countryside around Warsaw, such as in Kampinos Forest (the site of the Palmiry massacre). The proximity of the Pawiak prison and the isolation of the former ghetto from the rest of