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Chelmno - Extermination camp



Polish Jews forced to walk to the train which brings will them to Chelmno for extermination

        Chelmno was a Nazi extermination camp in Poland located near the river Ner, 37 M (60 KM) from Lodz. The village of Chelmno, in the district of Kolo, is situated 8 M (14 KM) from the town of Kolo. The main railway line from Lodz to Poznan runs through this town and is connected with the village of Chelmno via a branch line. Lodz, the second largest city in Poland, had a Jewish population of two hundred and two thousand in 1939. The Germans called it Kulmhof. The camp was used for the mass murder of Jews who lived in the Western Polish provinces which had been annexed by the Third Reich. First, closed trucks were used which killed the prisoners using exhaust fumes. Later, the Nazis introduced Zyklon B gas pellets. Detainees, who managed to escape from Chelmno, were the first to report that large numbers of Jews systematically were exterminated. Initially their horror stories were not believed.

       Little has been published about Chelmno despite its significance as it was the first extermination camp to become operational. Unlike Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, Chelmno was not part of Operation Reinhard. The Nazis began preparatory work at Chelmno two full months before the Wannsee Conference convened. This is considered to be a key milestone in the operational launching of the mass extermination program of the Jewish people in Europe. The extermination camp at Chelmno was a typical death-camp, a place designed exclusively for killing all who where brought there. The only inmates to be spared were a small group of workers selected by the Nazis for work associated with their criminal activity. The secret of Chelmno was kept well hidden because during German occupation only very few people in Poland and abroad ever knew of its existence or were aware of the hundreds of thousands of victims it claimed. The records show that more than 350,000 Jewish men, women, and children as well as Sinti and Roma were murdered at Chelmno before it was closed and destroyed in January 1945.

       Chelmno's first phase lasted from 7 December 1941 until March 1943. The first victims were deported from nearby places: Babiak, Dabie, Deby Szlacheckie, Grodziec, Izbica Kujawska, Klodawa, Kolo, Kowale Panskie, Nowiny Brdowskie and Sompolno. In January the SS started to exterminate the Jews of the ghetto in Lodz: Between 16 and 29 January 1942 10,003 Jews were killed, from 22 February - 2 April 34,073, from 4-15 May 11,680 and from 5-12 September 1942 15,859. Apart from Jews from the Lodz Ghetto, nearly all the other Jews of the Warthegau had been killed by early 1943. Also among the victims were 15,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Luxemburg, 5,000 Romany, several hundred Poles and an unknown number of Soviet POWs, as well as 88 Czech children from Lidice.

       On 7 April 1943 the SS blew up the manor house and the two furnaces. On this day a last unexpected transport arrived, with Jews who suffered from typhus. The Germans were afraid of being infected, and ordered them to go to the first storey of the palace building. Dynamite was placed in the basement and the building was blown up, together with the Jews.

 Once arrived at the railroad station of Chelmno, the Polish Jews were transferred from
closed cattle cars to open box-cars which would bring them to the place of extermination.

       During Chelmno's second phase, in June and July 1944, a further 10,000 Jews from the Lodz Ghetto were murdered. Himmler and Greiser had decided on the ghetto's liquidation. For that purpose the Sonderkommando Bothmann was ordered back, the Waldlager was reactivated and two new crematoria were built at the Waldlager.
Now the Jews from Lodz were transported usually by train to Kolo (sometimes by lorries directly to Chelmno). From Kolo by the narrow gauge railroad to Chelmno village. There they spent the night in the church. The next day they had to wait on the place in front of the church from were they were carried by lorries to the Waldlager in groups of mainly 150.

       At the Waldlager the people were separated into two large barracks, each about 20 x 10 m. Each barrack had two rooms, one for men, the other for women and children. Arrival at these two structures was a ruse to keep the intended victims from panicking. Both huts had a wooden fence extending on either side in order to make it appear as though the Jews had arrived at a transit or work camp. Each structure was falsely numbered and in addition signs were painted on them: - on the outside: "To the Bath", inside the barracks: "To the Doctor, Barrack Number…" etc. The SS kept this pretence of "resettlement" up until the last minute as the victims undressed, first the women and children followed by the men. When naked they filed through the door marked "Zum Bad" ("To the bath"). Behind this door a passageway 20 - 25 m long by 1.5 m wide, also enclosed by wooden boarding, turned sharply at its end to finish up on a ramp. From there the Jews climbed into the waiting gas vans. This method had been adopted, tried and tested at the death camps of Belzec and Sobibor. It was finally perfected in Treblinka. A simple, smaller version, copied from the Aktion Reinhard camps, was easily implemented at Chelmno.