70
years ago on this date, January 18, 1945, the Germans retreated from Chelmno
Extermination Camp. I will post information about this Death Camp from
Wikipedia and other links.
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Monument to victims of
Nazi extermination camp Kulmhof (Chełmno) in occupied Poland, unveiled in 1990
at the site of the camp
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Map of the Holocaust
in Poland during the Second World War (1939-1945) at the time of German
occupation of Poland.
This map shows all
German Nazi extermination camps (or death camps), prominent concentration,
labor and prison camps, major prewar Polish cities with ghettos set up by Nazi
Germany, major deportation routes and major massacre sites.
Notes: 1. Extermination camps were dedicated death camps for gassing, but all camps and ghettos took a toll of many, many lives.
2. Concentration camps
include labor camps, prison camps & transit camps.
3. Not all camps &
ghettos are shown.
4. Borders are at the
height of Axis domination (1942).
5. Regions have German
designations (e.g. "Ostland"), with the country name denoted in
uppercase letters, e.g. LITHUANIA, CZECHOSLOVAKIA, or in parenthesis below the
German occupational designation, e.g. (POLAND).
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Coordinates
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52°6′49″N 18°44′55″E
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Known for
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Genocide during the Holocaust
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Location
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Near Chełmno nad Nerem, General Government
(German-occupied Poland)
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Original use
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Death
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Operational
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December 8, 1941 – April 11, 1943 (1st period),
June 23, 1944 – January 18, 1945 |
Number of gas chambers
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3 gas vans
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Inmates
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mainly Jews
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Killed
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est. 152,000–340,000
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Liberated by
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Soviet Union, January 20, 1945
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Notable inmates
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Mordechaï Podchlebnik, Simon Srebnik, Yakov Grojanowski
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Chełmno extermination camp, known to the Germans as the Kulmhof
concentration camp, was a Nazi German extermination camp
situated 50 kilometres (31 mi) from Łódź, near the Polish village of Chełmno
nad Nerem (Kulmhof an der Nehr in German). After the invasion of Poland
in 1939 Germany annexed
the area as part of the new territory of Reichsgau
Wartheland aiming at its complete "Germanization". The camp was set up
specifically for that process. It operated from December 8, 1941 to April 11,
1943 during Aktion Reinhard
(the most deadly phase of the Holocaust),
and from June 23, 1944 to January 18, 1945 during the Soviet counter-offensive.
It was built to exterminate Jews of the Łódź Ghetto and
the local Polish inhabitants of Reichsgau Wartheland (Warthegau).
In 1943 modifications were made to the camp's killing methods, as the reception
building was already dismantled.
Further information: The Holocaust in Poland and Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland
At
a very minimum 152,000 people (Bohn) were killed in the camp, though the West
German prosecution citing Nazi figures during the Chełmno Trials of 1962–65, laid charges for
at least 180,000 Jews murdered there. The Polish estimates in the early postwar
period suggested a great deal more, up to a total of 340,000 victims, the vast
majority of whom were Jews. The murdered came chiefly from Łódź and the surrounding area, along with Romani from Greater Poland. But Jews from Hungary,
Bohemia, Moravia, Germany, Luxemburg, and Austria were also transported to
Chelmno via the Łódź Ghetto, and Soviet
prisoners of war were killed there. The camp killed most of the
victims by the use of gas vans. It was a
center for early experimentation and development of methods of mass murder,
some of which were applied in later phases of the Holocaust.
One
of the camp survivors testified that only three Jewish males had escaped the
Chełmno extermination camp successfully; he was fifteen years old. The Holocaust
Encyclopedia noted that seven escaped from work details during the early
1940s; among them was Yakov Grojanowski,
who documented the camp's operations in his Grojanowski Report.
But he was later captured and killed at another death camp before war's end. In
June 1945 two survivors testified at a trial of captured camp personnel in Łódź, Poland. The three best-known
survivors testified about their Chełmno experiences at the 1961 trial of Adolf
Eichmann in Jerusalem. Two also testified at the camp
personnel trials conducted in 1962–65 by West Germany.
Command
structure
Setting
up the extermination camp at Chełmno was initiated by the Governor (Reichsstatthalter)
of the Reichsgau Wartheland, Arthur Greiser. In a letter to Himmler dated
30 May 1942, Greiser referred to an authorisation he had received from him and Reinhard Heydrich, to start the Sonderbehandlung (Special Handling,
i.e. mass killing without judicial process) of 100,000 Jews, about one-third of
the total Jewish population of the Wartheland territory. The letter
stated that the process of killing those Jews was expected to be completed very
soon. One theory is that Greiser's request arose from the German Government's
decision of October 1941 to deport German Jews to the Łódź Ghetto (Litzmannstadt) in
central Poland. Greiser wanted to create space for the incoming German Jews by
killing off part of the existing Polish Jewish population.
According
to post-war testimony by the Higher SS
and Police Leader for Reichsgau Wartheland, SS General Wilhelm Koppe, he received an order from
Himmler to liaise with Reichsstatthalter Greiser to carry out the Sonderbehandlung
requested by the latter. Koppe entrusted the extermination operation to SS-Standartenführer
Ernst Damzog, Commander of Security Police
and SD from the
headquarters in occupied Poznań (Posen). Damzog
personally selected staff for the killing centre and later supervised its daily
operation. Damzog formed an SS-Sonderkommando
(special detachment) commanded by SS Captain Herbert Lange who was appointed the first
camp commander. Lange had previous experience with mass killing of Poles in the
Wartheland region (Wielkopolska)
during the Euthanasia Aktion of mid-1940, when his forces used a mobile
gas-chamber (Einsatzwagen) as well as shooting other victims. In October
1941, Lange toured the area looking for a suitable site for an extermination
centre, and finally chose Chełmno (Kulmhof) because of the estate. He was the
first commander of forces at the camp.
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A destroyed
Magirus-Deutz van found in 1945 in Koło (Kolo), Poland, not far from the
Kulmhof (Chelmno) extermination camp. The same type of van was used by the
Nazis for suffocation, with the exhaust fumes diverted into the sealed rear
compartment where the victims were locked in. This particular van has not been
modified yet, as explained by World
War II Today (read) sourced to Office of the United States Chief Counsel
for Prosecution of Axis Criminality publication Nazi Conspiracy and
Aggression – Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Office, 1946, Vol III, p. 418;
nevertheless it gives a good idea about the whole process.
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Architecture
The
killing center consisted of a vacated manorial estate in the town of Chełmno
and a large forest clearing about 4 km (2.5 mi) northwest of Chełmno,
off the east side of the road to Koło and abutting the village of Rzuchów to
the south. These sites were known respectively as the Schlosslager
(manor-house camp) and the Waldlager (forest camp). On the grounds of
the estate was a large two-story brick country house called "the palace."
Its rooms were adapted to use as the reception offices, including rooms 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 space for mass graves, was
likewise fenced off. The camp consisted of three parts: an administration
section, barracks and storage for plundered goods; and a burial and cremation
site.
Operations
The
SS-Sonderkommando "Lange" was supplied with three gas vans,
assigned by the RSHA in Berlin, for killing mass numbers of
victims. These vehicles had been converted to mobile gas-chambers by the use of
sealed compartments installed on the chassis, into which the engine exhaust was
directed by an attached pipe. The Germans had used such vans successfully in
September 1941 to kill mental patients in the occupied Soviet Union. For all practical purposes,
the extermination by mobile gas vans proved very efficient. On June 5, 1942
inspector Becker wrote to Obersturmbannfuhrer Rauff in RSHA that, by
using just three vans on the Eastern Front (the Opel-Blitz and the
larger Saurerwagen), without any faults, they were able to
"process" 97,000 captives in less than six months between December
1941 and June 1942.
The
rank and file of the so-called SS Special Detachment Lange was made up
of Gestapo,
Criminal Police, and Order Police
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.
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Ghetto Litzmannstadt:
Children rounded up for deportation to the Kulmhof death camp
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Deportations begin
The
SS and police began killing operations at Chełmno on December 8, 1941.
The first people transported to the camp were the Jewish and Romany populations
of Koło, Dąbie,
Sompolno, Kłodawa, Babiak, Izbica Kujawska, Bugaj,
Nowiny Brdowskie and Kowale Pańskie. A total of 3,830 Jews and
around 4,000 Gypsies were killed by gas before February 1942. First, the
victims were brought from all over Landkreis Warthbrücken to Powiercie by
rail. Using whips, the Nazis marched them toward the river near Zawadki, where
they were locked overnight in a mill, without food or water. The next morning,
they were loaded onto lorries and taken to Chełmno. They were transferred to
vans and gassed to death with the exhaust fumes on the way to the burial pits
in the forest. The daily average for the camp was about 6 to 9 van-loads of the
dead. The drivers used gas-masks. From
January 1942 the transports included hundreds of Poles and Soviet prisoners of
war. In addition, they included Jews from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia
and Luxemburg, who had first been deported to the ghetto in Łódź, a railroad hub, where they had been
subsiding for some time. One of the sisters of author Franz Kafka, Valeria Pollakova (born 1890)
was sent to the Łódź Ghetto from Prague on September 10, 1942, her last known
destination. She may have been gassed at Chełmno or died in the ghetto before
that.
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 by the church along with his
wife. His secret communiqué was intercepted by the SS-Sonderkommando.
Today, there is an obelisk to his memory at Chełmno, erected on August 7, 1991.
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| Chelmno extermination camp did not have direct rail connections. Jews were delivered by train to Koło, then to nearby Powiercie, |
Killing
process
During
the first five weeks, the murder victims came from the nearby areas. They were
transported to the manor house (Schlosslager) in Chełmno under the guard
of Special Detachment called SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof commanded by
Herbert Lange. The victims, mostly Jews, disembarked at the courtyard and
entered the manor house, where the SS men, wearing white coats and
pretending to be medics, waited for them with a translator released from the
Gestapo prison in Poznań. The deportees were told to undress for bathing, and
to have their clothes disinfected before transport to Germany and Austria.
Occasionally they were met by a German officer dressed as a local squire with a
feather hat, announcing that some of them would remain there.
The
Jews were led to a special room to strip and hand over their valuables. They
were told that all hidden banknotes would be destroyed during steaming and
needed to be taken out and handed over for safe-keeping. Wearing just
underwear, with the women allowed to keep slips on, they 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, pumping fumes into the rear
compartment. After about 5–10 minutes, the victims were killed by asphyxiation.
Witnesses heard their screams as they were dying. The vans full of corpses were
driven 4 km (2.5 mi) to the forest Waldlager camp, to
previously excavated mass graves. The vans were unloaded and cleaned by the Waldkommando,
and then returned to the loading dock at the manor house.
Murder
of Jews from the Łódź ghetto
On
January 16, 1942, the SS and police began deportations from the Łódź
Ghetto (Litzmannstadt). German officials transported the Jews from Łódź
by train to Koło railway station, six miles (10 km) northwest of Chełmno.
There, the SS and police personnel supervised transfer of the Jews from
the freight as well as passenger trains, to smaller-size cargo trains running
on a narrow-gauge track, which took them from Koło to the Powiercie station,
three miles (5 km) northwest of Chełmno. Beginning in late July 1942, the
victims were brought to the camp directly after the regular railway line
linking Koło with Dąbie was restored; the bridge over the Rgilewka River had
been repaired.
As
round-ups in Łódź normally took place in the morning, it was usually late
afternoon by the time the victims arrived by rail. Therefore they were marched
to a disused mill at Zawadki some two kilometres from Powiercie where they
spent the night. The mill continued to be used after the railway repairs, if
transports arrived late. The following morning the Jews were transported from
Zawadki by truck, in numbers which could be easily controlled at their
destination point. They were "processed" immediately upon arrival at
the manor-house camp.
Sonderkommando
German
staff selected young Jewish prisoners from incoming transports to join the camp
Sonderkommando, 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. 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.
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 kill Jews and Poles from all nearby towns and
villages, which were slated for German colonization (Lebensraum). 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 (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 killing methods. 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
Sauer 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 to the killing methods 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 kill the victims more quickly.
Another major change involved parking the gas vans while prisoners were killed.
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 killing 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) 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
June 23, 1944, in spite of earlier demolitions, the SS renewed gassing
operations at Chełmno in order to complete the liquidation of the remaining
70,000 Jewish prisoners of the Łódź ghetto, producing war supplies for the
Germans. The Special Detachment "Bothmann" returned to the forest and
resumed killing operations at a smaller camp, consisting of brand new wooden
barracks along with new pyres.
First,
the new victims were taken to the church building in Chełmno where they were
ordered to leave their bundles behind. They were driven to the forest, where
the camp authorities had constructed two fenced-out reception barracks for
undressing, 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
killed at least 152,000–180,000 people at Chełmno between December 1941 and
March 1943, and from June 23, 1944 until the Soviet advance. Note: a 1946–47
report by the Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland
(IPN) 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.
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| A remnant of the open-air mass cremation structure at the forest camp, with memorial plaque |
Testimonies
Main
article: Chełmno Trials
After
the war, Chełmno extermination camp personnel were tried in court cases in
Poland and in over a period of about 20 years. The first judicial trial of the
former members of the SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof took place in 1945 at
the District Court in Łódź. The subsequent four trials, held in Bonn, began in
1962 and concluded three years later in 1965 in Cologne.
Adolf
Eichmann testified about the camp during his 1961 war-crimes trial in Jerusalem.
He visited it once in late 1942. Simon
Srebnik, from the burial Sonderkommando,
testified in both the Chelmno Guard and Eichmann trials. Nicknamed Spinnefix
at the camp, Srebnik was recognised only by the Chelmno Guards by this name.
As soon as the ramp had been erected in the castle, people started arriving in Kulmhof from Litzmannstadt (Łódź) in lorries... The people were told that they had to take a bath, that their clothes had to be disinfected and that they could hand in any valuable items beforehand to be registered...When they had undressed they were sent to the cellar of the castle and then along a passageway on to the ramp and from there into the gas-van. In the castle there were signs marked "to the baths". The gas vans were large vans, about 4-5 metres [13-16 ft] long, 2.2 metres [7.2 ft] wide and 2 metres [6.5 ft] high. The interior walls were lined with sheet metal. A wooden grille was set into the floor. The floor of the van had an opening which could be connected to the exhaust by means of a removable metal pipe. When the lorries were full of people, the double doors at the back were closed and the exhaust connected to the interior of the van...The commando member detailed as driver started the engine right away so that the people inside the lorry were suffocated by the exhaust gases. Once this had taken place, the union between the exhaust and the inside of the lorry was disconnected and the van was driven to the camp in the woods where the bodies were unloaded. In the early days they were initially buried in mass graves, later incinerated... I then drove the van back to the castle and parked it there. Here it would be cleaned of the excretions of the people that had died in it. Afterwards it would once again be used for gassing.— Walter Burmeister, The Good Old Days
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Adolf Eichmann at
trial in Jerusalem 1961
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Survivors
Determining
the identities of the few survivors of Chełmno had presented ambiguity because
records used 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. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, a total of
seven Jews from the burial Sonderkommando escaped from the Waldlager.
Five escaped during the winter of 1942, including Mordechaï
Podchlebnik, Milnak Meyer, Abraham Tauber, Abram Roj, and Szlamek
Bajler (whose identity was later established as Yakov (or Jacob) Grojanowski). Mordechaï
Zurawski and Simon Srebnik
escaped later. Srebnik was among Jews shot by the Germans two days before the
Russians entered Chelmno, but he survived. Yakov (or Jacob) Grojanowski wrote about
the operations of the camp in his Grojanowski Report.
But Grojanowski was captured and murdered in the gas chamber at Bełżec
extermination camp before the end of the war. Other of the escapees
who have not been documented since the postwar period likely died during the
war.
In
June 1945, both Podchlebnik and Srebnik, then age fifteen, testified at a trial
in Lodz, Poland of camp personnel. In addition to being included in the Holocaust
Encyclopedia list, Mordechaï Zurawski is included as a survivor in three
other sources each of which documents his testifying, along with Srebnik and
Podchlebnik, about his experience at Chełmno at the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. In addition, Srebnik testified
in the Chelmno Guard
Trials of 1962/3. 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 in error. Podchlebnik is
sometimes referred to as Michał (or Michael), in Polish and English versions of
his name.
In
2002 Dr. Sara Roy of Harvard University
wrote that her father, Abraham, was one of "two survivors" of Chełmno.
Her father is the "Abram Roj" noted as an escapee by the Holocaust
Encyclopedia, as Abram/Avram stands for Abraham, and Roj appears to have
been transliterated or anglicized to Roy. She was mistaken about the total
number of survivors.
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