Chełmno extermination camp
Chełmno, or Kulmhof, was the first of Nazi Germany's extermination camps and was situated north of Łódź, near the village of Chełmno nad Nerem. Following the invasion of Poland in 1939, Germany annexed the area into the new territory of Reichsgau Wartheland. The camp, which was specifically intended for no other purpose than mass murder, operated from, to, parallel to Operation Reinhard during the deadliest phase of the Holocaust, 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, 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 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, 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 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, written under an assumed name by Szlama Ber Winer, a prisoner in the Jewish Sonderkommando who escaped only to perish at Bełżec during the liquidation of yet another Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Poland. In June 1945, two survivors testified at the trial of camp personnel in Łódź. The three best-known survivors testified about Chełmno at the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Two survivors testified also at the camp personnel trials conducted in 1962–65 by West Germany.
Background
is a village in Poland, annexed to Nazi Germany in 1939 and renamed Kulmhof during German occupation. 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 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. Damzog formed the SS-Sonderkommando Lange, and appointed Herbert Lange the first camp commandant because of his experience in the mass-murder of Poles from Wartheland. 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 where the mobile gas-chamber 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".
File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-E05455, Arthur Greiser.jpg|thumb|Gauleiter Arthur Greiser in Poznań, 1939
The use of the killing centre at Chełmno for the mass murder of rapidly growing number of Jews deported to the Łódź Ghetto 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. 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 and the Waldlager. 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 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.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 in Berlin which, by June 1942, produced twenty of them in accordance with the SS purchase order. The sealed compartments installed on the chassis had floor openings – about in diameter – with metal pipes welded below, into which the engine exhaust was directed. Victims generally suffocated to death, with their "bodies thrown out blue, wet with sweat and urine, the legs covered with excrement and menstrual blood". Drivers of gas vans also heard victims screaming and knocking on the walls.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, 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.
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 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, Kłodawa, Babiak, Izbica Kujawska, Bugaj, Nowiny Brdowskie and Kowale Pańskie. 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 to Koło by rail with the last stop in Powiercie. 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-masks. 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 subsisted there already for weeks.In late February 1942, the secretary of the local Polish council in Chełmno, Stanisław Kaszyński, 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 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 before May 1942. One of the sisters of author Franz Kafka, Valli Kafka, was murdered with them before mid-September.