Warsaw concentration camp

Polish insurgents toured around Gęsiówka prison of the Warsaw concentration camp complex, by a freed Jewish prisoner (August 5, 1944). Photo by Eugeniusz Lokajski.

The Warsaw concentration camp (German: Konzentrationslager Warschau, short KL or KZ Warschau) was an associated group of the German Nazi concentration camps, including an extermination camp, located in German-occupied Warsaw, capital city of Poland. Its main target was the Polish population of the city.

Pabst Plan

According to the Nazi Pabst Plan, Warsaw was to be turned into a provincial German city. To accomplish this, the Jewish population was grouped together in the Warsaw Ghetto before being eventually removed and mostly exterminated. The Nazis' next step in their plan was the intended killing of the Polish population of the city, which thus became the target of the łapanka roundup policy of closing-off a street, in an attempt to detain large numbers of civilians at random. Between 1942 and 1944, daily there were about 400 victims of such roundups in Warsaw, with the detainees first being transferred to KL Warschau custody.

Establishment date

The earliest official mention of the Warsaw concentration camp (KZ Warschau) is from June 19, 1943, which referred to the concentration camp in the ruins of the former Warsaw Ghetto. However, the term KZ Warschau was also used to describe similar camps that were discovered at an earlier date. Nevertheless, it is estimated that the camp was in operation from autumn 1942 until the Warsaw Uprising. The first commandant of the camp was SS-Obersturmbannführer Wilhelm Göcke, a former warehouse manager in Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. In addition to its genocidal purposes, the camp was designed to provide a work force to clean up the leveled ruins of the former Warsaw Ghetto and ultimately turn this area into a planned recreational park for the SS.

The exact date of the camp's creation remains unknown. Some historians have suggested that it was created following the orders of SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl on June 11, 1943. However, others, among them historian and Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) judge Maria Trzcińska,[1] claimed that the camp had already been operational prior to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943. The factual basis for this aforementioned claim is that on October 9, 1942, the SS head Heinrich Himmler issued an order in which he stated, regarding the population of the Warsaw Ghetto: "I've issued orders and requested that all the so-called arms factories workers working only as tailors, furriers or bootmakers be grouped in the nearest concentration camps, that is in Warsaw and in Lublin."

Organization

In the Atlas zur deutschen Zeitgeschichte 1918-1968 published in 1986 in Deutschland KL, Warschau is designated as a Hauptlager ("main camp"), and as such it has the same status as KL Dachau.[2] Besides Germans and the Volksdeutsche, the guards also included ethnic Ukrainians and Latvians from Trawniki concentration camp.

U.S. aerial photograph of northern Warsaw Ghetto area in May 1943

The camp was composed of six small sections located in different areas of Warsaw, all of which were connected by railway and were under unified organization and one command. In chronological order of opening, those were:

  1. Konzentrationslager (concentration camp) at Koło area (formerly a Kreigsgefangenenlager POW camp for the Polish Army soldiers captured in 1939);) this part remains controversial since local residents claim Maria Trzcinska mistook buildings of "drewniane Kolo" housing project for a camp.
  2. Vernichtungslager (extermination camp) near the Warszawa Zachodnia train station (this part remains very controversial);
  3. Gęsia Street (now: Anielewicza Street) concentration camp (formerly Arbeitserziehungslager, or "reeducational labour camp") in the former ghetto known as Gęsiówka;
  4. a camp for foreign Jews located on Nowolipie Street;
  5. Bonifraterska Street camp near Muranowski Square in the former ghetto;
  6. the former Gestapo prison on Pawia Street known as Pawiak.

The overall area of the camp was 1.2 km² (0.46 sq mi), with 119 barracks purposely built to hold approximately 40,000 prisoners, its infrastructure including several crematoriums.

Death in KL Warschau

An insurgent patrol approaching the Gęsia 26 Street crematorium.

The IPN estimates that the number of victims exterminated at those camps to be "not less than tens of thousands". Trzcińska's estimate however places the number of the camp's victims well above 212,000, mainly Poles and several thousand of non-Polish. Others estimate the number of deaths at 20,000 to 35,000 (not including some 37,000 people executed at Pawiak), with a proportionally larger percentage of Poles and other Europeans, including Jews, among the dead; smaller groups of victims included Greeks, Romani people, Belarusians and the German-interned officers of the Italian Army.

According to IPN, the majority of those executed at the camp were killed by gunfire, mostly with machine guns, both in the camp and in an adjoining "security zone". Some of the hostages and prisoners were also publicly executed in the streets of Warsaw by means of firing squad shooting and hanging. Numerous other victims were also gassed in the gas chambers at Gęsia Street, where a considerable quantity of Zyklon B was found after the war. The first gassing there took place on October 17, 1943, killing at least 150 Poles caught in a street roundup and about 20 Belgian Jews. A relatively small number of victims were sadistically killed by drunken guards in the so-called "amphitheatre" at Gęsiówka, or hanged at the so-called "death wall" (ściana śmierci) at Koło. There was also a mysterious T-shaped structure in the forest near Koło where the prisoners were occasionally transported by trucks and then never seen again. Besides the outright murders, a majority of deaths in the camps resulted from physical exhaustion and typhus epidemics.

Dead bodies were either cremated in crematoriums or open-air pyres (including at a former sports stadium) or simply buried under collapsed buildings during the systematic demolition of the former ghetto. A team of the SS wearing white coats and posing as medical workers also patrolled the ruins in order to locate and shoot the remaining Jews still hiding since the end of the ghetto uprising.

Bema Street tunnel

Bema Street tunnel entry with a graffiti picture of the controversial ventilator machine.

A debate surrounds the presumed existence of an enormous gas chamber in the pre-existing (Polish-built) road tunnel on Józef Bem Street near the train station Warszawa Zachodnia.[3] At 630 square meters (6,781 square feet) the tunnel would have been large enough to kill up to 1,000 people at one time, using poison gas like Zyklon B or carbon monoxide, if the new IPN testimonies were accurate. According to the propagators of the mass gassing theory based on three eye-witness accounts from the 1980s, the tunnel had been used to kill multiple truckloads of prisoners. However, all known Nazi gas chambers were typically much smaller and lower and so the use of a large tunnel as a gas chamber would be highly irregular and inefficient, and therefore improbable.[3]

The Bema Street tunnel was restored to street traffic after the war. In a further controversy, the alleged gas exhauster machinery and mysterious massive ventilators that might have been used to remove the gas into the atmosphere following the gassings were removed and scrapped during renovation works in 1996 and the early 2000s. In recent years, the part of the tunnel was turned into an unofficial mausoleum site by citizens of Warsaw. In 2001 the Polish parliament Sejm appealed for construction of an official memorial at the tunnel.[4]

The controversy has been debated secretly, not publicly, while almost completely unknown during the communist era of the Polish People's Republic (allegedly, the reason behind this secrecy was to inflate the casualty figures of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising by adding the victims of the camp to the uprising's actual death toll). In 2006, the Sejm once more recommended the initiation of a new investigation of the tunnel's past by a new team from the IPN, this time from the city of Łódź. Since 2007, the investigation is being once more conducted by IPN's Warsaw team, so far ineffectually, according to critics.

Liquidation

Szare Szeregi resistance fighters posing with the liberated prisoners in Gęsiówka sub-camp of Warsaw in August 1944.

On July 20, 1943, SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Koppe ordered the complex to be liquidated and dismantled. The majority of prisoners were either executed or transferred to other concentration camps, such as Dachau, Gross-Rosen and Ravensbrück. Between July 28 and July 31, four major railway transports left Warsaw, containing some 12,300 prisoners. Only a small group of several hundred inmates, mostly Jews from the other occupied countries, were left in Pawiak and Gęsiówka to dig up and burn the bodies buried under the blown-up buildings of the ghetto. The camp's documentation was burnt, and many of its structures and facilities were mined for demolition.

On August 5, 1944, during the first days of the Warsaw Uprising, an assault group of Armia Krajowa (AK) stormed the Gęsiówka sub-camp using a captured German tank, setting free the remaining 360 men and women, before the AK were forced to withdraw. On August 21, after a failed insurgent attack on Pawiak, the Germans executed almost all (except seven) of the remaining inmates, and the prison was blown up.

Personnel

Commandants

Other staff

Communist prison camp

After the Soviet takeover of Warsaw in January 1945, the remnants of the camp were used as a POW camp and a place of detention of the "enemies of the people's power" political prisoners by the Soviet NKVD and then by the Polish MBP until 1954 (the last prisoners left in 1956). It was the second biggest prison after the Mokotów Prison.[5]

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Warsaw concentration camp.

References

  1. ↑ Jerzy Kochanowski (4 November 2009). "Śmierć w Warschau" [Death in Warschau]. Polityka.pl – Historia (in Polish). Archived from the original on 25 Sep 2013. Retrieved 25 September 2013.
  2. ↑ Werner Hilgemann. Atlas zur deutschen Zeitgeschichte 1918-1968. Zurich 1986
  3. 1 2 (Polish) Bogusław Kopka, "Prawda o KL Warschau" (Truth about KL Warschau), Biuro Edukacji Publicznej Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej
  4. ↑ (Polish) IPN, Informacja o śledztwie w sprawie KL Warschau at the Wayback Machine (archived October 22, 2006) - Institute of National Remembrance, May 2003 (retrieved from the Internet Archive, May 23, 2010)
  5. ↑ (Polish) IPN wydał książkę o obozie KL Warschau

Sources

  1. Andreas Mix: Warschau-Stammlager. In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel: Der Ort des Terrors. München 2008, ISBN 978-3-406-57237-1, Band 8, S. 93
  2. Norman Davies "Europe at War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory". Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-69285-3
  3. Maria Trzcińska, Obóz zagłady w centrum Warszawy, Polskie Wydawnictwo Encyklopedyczne, Radom 2002, ISBN 83-88822-16-0. (Polish)
  4. Bogusław Kopka, "Konzentrationslager Warschau Historia i następstwa", Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, Warszawa 2007, ISBN 83-60464-46-4. (Polish)
  5. Informacja o ustaleniach dotyczących Konzentrationslager Warschau - Institute of National Remembrance, June 2002. (Polish)
  6. Śmierć w Warschau, "Polityka", 12 XI 2007. (Polish)

Coordinates: 52°14′35″N 20°59′35″E / 52.242925°N 20.9930305556°E / 52.242925; 20.9930305556

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