User:Szmenderowiecki/sandbox/Warsaw concentration camp

Warsaw
Nazi concentration camp
Barracks and watchtowers of KL Warschau during capture of the concentration camp by Battalion Zośka, 5 August 1944
Location	Warsaw, General Government, German-occupied Poland
Operated by	Nazi Germany
Commandant	Wilhelm Göcke (June 1943 – September 1943) Nikolaus Herbet (September 1943 – April 1944) Wilhelm Ruppert (May- June 1944)
Original use	Gęsiówka prison
First built	19 July 1943-10 June 1944
Operational	19 July 1943-5 August 1944 as a Nazi concentration camp January 1945-November 1949 as a labour/POW camp 1949-1956 as a prison
Inmates	Mostly Jews from countries other than Poland (Greece and Hungary in particular) 300 Germans
Number of inmates	8,000–9,000
Killed	4,000–5,000
Liberated by	Home Army during Warsaw Uprising

The Warsaw concentration camp (see other names), was a German concentration camp created on the order of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, on the base of the now non-existent Gęsiówka prison in what is today the Warsaw neighbourhood of Muranów. It was operating from July 1943 to August 1944.

The first person known to have come up with the idea of creating a concentration camp in Warsaw was Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel (SS), who, in an October 1942 memo, circulated to SS and Wehrmacht authorities, ordered to move all German companies operating in the Warsaw Ghetto there, submit them to SS control, and promptly evacuate the camp to the east; however, the idea did not prove to be popular, so it was postponed. Four months later, Himmler returned to the idea as the plans for the demolition of the Warsaw Ghetto came closer, but it was only when the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising failed that Himmler's (third) order was implemented in July 1943 with the arrival of 300 German prisoners from Buchenwald - the only non-Jewish inmates in the camp.

KL Warschau first functioned as a camp in its own right, though it differed substantially from other Nazi camps, both in administrative structure and prisoner composition and relations. The Encyclopedia on Camps and Ghettos says that in total, some 8,000 to 9,000 inmates were held at the Warsaw concentration camp. Bogusław Kopka estimates that at least 7,250 of its prisoners were Jews from various countries in Europe, who were used as forced labour to clean the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto and to find and sort whichever precious items were still left on its terrirory, with the ultimate goal of creating a park in the former ghetto's area. The camp and adjacent ruins were also used by the German administration as a place of execution, where Polish political prisoners, Jews who were caught on the "Aryan side" as well as whoever was rounded up on Warsaw streets were shot to death en masse.

In May 1944, KL Warschau to a branch became of the Majdanek concentration camp. In late July 1944, due to the Red Army approaching, Germans started to evacuate the concentration camp. Around 4,000 inmates were forced to march on foot to Kutno, 120 km (75 mi) away; those who survived were then transported to Dachau concentration camp. On 5 August 1944, the camp was captured by Battalion Zośka during the Warsaw Uprising, liberating 348 Jews who were still left on its premises. In total, about 4,000 to 5,000 prisoners died during the camp's existence, the death march out of KL Warschau, in the Warsaw Uprising, or while in hiding following the uprising. The Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), which also counted all people killed on the territory of the camp, gives a higher estimate of the total number of victims: it says that 20,000 people died, of which around 10,000 were Poles. After the Nazis were expelled from Warsaw by the Red Army, the new Communist administration continued to run the buildings as a forced labour camp, and then as a prison, until it was closed in 1956. All of the camp's premises were demolished in 1965.

The camp, which seldom appears in mainstream historiography, has been at the centre of a conspiracy theory, first promoted by Maria Trzcińska, a Polish judge who served for 22 years as a member of the Chief Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation. The theory, refuted by mainstream historians, contends that KL Warschau was an extermination camp which operated a giant gas chamber inside a tunnel near Warszawa Zachodnia railroad station and that 200,000 mainly non-Jewish Poles were gassed there.

Terminology

The building of the Wołyń Caserns was commonly known as Gęsiówka. Photo of the burnt edifice taken during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

During the first nine months, KL Warschau was a concentration camp in its own right. Its staff was subordinate to SS Main Economic and Administrative Office (SS-WVHA), but it also cooperated closely with the police authorities in Warsaw, particularly during the pacification that happened at the turn of 1943/44 and which was targeted at the Polish population of the capital. At this time it carried the official name of Waffen-SS Konzentrationslager Warschau (or KL Warschau for short). It was one of the three concentration camps (apart from Majdanek and Płaszów) created by the Nazis on the soil of General Government; though, as Gabriel N. Finder says, it played a rather minor role in comparison with other camps.

In May 1944, the KL Warschau became a branch of Majdanek concentration camp, so the camp's name changed to Waffen-SS Konzentrationslager Lublin – Arbeitslager Warschau (Waffen-SS Concentration Camp Lublin - Labour Camp Warsaw). It was also sometimes referred to in German sources as Arbeitslager Warschau.

After the end of World War II, when the camp was administered by the Ministry of Public Security (MBP), it was renamed to "Central Labour Camp for Warsaw's Reconstruction" (Polish: Centralny Obóz Pracy dla Odbudowy Warszawy), and later, when the camp was converted to a prison in November 1949, it became known under two names: Central Prison — Labour Centre in Warsaw (Polish: Centralne Więzienie – Ośrodek Pracy w Warszawie) or Central Prison Warsaw II Gęsiówka (Polish: Centralne Więzienie Warszawa II Gęsiówka).

In Polish sources, the name Gęsiówka (IPA: [ɡɛ̃ˈɕufka]) often appears as a name for the camp. This was due to the fact that the camp occupied the complex of Wołyń Caserns (now non-existent), which were relatively well preserved after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The caserns, at the corner of then-existing Gęsia and Zamenhof streets, were a military prison before WWII, and afterwards accomodated the central prison for the Jewish district, the correcting labour camp of the Sicherheitspolizei, as well as the Judenrat. The prison complex came to be colloquially known as "Gęsiówka" (named for Gęsia street), which nickname transferred to KL Warschau as well.

Genesis

According to Bogusław Tadeusz Kopka, the first person behind the idea of creating a concentration camp in Warsaw was Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel (SS), who mentioned it in a letter dated 9 October 1942. The letter informed the local posts of SS and Wehrmacht in the General Government that all Jewish craftsmen who so far had managed to avoid deportation to the extermination camps were to be "collected in the nearest concentration camps on the spot, i.e. in Warsaw and Lublin." Camps which were located close to the ghettos – like the one in Warsaw – were also intended to host Jewish labourers, who would be working for the weapons factories operating on-site; these, in their turn, were planned to be successively moved to concentration camps near Lublin, and then farther east. Himmler assumed that concentrating all Jewish labour in camps controlled by the SS-WVHA would be the basis for the creation of an SS economical empire in the East. His ideas, however, were met with resistance from the military, police and civil administration of the General Government, as well as from the Reich Ministry of Armaments and War Production and from German companies using Jewish slave labour. Himmler was thus unable to bring his idea to fruition, so the concentration camp in Warsaw did not appear, nor did all factories using Jewish labour become controlled by SS.

Letter from Oswald Pohl to Heinrich Himmler dated 23 July 1943 on creation of KL Warschau, noting arrival of first 300 prisoners

As plans of demolishing the Warsaw Ghetto appeared, Himmler soon returned to the idea of creating a concentration camp in Warsaw. In a letter dated 16 February 1943, addressed to SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl, head of SS-WVHA, Himmler ordered to create a concentration camp on the "Jewish district" territory and directed that all German-owned private enterprises operating in the Ghetto be relocated there. The camp, together with its enterprises and inhabitants, was planned to be "transported as quickly as possible to Lublin and nearby areas". On the same day, Himmler also wrote a letter to SS-Ogruf Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, Higher SS and police leader for the General Government, which demanded to demolish the buildings of the deserted ghetto after the concentration camp is transported to Lublin. The task of demolition was suggested to be handed over to local Jews. The idea's implementation was marred with numerous difficulties, so when the Germans decided to accelerate the deportations on 19 April, they met strong resistance from the Jews, who began the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The concentration camp, again, failed to materialise, and only part of the enterprises, together with some of the Jews, were evacuated to the concentration camps in Majdanek, Trawniki, and Poniatowa.

The idea of the camp was revived once again after the fall of the Warsaw Ghetto. SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop, who led the efforts aimed at quashing the insurgency, proposed on 16 May 1943, the day the uprising came to the end, to convert the Pawiak prison, used previously by the SD and the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police), to a concentration camp. Himmler agreed to the proposal and issued the order, which read:

I herewith order, that the Dzielna prison [Pawiak prison - note] in the former ghetto of Warsaw, is to be transformed into a concentration camp. The prisoners are to gather and secure the millions of building stones, scrap iron, and other building material from the former ghetto. Special care is to be taken for the secure guards of the prisoners during this work.

I instruct [...] to make sure that during this cleaning up the city center of the former ghetto is to be flattened completely and every cellar and every canalization is to be filled in.

After the work is finished the area is to be covered up with earth and a large park is to be planted.

— Heinrich Himmler, Letter of Himmler to Oswald Pohl ordering the complete flattening of the destroyed Warsaw Ghetto by Jews, 11 June 1943

Eventually Pawiak's status as a prison did not change, but the concentration camp was erected on the nearby Gęsia street, which was also located inside the Ghetto walls, partially because it was the only building left intact in the area previously occupied by the Ghetto. In addition to that, Bogusław Kopka argues that this position was chosen due to the fact that it was in a deserted area with restricted access to civilians, which additionally was in proximity to the warehouses at Umschlagplatz as well as German militarised units: an SS outpost on Żelazna street, a strong German army command at Stawki street and the staff of the Pawiak prison, all of whom could be quickly dispatched in case of mutiny.

On 19 July 1943, the first 300 prisoners, who were German and predominantly criminals, were transported from Buchenwald concentration camp. This date is considered to be the day when KL Warschau started operation.

Description

An aerial photograph, probably taken in November 1944, showing the camp's structure (a long and narrow rectangle in the image's centre) surrounded by Warsaw Ghetto's ruins. For a scheme of the camp, see external links section.

Warsaw concentration camp's crematorium.

Location and facilities

See also: Gęsiówka

The Warsaw concentration camp was created inside a closed and deserted zone of the former ghetto, which was surrounded by walls regularly patrolled by German guards and police officers. Gęsiówka, a former military prison, as well as spaces stretching along the Gęsia street, were adapted for the purposes of the camp. The camp occupied a long and narrow strip of land of a roughly rectangular shape, bordered by Okopowa street to the west, Gliniana, Ostrowska and Wołyńska (now Józefa Lewartowskiego) streets to the north, Zamenhofa street to the east and Gęsia (today's Anielewicza street) to the south.

Since none of the buildings in KL Warschau survived, the general appearance and facilities in the camp can only be deduced based on the testimony of witnesses, aerial photographs, and photos made during exhumation procedures and after the camp's liberation. According to the evidence, KL Warschau was divided into two parts. The first of these was called Lager I, also known as "the old camp", which consisted of Gęsiówka proper (the easternmost part of the camp), as well as wooden barracks erected during the initial months of the camp's operation (located between what is now John Paul II avenue and Smocza street). The second part, between Smocza and Okopowa streets, was called Lager II, or, colloquially, "the new camp", contained brick barracks. In total, 21 barracks were built, each around 70 m (230 ft) long and having a capacity of approx. 600 inmates.

Close-up of one of the turrets protecting the concentration camp. Photo taken during the camp's liberation

Wilhelm Ruppert, the last commandant of KL Warschau. Photograph taken in Allied custody.

It is known that the camp was surrounded by high walls guarded by watchtowers. The main entrance was located at what was then 24 Gęsia street. The former military prison and Judenrat seat, at what is today 17a Karmelicka street, served as a crematorium, where bodies of dead and murdered inmates, as well as those who were executed in the ghetto's ruins, were incinerated. The Germans also started to build two other cremation sites, but did not manage to open them before they evacuated the camp. In addition to that, one of Gęsiówka's buildings was used as a torture room, while a prison yard came to be a casino for SS officers. A bathhouse was built in late 1943 and early 1944, and bunkers were also available on site. The whole construction process was completed by June 1944.

There are some indications suggesting that the Warsaw concentration camp might have operated at least one gas chamber, which was used to murder inmates as well as Polish hostages and political prisoners. Bogusław Kopka says that current evidence does not allow to either fully confirm or debunk the hypothesis about their existence. He underlines, however, that even if people were gassed, the scale of such murder was much smaller than in death camps.

Personnel

About 380 SS officers were maintaining the concentration camp, approximately the size of a company. The original SS unit, was gathered from various other camps, including the Trawniki concentration camp and the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Following the attachment to Majdanek in May 1944, they were replaced with SS personnel from Lublin, and the guard was reduced to 259 people. The leadership positions were occupied by high- and middle-ranking SS members who were pre-war Third Reich citizens (Reichsdeutsche), while the rank-and-file were usually recruited among the Volksdeutsche, mainly from Southeast Europe but also from other areas.

As Bogusław Kopka shows, in comparison with other concentration camps, KL Warschau had a less sophisticated internal structure. For example, the camp lacked the political department (Politische Abteilung), and some other positions remained unoccupied. Among the 208 identified members of the camp's administration, SS-Uscharf Karl Leuckel was the director of the administrative department, SS-Oberscharführer Franz Mielenz was the Rapportführer and the person responsible for prisoner work management, while SS-Hstuf Willy Jobst and SS-Hstuf Heinrich Schmitz were camp doctors.

The Warsaw concentration camp usually featured SS officers who were deemed to be low-value workers. The first two commandants exhibited incompetence and little interest in the functioning of the camp. Many of the Volksdeutsche were hardly able to speak German, while some were illiterate. Corruption was rampant and extended up to the apex of the camp's hierarchy, which Andreas Mix attributes to the fact that like the senior SS officers, the kapos were Germans, therefore, the SS officers frequently made illicit agreements with them and delegated much more power to the kapos than was usual for the concentration camps. The irregularities were so numerous that SS authorities eventually intervened, presumably due to an escape of a Reichsdeutsche prisoner.

In late April 1944, Nikolaus Herbet, the commandant, Schutzhaftlagerführer (camp director) Wilhelm Härtel as well as Walter Wawrzyniak, the camp supervisor (German: Lagerälteste), were all arrested. The whole command of the camp was dissolved and almost all of its members were relieved from duty. By early May, the guards who were until then performing their duties in Warsaw were transported to Sachsenhausen and were replaced by personnel delegated from Majdanek. This scandal coincided with the degradation of the status of KL Warschau to a subcamp of Majdanek on 1 May 1944, and was thus renamed "Lublin concentration camp – Warsaw labour camp". According to some sources, it came due to deportations of prisoners to other camps as well as the approach of the Soviet army to Warsaw. Bogusław Tadeusz Kopka and Andreas Mix write, however, that it was the corruption scandal that was the causative agent for the change in status, and that the camp's reorganisation failed to get rid of the corruption issues.

There were three concentration camp commandants (German: Lagerkommandant) in the course of its history:

• SS-Obersturmbannführer Wilhelm Göcke served until October 1943;
• SS-Hauptsturmführer Nikolaus Herbet commanded the camp from October 1943 until his arrest in late April 1944;
• SS-Obersturmführer Friedrich Wilhelm Ruppert was appointed in May 1944 and dismissed in late June the same year.

As for the Schutzhaftlagerführer, who was concurrently the chief of the guards, SS-Obersturmführer Wilhelm Härtel served in this role from KL Warschau's creation until his arrest in late April 1944, while SS-Unterscharführer Heinz Villain occupied the position for the remainder of the camp's existence. The guards were violent towards the Jews, viewing them as enemies of the state.

Prisoners

General information

The trait that distinguished the Warsaw concentration camp from the other ones was that, apart from the initial transport of 300 Germans, the inmates were uniformly Jewish. Additionally, KL Warschau only accepted prisoners who were previously in concentration camps under the jurisdiction of SS-WVHA; in contrast, it did not accept those prisoners who were to serve in concentration camps due to a decision of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), local Security Police outposts, or new prisoners. These were predominantly young males (under 40 years old), who the Germans deemed to be suitable for demanding physical work. Only in the last days of the camp's existence was a group of Jewish women from the nearby Pawiak prison delivered to KL Warschau. The Nazis were trying to transport Jews from various European countries, hoping that the lack of knowledge of Polish would prevent them from communicating with the residents of Warsaw. Therefore, few Polish Jews were detained at the Warsaw concentration camp.

The first inmates, who previously were German prisoners in the Buchenwald concentration camp, arrived on 19 July 1943. Among these 300 people, 224 were professional criminals (German: Berufsverbrecher, or BV for short), 41 were deemed political prisoners, and 35 were considered "asocial". They became prisoner functionaries, such as kapos and Blockältester (block supervisors). Walter Wawrzyniak got hold of the chief position of camp supervisor (Lagerälteste). The German kapo prisoners, in particular those imprisoned as criminals, intimidated fellow Jewish inmates and acted towards them with cruelty, seeing them as expendable; though, as Gabriel Finder argues, this was not in most cases due to inherent anti-Semitism but rather due to the fact such violence granted them survival. Unlike in most other Nazi camps, there is little evidence an internal hierarchy among Jewish prisoners has ever developed and Jewish kapos were absent from the camp.

The first transport of Jewish prisoners arrived from Auschwitz-Birkenau on 31 August 1943, and three subsequent ones were made up to 27 November the same year, bringing 3,683 Jews in total, according to official data. The labourers represented Jews from various countries – the most numerous were Greek Salonican Jews, but some Austrian, Belgian, French, Dutch, German and even 50 Polish representatives of that religion (who only came because Germans had to meet 1,000 people transport quota) arrived to Warsaw as well. The ethnic composition changed substantially in spring 1944, when several trains from Auschwitz delivered a total of ca. 3,000 Hungarian Jews, who became the majority in the Warsaw concentration camp in the last months of its existence.

A multilingual sign saying that those who trespass the so-called "neutral zone" may be shot at without prior warning.

The exact number of prisoners who went through KL Warschau remains difficult to ascertain, as witness and expert estimates vary wildly, from 1,500 to 40,000 inmates. Gabriel N. Finder in his entry in the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos suggested some 8,000-9,000 people were incarcerated there. Bogusław Kopka, in his monography, says that at least 7,250 inmates went through the Warsaw concentration camp, including 300 German prisoner functionaries, about 3,700 Jews who arrived in 1943 and 3,000 Jews who came in 1944 from Auschwitz, in addition to 50 highly skilled Jews sent to the camp by the Ostbahn in 1943 and 200 Jews moved from the Pawiak prison. Successful escapes were rare, and Jews who were caught in the attempt were hanged in front of the assembled prisoner population.

Tasks

Prisoners were tasked with constructing the concentration camp they were residing in, demolishing the remaining ruins of the ghetto, clearing 2,640,000 m³ (93,000,000 cu ft) of rubble and with flattening the terrain at 1.20 m (3.9 ft) above the previous ground level, so as to convert the former ghetto into a park as Himmler envisaged in his order from 11 June 1943. While doing that, the workers were also ordered to salvage building materials (mainly scrap metal and bricks) for the German war effort, whose value was estimated to be worth about 220 million pre-war złotys (i.e. slightly above US$800 million in 2021 dollars). 10,000,000 m² (110,000,000 sq ft) of buildings were demolished, with some 8,105 tonnes of metal (of which about 7,300 tonnes of ferrous scrap metals and 805 tonnes of non-ferrous metals) and 34 million bricks salvaged. In addition to that, a separate search team was formed to find whatever precious items (such as money or jewellery) were left in the ruins; yet another team was working on the Umschlagplatz near Stawki street, where salvaged items were sorted and stored in warehouses.

A couple thousand of Polish civilians, who were paid, worked in the area, as did dozens of German technicians. At one period, these people, who usually handled more sophisticated tasks, such as the maintenance of demolition machines and handling explosives, outnumbered the inmates. German constructions firms, including Berlinisches Baugeschäft (Berlin), Willy Keymer (Warsaw), Merckle (Ostrów Wielkopolski), and Ostdeutscher Tiefbau (Naumburg), operated there on contract and benefitted from slave labour provided by the prisoners. The Ostbahn railway company assisted them.

Conditions

The conditions in KL Warschau were extremely harsh. Prisoners' food rationing was meagre and hunger was common among the inmates, which was exacerbated by lack of food parcels, as these were not delivered to the camp. The shortages, however, were somewhat alleviated by the presence of Polish workers contracted to remove the ruins of the ghetto, as this was an opportunity for the inmates to clandestinely buy food for whatever valuables they could find in the ruins, and, in later days, when such items became scarce, for gold fillings extracted from their teeth. The Jews were subjected to extermination through labour. The demolition and salvage work were hard and perilous labor, carried out at a brisk pace with no regard to loss of life of the prisoners, so fatal workplace incidents were commonplace. Sanitation was sorely lacking to the extent that hungry and drained prisoners were decimated by outbreaks of infectious diseases, and the lack of hygiene gave way to infestations of lice and fleas (though the situation got somewhat better by the time the leadership was changed and the camp's construction was finishing). In particular, a typhus epidemic in January and February 1944 decreased the prison population by two-thirds. The camp infirmary, according to dr Felician Loth, was "a parody of a sick ward", and patients who were unable to continue work were usually killed. The guards and prisoner functionaries tortured and murdered prisoners on a whim. For these reasons, almost 75% of original prisoners have died by March 1944, reducing the camp's population to around 1,000 inmates. This prompted the Germans to supply about 3,000 Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz.

Just as the Jews in other concentration camps, the inmates in KL Warschau were forced to wear camp uniforms and wooden clogs. The former had the Star of David badge sewn on it and a Latin letter marking the inmate's provenance. The newly arrived prisoners had their hair cut shortly and then underwent a procedure of bathing and disinsectisation, which, before the bathhouse was built in the camp, was happening in Pawiak prison. Prisoner functionaries, however, were treated differently – they lived in a separate barrack (with the exception of the Blockältester), could wear civilian clothes, bear arms, and even could sometimes go outside the camp's premises.

Executions

Ruins of the tenement house at 27 Dzielna Street in former Warsaw Ghetto, near Pawiak prison, this site was used as an execution spot in 1943–1944

Main article: Executions in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto (1943–1944)

Camp inmates, Polish Jews caught hiding on the "Aryan side" of Warsaw or in the ghetto's ruins, Polish political prisoners (Pawiak inmates) and Polish hostages captured during the street roundups (łapanki) were executed in the ruins of the former ghetto (which surrounded the camp) in 1943–1944. During the camp's existence, these executions took place almost daily, and in some days, dozens or even hundreds of Poles and Jews were executed there. The bodies were then burnt, first in open air pyres and later in the camp's crematorium.

The ruins of the ghetto supplanted previous execution sites, which were operating in the countryside around Warsaw, such as in Kampinos Forest (the site of the Palmiry massacre). The proximity of the Pawiak prison and the isolation of the former ghetto from the rest of the city, made them – from the German perspective – a far more suitable place for mass killings. Members of KL Warschau personnel, along with the members of other SS and Ordnungspolizei formations in Warsaw, were among the executioners. Furthermore, a special "death detachment" composed of the Jewish prisoners of the KL Warschau was used to dispose the bodies of the victims. The members of the Sonderkommando were often murdered after completing the task, too.

It is impossible to determine the exact number of victims of executions in the ruins. Historian Bogusław Tadeusz Kopka and Jan Żaryn, who wrote the foreword to Kopka's work, estimate that some 20,000 people were executed in the period, which included both people executed in the camp as in its vicinity. The Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos gives a smaller estimate of 4,000-5,000 people, counting only prisoners of KL Warschau.

Evacuation and liberation

Prisoners of camp with Polish soldiers from Battalion Zośka on 5 August 1944

Female prisoners constituted a part of prisoner population by the end of the camp's existence. Photo taken at liberation, 5 August 1944

In summer 1944, as the Red Army was approaching, Germans decided to evacuate the prisons and camps in Warsaw. By the end of July Schutzhaftlagerführer Heinz Villain demanded that all prisoners who would not be able to endure a march to assemble, promising the sick and exhausted that they would be transported in horse carriages. However, on 27 July, all those who appeared on the camp director's call were shot. The same day, all patients in the camp's infirmary were also killed. In total, around 400 prisoners died due to these actions.

The evacuation of the Warsaw concentration camp started on 28 July. About 4,500 inmates were then forced to march to Kutno, 120 km (75 mi) away, in sweltering heat. During the march, which lasted for three days, the prisoners were not given water nor food; the guards additionally murdered everyone who were unable to proceed or who were too slow to execute orders. Those who survived were loaded in freight carriages on 2 August, where poor conditions and the guards' cruelty added to the tally of dead prisoners. 3,954 prisoners eventually arrived to Dachau concentration camp on 6 August. Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos says that at last 500 inmates died during the operation, while Kopka gives a higher estimate of approximately 2,000 prisoners.

The Warsaw concentration camp was still operating, however. 90 SS personnel stayed there, so did about 400 prisoners who volunteered to stay in the camp to demolish it. Among those were about 300 original prisoners as well as dozens of Jewish prisoners of Pawiak (38-100 people, including 24 women), who were moved to KL Warschau on 28 July.

On 1 August, the Home Army (AK) started an uprising against Germans in Warsaw. In the first day of fighting, the Kedyw (sabotage command) for the Home Army District of Warsaw led by Lt. Stanisław Sosabowski "Stasinek" captured Waffen-SS warehouses on Stawki street (Umschlagplatz) and a school on nearby Niska street, setting free around 50 KL Warschau prisoners who were working there. By that time, the Home Army also partially controlled the area of "the new camp", located near Okopowa street. In light of these advances by AK, the concentration camp's staff and the prisoners retreated to the fortified defence positions in "the old camp".

In the following few days, the patrol of the insurgent forces made several incursions into the camp, with little success. Meanwhile, Cpt. Jan Kajus Andrzejewski "Jan", head of the Diversionary Brigade Broda 53 asked his superior, Lt. Col. Jan Mazurkiewicz "Radosław", to storm the buildings of Gęsiówka. Control over the concentration camp's area was important from a tactical standpoint, as the Home Army could gain control over the road leading to the Old Town via the ghetto's ruins, while also serving a humanitarian purpose of liberating the prisoners, who could be murdered. Mazurkiewicz agreed, and according to the plan, scout Battalion Zośka was handed the task of capturing the concentration camp's premises.

A bunker of the concentration camp near Okopowa street, destroyed by Battalion Zośka

KL Warschau was attacked on 5 August at 10:00, when Ryszard Białous "Jerzy", Zośka's commander, started the offensive. The military advantage was on the Polish side due to their prior capture and usage of the Panther tank, which destroyed the camp's watchtowers and bunkers. The German defence eventually collapsed and SS personnel hid in the Pawiak prison walls. Battalion Zośka's losses were rather small - one person was killed in action, another died of wounds and one person was wounded in action but survived; Germans' losses are unknown but were presumably larger. The Home Army thus liberated 348 Jews, among which 24 were women. Those released were mostly Greek and Hungarian Jews, with some Czechoslovakians and Dutch Jews, who knew very little Polish. It is known that only 89 people among the liberated had been Polish citizens, and historians have only been able to identify 73 prisoners.

The vast majority of released Jewish prisoners swiftly took part in the uprising, which Gabriel Finder attributes to an informal political group, which he says prevented the camp's inhabitants from moral deterioration. Some of these were fighting along other soldiers, while others were helping with transport and provisioning issues, rescuing those under ruins as well as extinguishing fires. Morale among Jewish fighters was hurt by displays of antisemitism, with several former Jewish prisoners in combat units killed by antisemitic Poles, in particular those associated with the National Armed Forces. After the defeat of the uprising, the survivors fled or hid in bunkers. There were as little as 200 Jewish survivors (former prisoners as well as Jews who were hiding on the "Aryan" side) when the Soviets entered Warsaw on 17 January 1945.

Postwar period

The Red Army entered Warsaw on 17 January 1945. After the retreat of the German forces, the former Nazi camp was first operated by the Soviet NKVD for German prisoners of war, as well as for the soldiers of the Home Army loyal to the Polish government-in-exile and other persons suspected of opposing the Soviet occupation. As in the case of the German period, the prisoners were held in poor conditions and it is probable that numerous executions were taking place in the camp.

The camp was then turned over to the Ministry of Public Security (MBP) in mid-1945, when it became known as Central Labour Camp for Warsaw's Reconstruction and whose prisoners were used for construction and demolition works in the capital. Most of the prisoners of war were released in 1948 and 1949, and in November 1949 the labour camp was converted to a prison. The facility did not change its purpose, as the inmates were still producing building materials for Warsaw's reconstruction, and it still used forced labour, but instead of prisoners of war, common criminals and people accused by the Special Commission for Fighting Abuse and Economic Sabotage of economic wrongdoings were sent there. According to Bogusław Kopka, 1,800 people died in the postwar prison; though an estimate of 1,180 victims also appears in the literature.

The prison on the place of the Warsaw concentration camp was closed in 1956 and was demolished in 1965. No element of the Nazi camp was preserved. As of 2021, the site is occupied by a garden square, residential buildings, and the building of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Inquiries

Exhumed bodies at the courtyard of Gęsiówka prison as part of the Polish government's inquiry into the crimes committed in the camp, September 1946

It did not take long for the newly established Communist government in Poland to start analysing the events that happened in the camp's history. Already in May 1945, the Warsaw Circuit Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland began a formal inquiry into the crimes committed in the Warsaw concentration camp. The premises were inspected by prosecutors for several times, which yielded a rich photographic documentation of the camp's buildings. On 15-25 September 1946, a total of 2180 kg of human corpses were exhumed and analysed (the corpses were then buried again in Wola Cemetery), however, the exhumations did not cover the whole territory of the camp.

In 1947, the inquiry was halted for the first time due to political considerations, as the former concentration camp was taken by the Ministry of Public Security, which ran a labour camp in the area. It was only in 1974 that the investigation was continued on the request of the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg, Germany; however, after two years, it was again suspended as the prosecutors deemed it impossible to retrieve more evidence in Poland. In light of the new evidence, the investigation was once again opened in 1986, only to be closed in 1996 due to the unavailability of the perpetrators for interrogation (who either went missing or were already dead). A parallel inquiry by German federal officials was also closed.

The topic of the camp returned to prominence in early 2000s, not least due to the July 2001 Sejm resolution commemorating the victims of the concentration camp, so the Regional Prosecutor's Office in Warsaw decided to open the Warsaw concentration camp case once again in 2002. The case was first managed by the Institute of National Remembrance's District Commission in Warsaw, then it was transferred to Łódź, but was promptly returned to the capital. On 23 January 2017, the case was closed for the fourth time.

Criminal responsibility of perpetrators

Following Allied victory in World War II, some people related to the Warsaw concentration camp's history were convicted in criminal or military courts.

• 53 SS officers and prisoner functionaries were convicted by the judiciary of the Polish People's Republic, who in most cases received relatively light sentences. Five Schutzstaffel officers from the camp were executed for their role in administering KL Warschau; seven died in prison and the rest was released in 1956 at the latest;
• Some members of KL Warschau staff were convicted in Dachau trials in the American zone of Allied-occupied Germany. Wilhelm Ruppert, Alfred Kramer and Franz Mielenz, for instance, received death penalties in the Dachau camp trial (Ruppert and Kramer were executed in 1946, while Mielenz died in prison); Willy Jobst, the camp doctor, also received capital punishment, but under the Mauthausen-Gusen camp trials (he was hanged in 1947).
• Walter Wawrzyniak, who was a prisoner functionary, was also sentenced to death for his activities in KL Warschau in an East German court in 1950, but this was reduced to life inprisonment on appeal.
• Heinz Villain, whom Bogusław Kopka described as among the most cruel staff member of KL Warschau, was ultimately convicted in the third Majdanek trial. In 1981, a court in Düsseldorf in West Germany gave him a 6-year prison term.

In addition to that, Theodor Szehinskyj, who immigrated to the US in the 1950s, had his US citizenship stripped as a federal court in Pennsylvania found in July 2000 that he had lied in his initial visa application about his past in the SS Totenkopf Division; the decision was upheld on appeal to the 3rd Circuit. Jürgen Stroop's trial in 1950 also included significant evidence relating to the concentration camp (Stroop was hanged in Warsaw in 1952).

Most of the staff of KL Warschau, however, did not face consequences for the war crimes. In particular, the whereabouts of Nicolaus Herbet, the second commandant of the camp, as well as Schutzhaftlagerführer Wilhelm Härtel remained unknown. In January 2017, IPN's prosecutors speculated that some SS officers involved in KL Warschau might be still alive, but decided to discontinue investigation due to the fact the prosecutors had no confirmation of this.

Discredited extermination-camp story

Tunnels near Warsaw West rail and bus stagion. The second tunnel from the left supposedly housed a German gas chamber used to exterminate non-Jewish Poles.

A purported scheme of the gas chamber in the tunnels near Warszawa Zachodnia station.

See also: Maria Trzcińska

Hypothesis

Despite the availability of reliable information about the Warsaw concentration camp, in the 1970s and 1980s a since-discredited legend or conspiracy theory developed in Poland concerning the camp. Maria Trzcińska, a Polish judge who served in 1974-1996 as a member of the Chief Commission for Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes in Poland (named Chief Commission for Investigation of Crimes against the Polish Nation after 1991), was assigned to investigate the German documents that her counterparts in Ludwigsburg have found. In mid-1988, testimony began to surface suggesting that the concentration camp was also located near Warszawa Zachodnia railway station, more than 3 km (1.9 mi) away, and included gas chambers; the witnesses also said that other camps also existed in the vicinity of the camp's generally recognised area.

Since then, Trzcińska engaged in activism for commemoration of the victims of the concentration camp. In 2002, on the wave of public interest that appeared since the Sejm's resolution, Trzcińska published a book titled Obóz zagłady w centrum Warszawy. Konzentrationslager Warschau (The Extermination Camp in the Centre of Warsaw. Konzentrazionslager Warschau). According to Jan Żaryn, when the idea of erecting a monument in honour of the victims of the Warsaw concentration camp came closer, the interested parties were not able to agree on descriptions for the monument, so Trzcińska requested that the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) verify which version was the correct one. The conclusions, which were published in a book by Bogusław Kopka, however, were so divergent from hers that she decided to retract her part of the publication and proceeded with her own book, which reiterated her points. These can be summarised in the following way:

• KL Warschau started its operation in October 1942;
• The Warsaw concentration camp was, according to Trzcińska, an extensive complex consisting of five subcamps: the main camp, which purportedly had previously served as a POW camp for the Polish Army soldiers detained after September 1939, was located in a small forest in the neighbourhood of Koło called Lasek na Kole; two were located in the former ghetto (one on Gęsia street, which is the generally recognised location, and another on Bonifraterska street), and two were located near the Warszawa Zachodnia station. These are said to have extended on an area of around 120 hectares (300 acres), containing 119 barracks capable of housing 41,000 inmates.
• KL Warschau was an extermination camp for Poles, which was part of the so-called Pabst Plan, which envisaged the reduction of Warsaw to a provincial Nazi-style city by demolishing most of Warsaw's buildings and reducing its population to 500,000 residents. Around 200,000 people, mostly ethnic Poles, were said to have been exterminated by gassing and mass shootings. The alleged gas chamber, which Trzcińska contended was located in a road tunnel near Józef Bem Street, converted specifically for that purpose, was central to these efforts. According to the historian, the corpses were then secretly transported to Gęsia street for cremation.
• The Polish People's Republic authorities were loath to study the history of the Warsaw concentration camp or commemorate its victims, as they were afraid of disclosing information about the functioning of Soviet NKVD and Polish Communist MBP administrations in KL Warschau, which she considered damaging.

Refutation

The contentions, in addition to not being confirmed by Bogusław Kopka, have also been refuted by the IPN, which in 2010 commissioned a report from historian and aerial-photography expert Zygmunt Walkowski, submitted in December 2016 (the report is not yet published as of September 2021), and were cast in doubt by other historians, including Władysław Bartoszewski, Tomasz Szarota and Jan Żaryn. In particular, they say that:

• no credible evidence exists for the assertion that KL Warschau had more camps than the one at Gęsia street. There is no testimony whatsoever about the existence of the camp at Bonifraterska street; as for three other camps which supposedly existed, available testimony is scarce, contains few details and contradicts one another. There is also no evidence for a POW camp in Koło neighbourhood that had allegedly existed before KL Warschau;

• there is no credible evidence for the hypothesis that KL Warschau was an extermination camp, featuring a tunnel near Warszawa Zachodnia station which had been converted to a giant gas chamber. Neither the Polish Underground State reports nor the German archives reveal any such information, nor did any piece of testimony coming from wartime period or shortly thereafter mention it. The oral and written submissions Trzcińska relied on were created more than 40 years after the war, and their veracity is dubious. Moreover, retired workers of "Kolprojekt", a rail construction bureau, and available documents of the enterprise suggest that the ventilation shafts near Józef Bem Street, which supposedly were remnants of the gas chamber, were in fact built in 1970s and that in 1960, the technical plan of Warszawa Zachodnia station did not have any gas chambers detected;
• known estimates of the losses Warsaw endured in World War II contradict the notion that 200,000 people could have died in the Warsaw concentration camp. Bogusław Kopka suggested that this number is in fact a sum of those who died in Warsaw Uprising, the deaths in the camps and some other civilian deaths in Warsaw.

Zygmunt Walkowski, who analysed aerial photographs of the area, confirmed in his report that the only place KL Warschau existed was on Gęsia street and that no camp infrastructure existed in the areas said to have contained other subcamps. Walkowski also noted tunnels were not closed and that vehicles could drive through them, while the two ventilation shafts and a ventilator engine that were supposedly used to pump Zyklon B were only built in the 1970s. It was also shown that during the German occupation, access to the forest near Koło was not restricted for civilians, the barracks were already built in 1930s and were used by civilians, while the purported "death wall" only emerged in 1972.

Reactions

According to Christian Davies, the discredited story that the Germans built a gas chamber to kill non-Jews, together with the fact of some 200,000 Polish fatalities in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising (for a total of 400,000 non-Jewish deaths in Warsaw, which is the usual estimate of the number of Jews imprisoned in Warsaw), has been used by the story's advocates to seek parity between Jewish and non-Jewish victimhood that would make the Holocaust seem less unique, a notion that Davies dubbed the "Polocaust". He also pointed to Law and Justice party (PiS) officials' endorsement for Mira Modelska-Creech, who emerged as one of the main proponents of the extermination camp hypothesis after Trzcińska died in 2011, and IPN's lack of reaction when the commemorative plaque citing Trzcińska's data was unveiled in 2017. Nasz Dziennik, a right-wing to far-right Catholic newspaper, and affiliated Radio Maryja, have promoted the hypothesis as an emblem of Polish martyrdom. The media outlets have also advocated for introducing the story into school curricula and for constructing a museum of KL Warschau.

Havi Dreifuss, Jan Grabowski, and Gideon Greif related the gas-chamber story to the current Polish government's historical policy and dismissed the account as a conspiracy theory (Grabowski) or fake history (Dreifuss). Walkowski, who said he was bemused by the fact that people were unhappy with his findings about fewer deaths, told reporters he received threats. Historian Daniel Blatman, on the hand, while seeing the hypothesis as "one of numberless stories that Holocaust deniers around the world are posting online", warned against generalisations on the Polish society or the Polish government.

Commemoration

A 1995 German post stamp, mentioning the Warsaw concentration camp

Probably in the 1950s, a Tchorek plaque, which said "in 1943-1944, Polish patriots were repeatedly shot to death and burnt by the Hitlerites in this building", was installed on a wall of the burnt-out Wołyń Caserns, specifically on the east wall, facing Zamenhof street. The plaque was lost in 1965, when Gęsiówka was demolished.

Commemoration efforts kickstarted in July 2001, when Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament, adopted a resolution commemorating the victims of the concentration camp, while calling to create a monument "in remembrance of thousands of Polish inhabitants of Warsaw who were murdered in the Warsaw concentration camp as part of the plan of annihilating the Capital City of Poland, as well as murdered citizens of other nationalities: Jews, Greeks, Gypsies, Belarusians and Italian officers".

In March 2004, the Warsaw city council allowed to build a commemoration site on the Alojzy Pawelek square in the southern part of Wola district, next to what Trzcińska contended were gas chambers and subcamps of KL Warschau. The resolution was cancelled in October 2009 after consultations with the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites, a governmental body responsible for preservation of sites of wartime persecution, and it was decided to place a new monument in Muranów neighbourhood, on the site of what was then Serbia prison, some 200 m (660 ft) away from the walls of the actual concentration camp. That decision was opposed by supporters of Trzcińska's hypothesis, who argued that placing the monument there would suggest that only Jews were victims of the concentration camp, but the Supreme Administrative Court denied their request to invalidate the new resolution. As of October 2021, the monument in Muranów has not yet appeared.

Supporters of the extermination camp theory have created their own commemoration sites. One was built with municipal approval in 2004 and became a place of informal monthly gatherings of supporters of Trzcińska's hypothesis. Their efforts have resulted in a plaque on a nearby church on Józef Bem Street, placed in 2009 and consecrated by Archbishop Kazimierz Nycz, and another one on a church in the Warsaw district of Praga-Południe in 2017; both are repeating Trzcińska's conjecture about 200,000 Poles murdered in the Warsaw concentration camp. An unofficial plaque was also installed in Lasek na Kole forest, contending that a place of execution connected with the Warsaw concentration camp existed there.

As a result, the only place of commemoration of the Warsaw concentration camp in the area of KL Warschau is a plaque that was initially embedded into a wall of a building at 34 Anielewicza street in 1994; it was moved in 2018 and is now located on the corner of Anielewicza and Okopowa street, which was the south-west corner of KL Warschau. The plaques, written in Polish, Hebrew and English inform about the camp's liberation by Battalion Zośka and the subsequent participation of the prisoners in the Warsaw uprising. A plaque in remembrance of the victims was also unveiled near the Museum of Pawiak Prison in November 2013.

The camp's name appears on the 1995 German post stamp, prepared for the 50th anniversary of liberation of prisoners from the concentration camps. In 2020, a 10 PLN silver commemorative coin was issued by the National Bank of Poland, honouring the camp's victims.

• Commemoration of the Warsaw concentration camp
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  Official commemorative site of the Warsaw concentration camp, on the corner of Anielewicza and Okopowa street, near the camp's south-west corner
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  Commemorative plaque near Pawiak Prison
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  Commemorative plaque placed in 2017, contending that 200,000 Poles were murdered in KL Warschau, which it says was "a white blot of history that was being hidden"
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  Another commemorative plaque citing the same number
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  Commemoration site for the Warsaw concentration camp on Alojzy Pawelek square, an unofficial gathering place of Trzcińska's supporters. Photo taken in 2012

External links

• Scheme of the camp, partially superimposed on current layout of the streets (in Polish)
• Photograph of the commemorative plaque in Lasek na Kole
• Collection of materials related to the Warsaw concentration camp (particularly related to Kopka's book and controversy about Trzcińska's findings; in Polish)

Sources

Books

• Bartoszewski, Władysław (1970). Warszawski pierścień śmierci 1939–1944 [Warsaw Ring of Death 1939-1944] (in Polish). Warszawa: Interpress.
• Borkiewicz-Celińska, Anna (1990). Batalion „Zośka” [Battalion Zośka] (in Polish). Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. ISBN 83-06-01851-6.
• Domańska, Regina (1978). Pawiak – więzienie Gestapo. Kronika lat 1939–1944 [Pawiak - the prison of Gestapo. Chronography of 1939-1944]. Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza.
• Engelking, Barbara; Leociak, Jacek (2013). Getto warszawskie. Przewodnik po nieistniejącym mieście [Warsaw Ghetto. A guide to a non-existent city]. Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów. ISBN 978-83-63444-27-3.
• Kopka, Bogusław (2007). Konzentrationslager Warschau. Historia i następstwa [Konzentrationslager Warschau. History and consequences]. Warsaw: Institute of National Remembrance. ISBN 978-83-60464-46-5.
• Kopka, Bogusław (2019). Gułag nad Wisłą. Komunistyczne obozy pracy w Polsce 1944–1956 [GULag on the Vistula. Communist forced labour camps in Poland in 1944-1956]. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie. ISBN 978-83-08-06753-6.
• Łuszczyna, Marek (2017). "Antifa, czyli punkt widzenia Heinza Grischke". Mała zbrodnia: Polskie obozy koncentracyjne (in Polish). Warsaw: Znak-Horyzont. ISBN 978-83-240-4175-6.
• Longerich, Peter (2011). Heinrich Himmler: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199592326.
• Salter, Michael (11 June 2007). Nazi War Crimes, US Intelligence and Selective Prosecution at Nuremberg: Controversies Regarding the Role of the Office of Strategic Services. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-135-33133-7.
• Stroop, Jürgen (1943). The Warsaw Ghetto is no more. New Haven: Yale Law School Lillian Goodman Law Library. ISBN 978-83-7629-455-1.
• Szarota, Tomasz (2014). "Konzentrationslager Warschau". In Komorowski, Krzysztof (ed.). Warszawa walczy 1939–1945. Leksykon [Warsaw fights 1939-1945. A dictionary] (in Polish). Warsaw: Fundacja Warszawa Walczy 1939–1945/Bellona Publishing House. ISBN 978-83-1113474-4.
• Trzcińska, Maria (2002). Obóz zagłady w centrum Warszawy. Konzentrationslager Warschau [An extermination camp in the centre of Warsaw. Konzentrationslager Warschau] (in Polish). Radom: Polskie Wydawnictwo Encyklopedyczne. ISBN 83-88822-16-0.

Further reading

• Benjakob, Omer (4 October 2019). "The Fake Nazi Death Camp: Wikipedia's Longest Hoax, Exposed". Haaretz. Retrieved 18 October 2019.
• Goldstein, Chaim Itzl (1970). The Bunker. Philadelphia, Pa.: Jewish Publication Society.
• Libionka, Dariusz (1 December 2014). "Zapisy dotyczące Żydów w warszawskich kronikach policyjnych z lat 1942–1944". Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały (in Polish) (10): 558–591. doi:10.32927/ZZSiM.537. ISSN 2657-3571.
• Mannheimer, Max (2000). Spätes Tagebuch. Theresienstadt - Auschwitz - Warschau - Dachau (in German). Zurich: Pendo. ISBN 9783858423740.