Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
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 ...
invasion of Poland
The invasion of Poland (1 September – 6 October 1939) was a joint attack on the Republic of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union which marked the beginning of World War II. The German invasion began on 1 September 1939, one week af ...
the Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
, and again from , to , during the Soviet counter-offensive. In 1943, modifications were made to the camp's killing methods as the reception building had already been dismantled.
At the very minimum, 152,000 people were murdered in the camp, which would make it the fifth deadliest extermination camp, after Auschwitz, Treblinka,
Bełżec
Belzec (English: or , Polish: ) was a Nazi German extermination camp built by the SS for the purpose of implementing the secretive Operation Reinhard, the plan to murder all History of Jews in Poland, Polish Jews, a major part of the "Fina ...
, and Sobibór. However, the West German prosecution, citing Nazi figures during the Chełmno trials of 1962–65, laid charges for at least 180,000 victims. The Polish official estimates, in the early postwar period, have suggested much higher numbers, up to a total of 340,000 men, women, and children. The gives the figure of around 200,000, the vast majority of whom were Jews of west-central Poland, along with
Romani
Romani may refer to:
Ethnicities
* Romani people, an ethnic group of Northern Indian origin, living dispersed in Europe, the Americas and Asia
** Romani genocide, under Nazi rule
* Romani language, any of several Indo-Aryan languages of the Roma ...
people from the region, as well as foreign Jews from Hungary, Bohemia and Moravia, Germany, Luxembourg, and Austria transported to Chełmno via the
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 ...
, on top of the Soviet prisoners of war. The victims were murdered using gas vans. Chełmno was a place of early experimentation in the development of the Nazi extermination programme.
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (Russian language, Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist R ...
troops captured the town of Chełmno on . By then, the Germans had already destroyed evidence of the camp's existence, leaving no prisoners behind. One of the camp survivors, who was fifteen years old at the time, testified that only three Jewish males had escaped successfully. The ''Holocaust Encyclopedia'' counted seven Jews who escaped; among them was the author of the
Grojanowski Report
The Grojanowski Report is an eye-witness account about atrocities in the Nazi Chełmno extermination camp, written in 1942 by Polish-Jewish escapee from the camp, Szlama Ber Winer (also known incorrectly as Szlawek Bajler), under the pseudonym of ...
, written under an assumed name by
Szlama Ber Winer
Szlama Ber Winer, '' nom de guerre'' Yakov (Ya'akov) Grojanowski (23 September 1911 – ), was a Polish Jew from Izbica Kujawska, who escaped from the Chełmno extermination camp during the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland. Szlamek (the diminut ...
, a prisoner in the Jewish ''
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 vict ...
Adolf Eichmann
Otto Adolf Eichmann ( ,"Eichmann" '' Jerusalem
Jerusalem (; he, יְרוּשָׁלַיִם ; ar, القُدس ) (combining the Biblical and common usage Arabic names); grc, Ἱερουσαλήμ/Ἰεροσόλυμα, Hierousalḗm/Hierosóluma; hy, Երուսաղեմ, Erusałēm. i ...
. Two survivors testified also at the camp personnel trials conducted in 1962–65 by
West Germany
West Germany is the colloquial term used to indicate the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG; german: Bundesrepublik Deutschland , BRD) between its formation on 23 May 1949 and the German reunification through the accession of East Germany on 3 O ...
Poland
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, , is a country in Central Europe. Poland is divided into Voivodeships of Poland, sixteen voivodeships and is the fifth most populous member state of the European Union (EU), with over 38 mill ...
, annexed to Nazi Germany in 1939 and renamed ''Kulmhof'' during
German occupation
German-occupied Europe refers to the sovereign countries of Europe which were wholly or partly occupied and civil-occupied (including puppet governments) by the military forces and the government of Nazi Germany at various times between 193 ...
. As the Nazis themselves exclusively referred to the camp as "Kulmhof", the name "Chełmno extermination camp" is not historically accurate, with its use perhaps deriving from the Main Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland shortly after the war.
Chełmno (Kulmhof) camp was set up by '' SS-Sturmbannführer'' Herbert Lange, following his gas van experiments in the murder of 1,558 Polish prisoners of the Soldau concentration camp northeast of Chełmno nad Nerem. In October 1941, Lange toured the area looking for a suitable site for an extermination centre, and chose Chełmno on the Ner, because of the estate, with a large manor house similar to Sonnenstein, which could be used for mass admissions of prisoners with only minor modifications. Staff for the facility was selected personally by Ernst Damzog, Commander of Security Police and SD from headquarters in occupied
Poznań
Poznań () is a city on the River Warta in west-central Poland, within the Greater Poland region. The city is an important cultural and business centre, and one of Poland's most populous regions with many regional customs such as Saint Joh ...
(Posen). Damzog formed the '' SS-Sonderkommando Lange'' (special detachment), and appointed Herbert Lange the first camp commandant because of his experience in the mass-murder of Poles from ''Wartheland'' ( Wielkopolska). Lange served with '' Einsatzgruppe'' VI during Operation Tannenberg. Already by mid-1940, Lange and his men were responsible for the murder of about 1,100 patients in Owińska, 2,750 patients at Kościan, 1,558 patients and 300 Poles at Działdowo, and hundreds of Poles at
Fort VII
Fort VII, officially ''Konzentrationslager Posen'' (renamed later), was a Nazi German death camp set up in Poznań in German-occupied Poland during World War II, located in one of the 19th-century forts circling the city. According to different e ...
where the mobile gas-chamber (''Einsatzwagen'') was invented. Their earlier hospital victims were usually shot out of town in the back of the neck. The two so-called ''Kaisers-Kaffe'' vans, manufactured by the Gaubschat factory in Berlin, were delivered in November. Chełmno began mass gassing operations on using vehicles approved by '' Obergruppenführer'' Reinhard Heydrich from RSHA. Two months later, on , Heydrich, who had already confirmed the effectiveness of industrial-scale murder by exhaust fumes, called a secret meeting of German officials to undertake the European-wide Final Solution to the Jewish Question under the pretext of "resettlement".
The use of the killing centre at Chełmno for the mass murder of rapidly growing number of Jews deported to the Łódź Ghetto ("Special Handling", the '' Sonderbehandlung'') was initiated by Arthur Greiser, the Governor of ''Reichsgau Wartheland''. In a letter to Himmler dated , Greiser referred to an authorization he had received from him and Reinhard Heydrich, stating that the clandestine program of murdering 100,000 Polish Jews, about one-third of the total Jewish population of ''Wartheland'', was expected to be carried out soon. Greiser's plan was based on the German government's decision of October 1941 to deport German Jews to the Łódź Ghetto. Greiser and the SS decided to create space for the incoming Jews by annihilating the existing Polish-Jewish population in his district.
According to post-war testimony of Wilhelm Koppe, Higher SS and Police Leader for ''Reichsgau Wartheland'', Koppe received an order from Himmler to liaise with Greiser regarding the ''Sonderbehandlung'' requested by the latter. Koppe entrusted the extermination operation to ''SS-Standartenführer'' Ernst Damzog from Security Police in
Poznań
Poznań () is a city on the River Warta in west-central Poland, within the Greater Poland region. The city is an important cultural and business centre, and one of Poland's most populous regions with many regional customs such as Saint Joh ...
. Damzog supervised the camp's daily operations thereafter.
Architecture
The killing center consisted of a vacated manorial estate in the village of Chełmno on the Ner river, and a large forest clearing about northwest of Chełmno, off the road to Koło town with a sizable Jewish population which had been previously ghettoized. The two sites were known respectively as the ''Schlosslager'' (manor-house camp) and the ''Waldlager'' (forest camp).Alan Heath (Sep 16, 2007), (''about razed manor house''). Narration by the author. Retrieved Alan Heath is a British publisher, writer and Holocaust historian specialising in Nazi death camps. He is the author of a series of video essays about the German killing factories in Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek and Auschwitz. In March 2007, Heath accompanied Holocaust denier David Irving on a tour of the death camps in Poland. On the grounds of the estate was a large two-story brick
country house
An English country house is a large house or mansion in the English countryside. Such houses were often owned by individuals who also owned a Townhouse (Great Britain), town house. This allowed them to spend time in the country and in the cit ...
called "the palace". Its rooms were adapted to use as the reception offices, including space for the victims to undress and to give up their valuables. The '' SS'' and police staff and guards were housed in other buildings in the town. The Germans had a high wooden fence built around the manor house and the grounds. The clearing in the forest camp, which contained large mass graves, was likewise fenced off. The camp consisted of separate zones: an administration section with nearby barracks and storage for plundered goods; and the more distant burial and cremation site to which victims were delivered in hermetically proofed ''superstructures''.Alan Heath (Sep 20, 2007), (the road through town to forest). Narration by Alan Heath.
Operations
The ''SS-Sonderkommando "Lange"'' was supplied with two vans initially, each carrying about 50 Jews gassed en route to the forest. Later on, Lange was given three gas vans by the RSHA in Berlin for the murder of greater numbers of victims. The vehicles had been converted to mobile gas-chambers by the Gaubschat company ( de) in Berlin which, by June 1942, produced twenty of them in accordance with the SS purchase order. The sealed compartments (also called superstructures) installed on the chassis had floor openings – about in diameter – with metal pipes welded below, into which the engine exhaust was directed. The exhaust gases causing death by
asphyxia
Asphyxia or asphyxiation is a condition of deficient supply of oxygen to the body which arises from abnormal breathing. Asphyxia causes generalized hypoxia, which affects primarily the tissues and organs. There are many circumstances that ca ...
were tested by a chemist from the mass murder operation Action T4 to make sure they contained large enough amounts of
carbon monoxide
Carbon monoxide ( chemical formula CO) is a colorless, poisonous, odorless, tasteless, flammable gas that is slightly less dense than air. Carbon monoxide consists of one carbon atom and one oxygen atom connected by a triple bond. It is the si ...
(or 1% concentration), to form carboxyhaemoglobin, a deadly blood agent, in combining with haemoglobin in the cells. The victims were thereby deprived ''internally'' of life-giving
oxygen
Oxygen is the chemical element with the symbol O and atomic number 8. It is a member of the chalcogen group in the periodic table, a highly reactive nonmetal, and an oxidizing agent that readily forms oxides with most elements as we ...
before death.
The SS had first used pure carbon monoxide from steel cylinders to murder mental patients in extermination hospitals of Action T4, and therefore had considerable knowledge of its efficacy. For all practical purposes, the extermination by mobile gas vans proved equally efficient following Operation Barbarossa of 1941. In the newly occupied territories, the gas vans were used to murder mental patients as well as Jews in the extermination ghettos. By employing just three vans on the Eastern Front (the ''Opel-Blitz'' and the larger ''Saurerwagen''), without any faults occurring in the vehicles, the '' Einsatzgruppen'' were able to murder 97,000 captives in less than six months between December 1941 and June 1942. The SS relayed urgent requests to Berlin for more vans.A secret memorandum of written by one Willy Just, to the Director of section II D ''SS-Obersturmbannführer'' Walter Rauff at the Reich Main Security Office (''Reichssicherheitshauptamt'' in Berlin), contained five pages of numbered paragraphs, suggesting mechanical improvements to gas vans. In the opening line, the letter stated: "ninety-seven thousand have been processed, using three vans, without any defects showing up in the vehicles" (see attached photocopies at HolocaustHistory.org) '' In his postwar testimony ''Obersturmbannführer''
August Becker
August Becker (17 August 1900 – 31 December 1967) was a mid-ranking functionary in the SS of Nazi Germany and chemist in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). He helped design the vans with a gas chamber built into the back compartment u ...
, the gas van inspector, claimed that the letter was sent by himself on to Walter Rauff in RSHA. ''See:'' Nevertheless,
Christopher Browning
Christopher Robert Browning (born May 22, 1944) is an American historian who is the professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). A specialist on the Holocaust, Browning is known for his work documenting ...
confirmed in his Evidence for the Implementation of the Final Solution ' (2000) that the letter was sent by Just, not by Becker, as shown through the archives of RSHA: Just an Rauff, 5.6.42; BA, R 58/871.
The rank and file of the so-called ''SS Special Detachment Lange'' was made up of
Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one or ...
,
Criminal Police
In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority. The term ''crime'' does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,Farmer, Lindsay: "Crime, definitions of", in Ca ...
, and
Order Police
The ''Ordnungspolizei'' (), abbreviated ''Orpo'', meaning "Order Police", were the uniformed police force in Nazi Germany from 1936 to 1945. The Orpo organisation was absorbed into the Nazi monopoly on power after regional police jurisdiction w ...
personnel, under the leadership of Security Police and SD officers. Herbert Lange was replaced as camp commandant in March (or April) 1942 by Schultze. He was succeeded by SS-Captain Hans Bothmann, who formed and led the ''Special Detachment Bothmann''. The maximum strength of each Special Detachment was just under 100 men, of whom around 80 belonged to the Order Police. The local ''SS'' also maintained a "paper command" of the camps '' Allgemeine-SS'' inspectorate, to which most of the Chełmno camp staff were attached for administrative purposes. Historians do not believe members of the 120th SS-Standarte office established in Chełmno performed any duties at the camp.
Deportations begin
The ''SS'' and police began murdering victims at Chełmno on . The first people transported to the camp were the Jewish and Romani populations of Koło, Dąbie,
Sompolno
Sompolno is a town in Konin County, Greater Poland Voivodeship, Poland, with 3,700 inhabitants (2004).
History
In the 10th century, the area became part of the emerging Polish state under its first historic ruler Mieszko I. In 1242, Duke Casimir ...
Nowiny Brdowskie
Nowiny Brdowskie is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Babiak, within Koło County, Greater Poland Voivodeship, in west-central Poland. It lies approximately east of Babiak, south-east of Brdów, north-east of Koło, and e ...
and
Kowale Pańskie
Kowale Pańskie () is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Kawęczyn, within Turek County, Greater Poland Voivodeship, in west-central Poland. It lies approximately north of Kawęczyn, south of Turek, and south-east of the regio ...
. A total of 3,830 Jews and around 4,000 Romani were murdered by gas before February 1942. The victims were brought from all over Koło County (german: Landkreis Warthbrücken) to Koło by rail with the last stop in
Powiercie
Powiercie is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Koło, within Koło County, Greater Poland Voivodeship, in west-central Poland. It lies approximately east of Koło and east of the regional capital Poznań.
The village has a popu ...
. Using whips, the Orpo police marched them toward the Warta river near Zawadka, where they were locked overnight in a mill, without food or water. The next morning, they were loaded onto lorries and taken to Chełmno. At "the palace", they were stripped of possessions, transferred to vans, and murdered with exhaust fumes on the way to burial pits in the forest. The daily average for the camp was about six to nine van-loads of the dead. The drivers used
gas-mask
A gas mask is a mask used to protect the wearer from inhaling airborne pollutants and toxic gases. The mask forms a sealed cover over the nose and mouth, but may also cover the eyes and other vulnerable soft tissues of the face. Most gas mask ...
s. From January 1942, the transports included hundreds of Poles and Soviet prisoners of war. In addition, they included over 10,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia and Luxembourg, who had first been deported to the ghetto in Łódź and subsided there already for weeks.
In late February 1942, the secretary of the local Polish council in Chełmno, Stanisław Kaszyński (b. 1903), was arrested for trying to bring public attention to what was being perpetrated at the camp. He was interrogated and executed three days later on February 28, 1942, near a church along with his wife. His secret
communiqué
A press release is an official statement delivered to members of the news media for the purpose of providing information, creating an official statement, or making an announcement directed for public release. Press releases are also considere ...
was intercepted by the ''SS-Sonderkommando''. Today, there is an obelisk to his memory erected at Chełmno on . Over 4,500, Czech Jews from Prague were sent to the
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 ...
before May 1942. One of the sisters of author
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It ty ...
, Valli Kafka (born 1890), was murdered with them before mid-September.
Killing process
During the first five weeks, the murder victims came only from the nearby areas. On reaching their final destination before "transport" to Germany and Austria, the Jews disembarked in the courtyard of the ''Schlosslager'' manor where the ''SS'' men wearing white coats and pretending to be medics waited for them with a translator released earlier from the Gestapo prison in
Poznań
Poznań () is a city on the River Warta in west-central Poland, within the Greater Poland region. The city is an important cultural and business centre, and one of Poland's most populous regions with many regional customs such as Saint Joh ...
. The victims were led to a large empty room and ordered to undress; their clothing stacked for disinfection. They were told that all hidden banknotes would be destroyed during steaming and needed to be taken out and handed over for safe-keeping. Occasionally they were met by a German officer dressed as a local squire with a Tyrolean hat, announcing that some of them would remain there.
Wearing just underwear, with the women allowed to keep
slips Slips (or SLIPS) may refer to:
*Slips (oil drilling)
*SLIPS (Slippery Liquid Infused Porous Surfaces)
*SLIPS (company)
*SLIPS (Sri Lanka Interbank Payment System)
*Slip (cricket), often used in the plural form
*The Slips, a UK electronic music duo
...
on, the victims were taken to the cellar and across the ramp into the back of a gas van holding from 50–70 people each ('' Opel Blitz'') and up to 150 ('' Magirus''). When the van was full, the doors were shut and the engine started. Surviving witnesses heard their screams as they were dying of asphyxiation. After about 5–10 minutes, the vans full of corpses were driven to the forest ''Waldlager'' camp. The vans were unloaded to excavated mass graves, and cleaned by the ''Waldkommando'' before returning to the manor house. ''Scharführer'' Walter Burmeister, a gas-van driver, made sure his own vehicle "would be cleaned of the excretions of the people that had died in it. Afterwards, it would once again be used for gassing" at the loading dock.
Murder of Jews from the Łódź ghetto
On January 16, 1942, the ''SS'' and police began deportations from the Łódź Ghetto lasting for two weeks. German officials with the aid of ''
Ordnungspolizei
The ''Ordnungspolizei'' (), abbreviated ''Orpo'', meaning "Order Police", were the uniformed police force in Nazi Germany from 1936 to 1945. The Orpo organisation was absorbed into the Nazi monopoly on power after regional police jurisdictio ...
'' rounded up 10,000 Polish Jews based on selection by the ghetto ''
Judenrat
A ''Judenrat'' (, "Jewish council") was a World War II administrative agency imposed by Nazi Germany on Jewish communities across occupied Europe, principally within the Nazi ghettos. The Germans required Jews to form a ''Judenrat'' in ever ...
''. The victims were transported from the
Radegast train station
Radogoszcz station (german: Bahnhof Radegast) is a historic railway station in Łódź, Poland. The station, which was originally built between 1926 and 1937, was used extensively during The Holocaust. It served as the '' Umschlagplatz'' for trans ...
in Łódź, to Koło railway station, northwest of Chełmno. There, the ''SS'' and police personnel supervised transfer of prisoners from the freight as well as passenger trains, to smaller-size cargo trains running on narrow gauge tracks, which took them from Koło to a much smaller
Powiercie
Powiercie is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Koło, within Koło County, Greater Poland Voivodeship, in west-central Poland. It lies approximately east of Koło and east of the regional capital Poznań.
The village has a popu ...
station,Alan Heath, (deportation photo, 1 minute). Narration by Alan Heath. just outside Chełmno.
As round-ups in Łódź normally took place in the morning, it was usually late afternoon by the time Jews disembarked from the Holocaust trains in Powiercie. Therefore, they were marched to a disused mill at Zawadki some two kilometres distance where they spent the night. The mill building continued to be used after the railway repairs, if transports arrived late.Alan Heath, . Narration by Alan Heath. The following morning the Jews were transported from Zawadki by truck, in numbers which could be easily controlled at their destination. The victims were "processed" immediately upon arrival at the manor-house.Alan Heath, , Narration by Alan Heath. Beginning in late July 1942, the victims were brought to the camp directly from Powiercie after the regular railway line linking Koło with Dąbie was restored; and the bridge over the Rgilewka River had been repaired.Alan Heath, . Narration by Alan Heath.
''Sonderkommando''
The German SS staff selected young Jewish prisoners from incoming transports to join the camp ''
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 vict ...
'', a special unit of 50 to 60 men deployed at the forest burial camp. They removed corpses from the gas-vans and placed them in mass graves. The large trenches were quickly filled, but the smell of decomposing bodies began to permeate the surrounding countryside including nearby villages. In the spring of 1942, the ''SS'' ordered burning of the bodies in the forest. The bodies were cremated on open air grids constructed of concrete slabs and rail tracks; pipes were used for air ducts, and long ash pans were built below the grid.Alan Heath, "The Destruction of Corpses at Chelmno nad Nerem YouTube video. Narration by Alan Heath. Later, the Jewish Sonderkommando had to exhume the mass graves and burn the previously interred bodies. In addition, they sorted the clothing of the victims, and cleaned the excrement and blood from the vans.
A small detachment of about 15 Jews worked at the manor house, sorting and packing the belongings of the victims. Between eight and ten skilled craftsmen worked there to produce or repair goods for the ''SS'' Special Detachment.Claude Lanzmann, '' Shoah'' (1985) documentary.
Periodically, the ''SS'' executed the members of the Jewish special detachment and replaced them with workers selected from recent transports. The ''SS'' held jumping contests and races among the prisoners, who were shackled with chains on their ankles, to deem who was fit to continue working. The losers of such contests were shot.
Stages of camp operation
The early killing process carried out by the SS from December 8, 1941, until mid-January 1942, was intended to murder Jews from all nearby towns and villages, which were slated for German colonization (''
Lebensraum
(, ''living space'') is a German concept of settler colonialism, the philosophy and policies of which were common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s. First popularized around 1901, '' lso in:' became a geopolitical goal of Impe ...
''). From mid-January 1942, the SS and Order Police began transporting Jews in crowded freight and passenger trains from Łódź. By then, Jews had also been deported to Łódź from Germany, Bohemia-Moravia, and Luxembourg, and were included in the transports at that time. The transports included most of the 5,000
Roma
Roma or ROMA may refer to:
Places Australia
* Roma, Queensland, a town
** Roma Airport
** Roma Courthouse
** Electoral district of Roma, defunct
** Town of Roma, defunct town, now part of the Maranoa Regional Council
* Roma Street, Brisbane, a ...
(Gypsies) who had been deported from Austria. Throughout 1942, the Jews from ''Wartheland'' were still being processed; in March 1943 the SS declared the district '' judenfrei''. Other victims murdered at the killing center included several hundred Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war.
During the summer of 1942, the new commandant Bothmann made substantial changes to the camp's murder techniques. The change was prompted by two incidents in March and April of that year. First, the gas-van broke down on the highway while full of living victims. Many passers-by heard their loud cries. Soon after that, the Saurer van exploded while the driver was revving its engine at the loading ramp; the gassing compartment was full of living Jews. The explosion blew off the locked back door, and badly burned the victims inside. Drivers were replaced. Bothmann's modifications included adding poison to gasoline. There is evidence that some red powder and a fluid were delivered from Germany by Maks Sado freight company, in order to murder the victims more quickly. Another major change involved parking the gas vans while prisoners were murdered. They were no longer driven en route to the forest cremation area with living victims inside.
After having annihilated almost all Jews of ''Wartheland'' District, in March 1943 the Germans closed the Chełmno killing centre, while Operation Reinhard was still underway elsewhere. Other death camps had faster methods of murdering and incinerating people. Chełmno was not a part of Reinhard. The ''SS'' ordered complete demolition of ''Schlosslager,'' along with the manor house, which was levelled. To hide the evidence of the ''SS''-committed war crimes, from 1943 onward, the Germans ordered the exhumation of all remains and burning of bodies in open-air cremation pits by a unit of ''Sonderkommando'' 1005. The bones were crushed on cement with mallets and added to the ashes. These were transported every night in sacks made of blankets to river Warta (or to the
Ner River NER may refer to:
* New European Recordings, a record label
* ISO 3166-1 three letter code for Niger
* Named entity recognition, a text processing task that identifies certain words as belonging to one class or another
* Northeast Regional, an Amtr ...
) on the other side of Zawadka, where they were dumped into the water from a bridge and from a flat-bottomed boat. Eventually, the camp authorities bought a bone-crushing machine (''Knochenmühle'') from Schriever and Co. in Hamburg to speed up the process.
The final extermination phase
On , in spite of earlier demolition of ''the palace'', the ''SS'' renewed gassing operations at Chełmno in order to complete the annihilation of the remaining 70,000 Jewish prisoners of the ghetto in Łódź,Jewish Virtual Library Łódź. Overview of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto History. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Online Exhibition: "Give Me Your Children." Voices from the Lodz Ghetto. Retrieved June 30, 2015. the last ghetto in occupied Poland to produce war supplies for the Germans. The Special Detachment "Bothmann" returned to the forest and resumed murdering victims at a smaller camp, consisting of brand new wooden barracks along with new crematory pyres.
First, the victims were taken to the desecrated church in Chełmno where they spent the night if necessary, and left their bundles behind on the way to the reception area. They were driven to the forest, where the camp authorities had constructed two fenced-out barracks for undressing before "shower", and two new open-air cremation pits, further up. The ''SS'' and police guarded the victims as they took off their clothes and gave up valuables before entering gas-vans. In this final phase of the camp operation, some 25,000 Jews were murdered. Their bodies were burned immediately after death. From mid-July 1944, the ''SS'' and police began deporting the remaining inhabitants of the Łódź ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In September 1944, the ''SS'' brought in a new Commando 1005 of Jewish prisoners from outside the ''Wartheland'' District to exhume and cremate remaining corpses and to remove evidence of the mass murder operations. A month later, the ''SS'' executed about half of the 80-man detachment after most of the work was done. The gas vans were sent back to Berlin. The remaining Jewish workers were executed just before the German retreat from the Chełmno killing center on January 18, 1945, as the Soviet army approached (it reached the camp two days later). The 15-year-old Jewish prisoner Simon Srebnik was the only one to survive the last executions with a gunshot wound to the head. Historians estimate that the ''SS'' murdered at least 152,000–180,000 people at Chełmno between December 1941 and March 1943, and from , until the Soviet advance. Note: a 1946–47 report by the placed the number closer to 340,000 based on a statistical approach, as the camp authorities had destroyed all waybills in an effort to hide their actions.Main Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland ''German Crimes in Poland'' (Warsaw: 1946, 1947) , Archive of ''Jewish Gombin Genealogy'', with introduction by Leon Zamosc. ''Note:'' The Main (or Central) Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland ( pl, Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce, GKBZNwP) founded in 1945 was the predecessor of the Institute of National Remembrance (see also the ). ''Quote:'' "The Main Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against the Polish Nation – The Institute of National Memory... has a fifty years long history (1995). The creation of the Main Commission... was preceded by work done in London since 1943 by the Polish Government in Exile."
Chełmno trials
After the war, some Chełmno extermination camp personnel were tried in Poland as well as in other court cases spanning a period of about 20 years. The first judicial trial of three former members of the ''SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof'', including camp's deputy commandant '' Oberscharführer'' Walter Piller, took place in 1945 at the District Court in
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 ...
. The examination of evidence during the investigation was carried out by Judge Władysław Bednarz. The subsequent four trials, held in
Bonn
The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ru ...
, began in 1962 and concluded three years later in 1965 in
Cologne
Cologne ( ; german: Köln ; ksh, Kölle ) is the largest city of the German western state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the fourth-most populous city of Germany with 1.1 million inhabitants in the city proper and 3.6 millio ...
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 vict ...
,'' testified in both the Chelmno Guard and Eichmann trials. Nicknamed ''Spinnefix'' at the camp, Srebnik was recognised by the Chelmno Guards only by this moniker. Walter Burmeister, a gas-van driver (not to be confused with the camp's ''SS-Unterscharfuehrer'' Walter Burmeister), testified in Bonn in 1967.
Survivors
According to the ''Holocaust Encyclopedia'', a total of seven Jews from the burial ''
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 vict ...
'' escaped from the ''Waldlager''. Determining the identities of the few survivors of Chełmno had presented ambiguity because records use different versions of their names. One survivor may not have been recorded in the early postwar years because he did not testify at trials of camp personnel. Five escaped during the winter of 1942, including Mordechaï Podchlebnik, Milnak Meyer, Abraham Tauber, Abram Roj and
Szlama Ber Winer
Szlama Ber Winer, '' nom de guerre'' Yakov (Ya'akov) Grojanowski (23 September 1911 – ), was a Polish Jew from Izbica Kujawska, who escaped from the Chełmno extermination camp during the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland. Szlamek (the diminut ...
(Szlamek Bajler) whose identity was recognized also as Yakov or Jacob Grojanowski.Jon E. Lewis Voices from the Holocaust pages 101–102 (Google Books). Mordechaï Zurawski and Simon Srebnik escaped later. Srebnik was among Jews shot by the Germans two days before the Russians entered Chełmno, but he survived. Winer wrote under pseudonym Grojanowski about the operations of the camp in his ''
Grojanowski Report
The Grojanowski Report is an eye-witness account about atrocities in the Nazi Chełmno extermination camp, written in 1942 by Polish-Jewish escapee from the camp, Szlama Ber Winer (also known incorrectly as Szlawek Bajler), under the pseudonym of ...
'', but he was rounded up with thousands of others and murdered in the gas chamber of Bełżec extermination camp.
In June 1945, both Podchlebnik and Srebnik (then age fifteen), testified at the Chełmno trials of camp personnel in
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 ...
, Poland. In addition to being included in the ''Holocaust Encyclopedia'', Mordechaï Zurawski is included as survivor in three other sources,Gouri, Haim. ''Facing the Glass Booth: The Jerusalem Trial of Adolf Eichmann''. Wayne State University Press, 2004. p. 122. each of which documents his testifying, along with Srebnik and Podchlebnik about his experience at Chełmno, at the 1961 trial of
Adolf Eichmann
Otto Adolf Eichmann ( ,"Eichmann" '' Jerusalem
Jerusalem (; he, יְרוּשָׁלַיִם ; ar, القُدس ) (combining the Biblical and common usage Arabic names); grc, Ἱερουσαλήμ/Ἰεροσόλυμα, Hierousalḗm/Hierosóluma; hy, Երուսաղեմ, Erusałēm. i ...
. In addition, Srebnik testified in the Chelmno Guard Trials of 1962–63. The French director Claude Lanzmann included interviews with Srebnik and Podchlebnik in his documentary '' Shoah'', referring to them as the only two Jewish survivors of Chełmno, but he was in error. Some sources repeat that only Simon Srebnik and Mordechaï Podchlebnik survived the war but these are also in error.Rubenstein, Richard L. ''Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy''. Westminster John Knox Press, 1987. p. 197. Podchlebnik is sometimes referred to as Michał (or Michael), in Polish and English versions of his name.Epstein, Julia. ''Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust''. University of Illinois Press, 2001. p. 58.
Not all escapees have been identified in the postwar period. In 2002 Dr.
Sara Roy
Sara M. Roy is an American political economist and scholar. She is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.
Roy's research and over 100 publications focus on the economy of Gaza and more recent ...
of
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
wrote that her father, Abraham Roy, belonged to the aforementioned survivors.Sara Roy, "Living with the Holocaust: The Journey of a Child of Holocaust Survivors" ''Journal of Palestine Studies'' (32):1, 2002 She said that her father was the escapee recognized by the ''Holocaust Encyclopedia'' as Abram Roj, although she was mistaken about their total number. Two other survivors of Chełmno include Yitzhak Justman and Yerachmiel Yisrael Widawski who escaped together from the forest burial commando in the winter of 1942. They arrived at Piotrków Trybunalski Ghetto in March 1942 and deposited their testimonies with Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lau. Widawski spoke with Rabbi Lau as well as some members of the prewar Communal Council before he left the ghetto, robbing them of their peace of mind with earth-shattering facts about the extermination process. Widawski saw the bodies of thirteen relatives murdered in gas vans including his own fiancée. Both fugitives, Justman and Widawski, arrived also at the Częstochowa Ghetto and met with Rabbi Chanoch Gad Justman. They headed in various directions and made a tremendous effort to inform and warn the Jewish communities about the fate that awaited them, however, many people refused to believe their stories.
See also
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The Holocaust in occupied Poland
The Holocaust in Poland was part of the European-wide Holocaust organized by Nazi Germany and took place in German-occupied Poland. During the genocide, three million Polish Jews were murdered, half of all Jews murdered during the Holoca ...
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is the United States' official memorial to the Holocaust. Adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the USHMM provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust hi ...
, and has been released under the GFDL.'' Wikipedia OTRS ticket no. 2007071910012533 confirmed.