Kulmhof extermination camp

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Map of today's Poland with the locations of the extermination camps at that time

The extermination camps Chelmno , also called extermination camps Chelmno known was in Chelmno nad Nerem (during the German occupation Kulmhof am Ner ) near the town of Dąbie (during the occupation Eichstädt (Wartheland) ) in the time of World War II in occupied Poland . The Nazi extermination camp was about 130 km east of Poznań (German: Posen, annexed at that time ) (between 1939 and 1945 with the administrative names of the district of Warthbrücken in the Reichsgau Wartheland) and northwest of Łódź (Lodsch).

Kulmhof was mainly used as an extermination site between December 1941 and March 1943, after which it was cleared and used again in the summer of 1944 to murder Jews in the Litzmannstadt ghetto .

Creation of the extermination site

Herbert Lange , first commandant of Kulmhof (picture before 1939)

On July 16, 1941, Rolf-Heinz Höppner , the leader of the SD-Leitabschnitts Posen , sent a note to Adolf Eichmann . It was considered that Jews who were unable to work “to be dealt with by any quick-acting means.” Such a “quick-acting means”, namely gassing with carbon monoxide gas from steel bottles, had been used by the Lange Sonderkommando under Herbert Lange in the Warthegau since the end of 1939 to make inmates more psychiatric To murder. The search for a place to kill Jews who could not be used for forced labor began in the Warthbrücken district (pl.Kolo) in July 1941.

In the village of Kulmhof, an uninhabited manor house with a park and granary as well as parts of an adjoining nursery were leased as an extermination site ; the "castle grounds" were screened off with a wooden fence. In October and November 1941 the members of the Sonderkommando arrived. Since December 8, 1941, first Jews from the neighboring office districts were Koło , Dąbie , Sompolno , Kłodawa , Babiak and Kowale Panskie and from the Austrian Burgenland originating Roma in gas vans murdered.

Authority and responsibilities

Hans Bothmann, second in command of Kulmhof (picture before 1939)

The first commandant of the extermination camp was Herbert Lange , who had already used gas vans to murder disabled people in Wartheland and Soldau . He was replaced by Hans Bothmann in March 1942 . All leading positions were held by the 15–20 men of the “Sonderkommando Kulmhof”. Personal sovereignty over the security and order police officers deployed lay with the HSSPF Wilhelm Koppe . But Gauleiter Arthur Greiser transferred the responsibility for the entire organizational and financial handling of this “regional final solution” to two officials of his Lieutenancy, so that this mass murder came about through “division of labor” between the SS and the administration.

Course of action

Numerous statements by eyewitnesses and confessions by perpetrators paint a detailed picture of what happened.

The men of the Sonderkommando were supported by 80 to 100 police officers who carried out the guarded transport by lorry from the station of a small train to the "castle" in Kulmhof. A speech was given to the newcomers in the courtyard that they would be deloused and bathed in order to come to Germany for labor service. The victims then entered the interior of the castle. They had to undress and were driven to a ramp at the end of which was one of the three existing gas vans. After the victims had been driven in there with the whipping, the doors were locked. The driver crawled under the vehicle, connected the connecting hose from the exhaust pipe to the interior of the vehicle and started the gasoline engine. The penetrating exhaust gases suffocated the people within ten minutes. The driver then drove the bodies to a warehouse in the forest, where they were initially buried in mass graves .

Number of victims

Children from the Łódź ghetto await deportation to the Kulmhof extermination camp (September 1942)
Excavations at the Kulmhof extermination camp, around 2007

Polish estimates were of 300,000 victims; this number is considered excessive today.

Kulmhof was mainly used from December 1941 to April 1943. From September 1942 onwards, mostly only smaller transports arrived. As can be seen from the Korherr report , 145,301 Jews were "smuggled through" through the camps in Warthegau by the end of 1942. The total number of Jewish victims is calculated with 152,477 victims. Added to this are over 4,000 Sinti and Roma as well as an unknown number of Soviet prisoners of war and other non-Jewish people.

The extermination site was closed in April 1943. The so-called "castle" was blown up. Gauleiter Arthur Greiser thanked the members of the Sonderkommando with a gift of money, invited them to take special leave on his estate and, in a letter to Heinrich Himmler, praised the men who “faithfully and well and consistently fulfill the heavy duty assigned to them in every respect “Had.

When the Litzmannstadt ghetto was dissolved, the Kulmhof extermination site was used again. At the beginning of April 1944 the men of the Sonderkommando returned. Two barracks were set up in the forest. The gas trucks drove only a short distance to the prepared pits, in which there were two brick earth ovens. Between June 23 and July 14, 1944, 7,176 Jews from Litzmannstadt were killed. After that, the Jews from the ghetto were only deported to Auschwitz . The Kulmhof extermination camp was dismantled, the traces covered and the last labor prisoners burned in the warehouse on the night of January 17-18, 1945 after unsuccessful resistance.

confidentiality

Paul Blobel (1948)

In the summer of 1942, SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel attempted to burn the corpses and crush the bones. The experience gained was later used in special campaign 1005 to blur the murderous acts. In September 1942, Rudolf Höß visited the corpses disposal facility in Kulmhof.

The action could not be concealed from the 300 villagers, however. On January 19, a labor prisoner fled, informed the local rabbi of Grabow and ended up in the Warsaw ghetto . The circulating rumor that the Jews deported from Litzmannstadt would be killed by burning was noted by Wehrmacht officer Wilm Hosenfeld in his diary and was even published in the New York Times on July 2, 1942 . The English Daily Telegraph published for the first time on June 25, 1942 for Chelmno (Kulmhof) a number of victims of approx. 40,000 people to gas for the period December 1941 to March 1942, with a murder rate of 1,000 people per day.

Prosecution

Memorial stone with the inscription Pamiętamy (Polish for "we remember" or "we remember") (2005)

The two former prisoners Shimon Srebrnik (* 1930 in Poland , † 2006 in Nes Ziona , Israel ) and Mordechaï Podchlebnik survived the war. I.a. in the film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann , they reported the death camp and the perpetrators.

Arthur Greiser was sentenced to death in Posen on July 9, 1946 and hanged on July 21, 1946. Ernst Kendzia , commissioned by him to organize the extermination camp, was executed in Waldheim prison on November 4, 1950. Other Lieutenancy employees were not charged in the Federal Republic because the security police assumed responsibility for the extermination camp. The HSSPF Wilhelm Koppe lived under a false name until 1960, was released in 1962 on payment of a bail , later declared incapable of standing and died with unpunished in 1975.

The two camp commanders, Herbert Lange and Hans Bothmann, could no longer be called to account. Paul Blobel had been executed for other acts. As executives at the Litzmannstadt state police station, Otto Bradfisch and his assistant Günter Fuchs were sentenced to long prison terms in Hanover in 1963. Further proceedings against former police officers were ongoing in Poland and the Federal Republic, where a main hearing at the Bonn Regional Court against twelve parties began in 1962 .

Commemoration

In the post-war period, monuments and memorial plaques were installed in the former forest camp. Later, a museum building and exhibition rooms in the forest camp were built on the farm.

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Kulmhof extermination camp  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Israel Gutman (ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust . Piper Verlag, Munich 1998, Volume 1, pp. 280f.
  2. ↑ Loewy, Hanno; Schoenberner, Gerhard: Our only way is work . Vienna 1990, ISBN 3-85409-169-9 , p. 169. / on the Internet in Chronology of the Holocaust ( Memento of the original of March 9, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Accessed September 19, 2009). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.holocaust-chronologie.de
  3. ^ Peter Klein: Kulmhof / Chelmno. In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror. Volume 8, Munich 2008, p. 305.
  4. ^ Peter Klein: Kulmhof / Chelmno. P. 306.
  5. ^ Henry Friedlander: The way to the Nazi genocide ... , p. 454.
  6. ^ A b Peter Klein: Kulmhof / Chelmno. P. 314.
  7. ↑ Eugen Kogon et al. (Ed.): National Socialist mass killings by poison gas. A documentation. Fischer Tb, Frankfurt 1986, ISBN 3-596-24353-X , pp. 114-129.
  8. ^ Henry Friedlander: The way to the Nazi genocide. From euthanasia to the final solution. Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-8270-0265-6 , p. 453.
  9. ↑ Peter Klein: Mass killings by poison gas in the Chelmno extermination camp. In: Günter Morsch, Bertrand Perz: New studies on National Socialist mass killings by poison gas. Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-940938-99-2 , p. 183.
  10. ^ Peter Klein: Kulmhof / Chelmno. P. 310.
  11. ^ Peter Klein: Kulmhof / Chelmno. P. 321 and p. 301.
  12. ↑ Holocaust Memorial Day: Telegraph revealed Nazi gas chambers three years before liberation of Auschwitz .
  13. ^ Peter Klein: Kulmhof / Chelmno. P. 321 f.

Coordinates: 52 ° 8 ′ 38 "  N , 18 ° 42 ′ 59"  E