Chelmno Killing Center Claimed 200, 000 Victims

Chelmno (Kulmhof) was the first killing center of “Holocaust by Gas” – it became operational six weeks prior to Wannsee Conference (on December 8, 1941). It was established to (ultimately) kill all Jews of Lodz Ghetto (the second largest after the one in Warsaw) and to serve as a pilot project (and a proving ground) for “Holocaust by Gas” – the main phase of the “final solution to the Jewish question”.

200,000 is the estimated most likely number of victims (given by the Kulmhof Museum of Martyrdom) as no records of the latter survived (or were even kept). Estimate range from 152,000 (most likely, too low) to 320,000 (way too high).

The facility, which was specifically intended for no other purpose than serial mass murder, operated from December 8, 1941, to April 11, 1943, parallel to Operation Reinhard during the deadliest phase of the Holocaust. And again, from June 23, 1944, to January 18, 1945. In 1943, modifications were made to the camp’s killing methods as the reception building had already been dismantled.

The first people murdered in Chelmno, were the Jewish and Romani populations of Kolo District. The early killing process carried out by the SS from December 8, 1941, until mid-January 1942, was intended to murder Jews from all nearby towns and villages, which were slated for German colonization.

On January 16, 1942, the SS and police began deportations from the Lodz Ghetto which lasted for two weeks. 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 Lodz and stayed there for weeks – waiting for their deaths. The victims were “processed” immediately upon arrival at the manor-house in Chelmno.

The German SS 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.

Periodically, the SS executed the members of the Jewish special detachment and replaced them with workers selected from recent transports. It was a common practice in all death factories.

Having murdered almost all Jews of Wartheland District, in March 1943 the SS closed the Che;mno killing center. Himmler ordered complete demolition of Schlosslager (death factory proper), which was razed to the ground.

To hide the evidence of crimes committed, from 1943 onward, the SS ordered the exhumation of all remains and burning of bodies in open-air cremation pits by a unit of Sonderkommando 1005.

The bones of the dead bodies 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) 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 to speed up the process.

On June 23, 1944, in spite of earlier demolition of the palace, the SS renewed gassing operations at Che;mno in order to complete the annihilation of the remaining 70,000 Jewish inmates of the Lodz ghetto – the last Jewish ghetto in occupied Poland to produce war supplies for the Wehrmacht.

First, the victims were taken to the desecrated church in Che;mno where they spent the night if necessary, and left their bundles behind on the way to the reception area. They were driven to the forest, where the camp authorities had constructed two fenced-out barracks for undressing before “shower”, 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 Lodz ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau death factory.

In September 1944, the SS brought in Jewish prisoners from outside the Wartheland to exhume and cremate remaining corpses and to remove evidence of their crimes. Gas vans were sent to Berlin.

The remaining Jewish workers were executed just before the German retreat on January 18, 1945, as the Soviet army approached (it reached the site two days later).