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Chełmno Trials
The Chełmno trials were a series of consecutive war-crime trials of the Chełmno extermination camp personnel, held in Poland and in Germany following World War II. The cases were decided almost twenty years apart. The first judicial trial of the former ''SS'' men – members of the '' SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof'' – took place in 1945 at the District Court in Łódź, Poland. The subsequent four trials, held in Bonn, Germany, began in 1962 and concluded three years later, in 1965 in Cologne. A number of camp officials, gas-van operators and ''SS'' guards, were arraigned before the court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed at Chełmno (a.k.a. ''Kulmhof'') in occupied Poland in the period between December 1941 and January 1945. The evidence against the accused, including testimonies by surviving witnesses, former prisoners, and mechanics attending to repair needs of the ''SS'', was examined in Poland by Judge Władysław Bednarz of the Łódź District ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Łódź
Łódź, also rendered in English as Lodz, is a city in central Poland and a former industrial centre. It is the capital of Łódź Voivodeship, and is located approximately south-west of Warsaw. The city's coat of arms is an example of canting arms, canting, as it depicts a boat ( in Polish language, Polish), which alludes to the city's name. As of 2022, Łódź has a population of 670,642 making it the country's List of cities and towns in Poland, fourth largest city. Łódź was once a small settlement that first appeared in 14th-century records. It was granted city rights, town rights in 1423 by Polish King Władysław II Jagiełło and it remained a private town of the Kuyavian bishops and clergy until the late 18th century. In the Second Partition of Poland in 1793, Łódź was annexed to Kingdom of Prussia, Prussia before becoming part of the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw; the city joined Congress Poland, a Russian Empire, Russian client state, at the 1815 Congress of Vien ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Łódź Ghetto
The Łódź Ghetto or Litzmannstadt Ghetto (after the Nazi German name for Łódź) was a Nazi ghetto established by the German authorities for Polish Jews and Roma following the Invasion of Poland. It was the second-largest ghetto in all of German-occupied Europe after the Warsaw Ghetto. Situated in the city of Łódź, and originally intended as a preliminary step upon a more extensive plan of creating the ''Judenfrei'' province of Warthegau, the ghetto was transformed into a major industrial centre, manufacturing war supplies for Nazi Germany and especially for the Wehrmacht. The number of people incarcerated in it was increased further by the Jews deported from Nazi-controlled territories. On 30 April 1940, when the gates closed on the ghetto, it housed 163,777 residents. Because of its remarkable productivity, the ghetto managed to survive until August 1944. In the first two years, it absorbed almost 20,000 Jews from liquidated ghettos in nearby Polish towns and villages, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sonderkommando
''Sonderkommandos'' (, ''special unit'') were work units made up of German Nazi death camp prisoners. They were composed of prisoners, usually Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust. The death-camp ''Sonderkommandos'', who were always inmates, were unrelated to the ''SS-Sonderkommandos'', which were ''ad hoc'' units formed from members of various SS offices between 1938 and 1945. The German term was part of the vague and euphemistic language which the Nazis used to refer to aspects of the Final Solution (e.g., ''Einsatzkommando'', "deployment units"). Death factory workers ''Sonderkommando'' members did not participate directly in killing; that responsibility was reserved for the SS, while the ''Sonderkommandos'' primary duty was disposing of the corpses. In most cases, they were inducted immediately upon arrival at the camp and forced into the position under threat of death. They were not ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mordechaï Podchlebnik
Mordechaï Podchlebnik or Michał Podchlebnik (1907 – 1985) was a Polish Jew who managed to survive the Holocaust. He was a member of the '' Sonderkommando'' work detail for nearly two weeks at the Chełmno extermination camp in occupied Poland. Podchlebnik was one of at least three prisoners who escaped into the surrounding forest from the mass burial zone. Life He was born to a family of Jacob Podchlebnik and Sosia (Zosia) née Widawska from Koło, known also by the Polish equivalent of his first name, Michał. He witnessed the deportation of his father, mother, sister with her five children, and brother with his own wife and three children. Podchlebnik became a key witness in 1945 at the Chełmno Trials of the former ''SS'' men from the SS Special Detachment '' Kulmhof''. Decades later in 1961 he gave testimony at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Podchlebnik was also interviewed by Claude Lanzmann for the documentary film Shoah. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Simon Srebnik
Szymon (Shimon, Simon) Srebrnik (April 10, 1930 – August 16, 2006) was a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor of the Chełmno extermination camp – a German Nazi death camp established in occupied Poland during World War II. Srebrnik escaped after being shot in the back of his head at close range, two days before the Russians arrived in 1945. His testimony along with that of the few other witnesses was critical to prosecution of camp personnel and other Nazi officials, because of the destruction of evidence by the Germans of their mass extermination of Jews in Chełmno. At the age of fifteen, Srebrnik testified in June 1945 in the Polish trial of Chełmno personnel. He testified again about Chełmno in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, and in the Chełmno trials in Germany (1962–1965) of the former SS men from the SS Special Detachment '' Kulmhof''. Life Ghetto and camp Srebrnik witnessed his father killed in the Łódź Ghetto. He was thirteen years old when ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hans Johann Bothmann
Hans Bothmann or Hans Johann Bothmann (November 11, 1911 – April 4, 1946)IPNHans Bothmann''Concentration camps' functionaries - biographical notes and witness' account.'' Institute of National Remembrance 2012. was the last commandant of the Chełmno extermination camp from 1942 on ( SS card number 117630); leader of the ''SS Special Detachment Bothmann'' conducting the extermination of Jews from the Łódź Ghetto and other places. He committed suicide in British custody in April 1946 while in Heide. Career Bothmann was born in Lohe-Rickelshof village in the Dithmarschen district of Holstein (northern Germany) in November 1911. He joined the paramilitary Hitler Youth (''Hitlerjugend'', HJ) in 1932. Soon, he got a full-time job with the Gestapo office ''Stapoleitstelle Berlin'', and in 1937 became a ''Kriminalkommissar'' there. He was 27 years old at the time of the German invasion of Poland. During the summer of 1942, after replacing ''Hauptsturmführer'' Herbert Lange at ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Herbert Lange
Herbert Lange (29 September 1909 – 20 April 1945) was an '' SS-Sturmbannführer'' and the commandant of Chełmno death camp until April 1942; leader of the ''SS Special Detachment Lange'' conducting the murder of Jews from the Łódź Ghetto. He was responsible for numerous crimes against humanity including the murder of mental patients in Poland and in Germany during the ''Aktion T4'' "euthanasia" programme and becoming one of the key originators of the Holocaust. Biography Lange studied law, but failed to obtain a degree and he subsequently joined the NSDAP (Nazi Party) on 1 May 1932. He enlisted in the ''Sturmabteilung'' (SA) three months later, and the following year, he joined the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS). He subsequently joined the police force, becoming a deputy commissioner in 1935. Crimes against humanity Lange entered Poland with ''Einsatzgruppe'' Naumann ( EG VI) during the September campaign. On 9 November 1939, following a Nazi German victory, Lange was promo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gas Chamber
A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or other animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. Poisonous agents used include hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide. History General Rochambeau developed a rudimentary method in 1803, during the Haitian Revolution, filling ships' cargo holds with sulfur dioxide to suffocate prisoners of war. The scale of these operations was brought to larger public attention in the 2005 book '' Napoleon's Crimes'', although the allegations of scale and sources were heavily questioned. In America, the utilization of a gas chamber was first proposed by Allan McLane Hamilton to the state of Nevada. Since then, gas chambers have been used as a method of execution of condemned prisoners in the United States and continue to be a legal execution method in three states, seeing a possible, legislated reintroduction, although redundant in practice since the early 1990s. Lithuania ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Majdanek Trials
The Majdanek trials were a series of consecutive war-crime trials held in Poland and in Germany during and after World War II, constituting the overall longest Nazi war crimes trial in history spanning over 30 years. The first judicial trial of Majdanek extermination camp officials took place from November 27, 1944, to December 2, 1944, in Lublin, Poland. The last one, held at the District Court of Düsseldorf began on November 26, 1975, and concluded on June 30, 1981. It was West Germany's longest and most expensive trial, lasting 474 sessions. A number of former high ranking SS men, camp officials, camp guards, and SS staff were arraigned before the courts on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed at Majdanek in the period between October 1, 1941, and July 22, 1944. Notably, only 170 Nazis who served at Majdanek had been prosecuted at all, of the 1,037 camp personnel known by name. Half of the defendants charged by the West German justice system were set f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Death Camp
Nazi Germany used six extermination camps (german: Vernichtungslager), also called death camps (), or killing centers (), in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million peoplemostly Jewsin the Holocaust. The victims of death camps were primarily murdered by gassing, either in permanent installations constructed for this specific purpose, or by means of gas vans. The six extermination camps were Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps also used extermination through labour in order to kill their prisoners. The idea of mass extermination with the use of stationary facilities, to which the victims were taken by train, was the result of earlier Nazi experimentation with chemically manufactured poison gas during the secretive Aktion T4 euthanasia programme against hospital patients with mental and physical disabilities. The technology was adapted, expanded, and applied in wart ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Koło, Łódź Voivodeship
Koło is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Sulejów, within Piotrków County, Łódź Voivodeship, in central Poland. It lies approximately north-west of Sulejów, east of Piotrków Trybunalski, and south-east of the regional capital Łódź Łódź, also rendered in English as Lodz, is a city in central Poland and a former industrial centre. It is the capital of Łódź Voivodeship, and is located approximately south-west of Warsaw. The city's coat of arms is an example of cant .... References Villages in Piotrków County {{Piotrków-geo-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
GFDL
The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify (except for "invariant sections") a work and requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license. Copies may also be sold commercially, but, if produced in larger quantities (greater than 100), the original document or source code must be made available to the work's recipient. The GFDL was designed for manuals, textbooks, other reference and instructional materials, and documentation which often accompanies GNU software. However, it can be used for any text-based work, regardless of subject matter. For example, the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia uses the GFDL (coupled with the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License) for much of its text, excluding text that was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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