The extermination camp in Chelmno - upon - Ner was the first centre for the mass extermination of Jews. It began functioning as early as December, 1941. The decision to build the camp was greatly influenced by Heinz-Rolf Hoppner's letter from the Governorship of the Third Reich in Poznan. The letter, which was sent to Berlin on July 16th 1941, contained a proposal of "solving the Jewish problem" in the so-called "Warta country".

There are two main periods in the camp's history. Period I - from December 8th 1941 (the arrival of the first transport of prisoners) to April 7th 1943 (the blowing up of the palace and the demolition of the crematoriums ). The extermination took place in mobile gas chambers(Spezialwagen), using exhaust fumes. After being brought to Chelmno, the Jews were led into the palace, supposedly in order to take a bath. They were later forced into the gas-truck. After the engine was started, the exhaust fumes entered the truck as it was driven to the Rzuchow Forest, four kilometres (2,5 miles) away from Chelmno. There a group of Jewish workers, who were picked out from the transport as needed, buried the bodies in large grave ditches. In the summer of 1942, probably for fear of an epidemic the graves were re-opened and all the bodies were burned in the crematoriums.

The first to be murdered were the Jews from the nearby ghettos in Kolo, Dabie and Izbica Kujawska. Beginning in January 1942, the Gypsies from Lodz started to be brought in, followed by the Jews from the Lodz Ghetto, which also contained the Jews from abroad (Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria...), for whom the Lodz Ghetto was just a transient stage in their tragedy.

Period II - covers the spring - summer of 1944, to January 18th 1945. The sonderkommando crew, which had been sent to Yugoslavia to fight the partisans, returned to Chelmno in the spring of 1944. The palace had already been destroyed, so extermination was continued in the Rzuchow Forest. After the arrival of several transports, the operation of the camp was again suspended and the Jews stopped being murdered on such a large scale in Chelmno. A part of the camp's personnel and a group of the last 47 Jews, imprisoned in a granary near the palace ruins, remained in the village. The last execution took place on the night of January 17th 1945. The Jews were killed by a shot to the back of the head. Only two men survived: Mieczyslaw Zurawski and Szymon Srebrnik, who - with Michal Podchlebnik - the one who had escaped from the camp in January 1942, became the eyewitnesses of this crime after the war. Two other fugitives "Szlamek" and Abram Roj died before the end of the war.

The post-war investigation conducted by judge Wladyslaw Bednarz, revealed many details of the camp's history. Bednarz uncovered how the crematoriums and the "Spezialwagen" were constructed. The camp's personnel consisted of more than a dozen Gestapo officers and tens of policemen and military policemen from Lodz and Poznan. The camp's first commander was ss-hauptsturmfuhrer Herbert Lange and later from March 1942 until the closure of the camp - hauptsturmfuhrer Hans Johann Bothmann, who was a commissioner in the crime department of the SS. After the war, two members of the sonderkommando "Kulmchof", Walter Piller and Hermann Gielow, were sentenced to death by a Polish court. In the years 1962-1965, eleven criminals from the Chelmno camp were on trial in West Germany. For "accessory to murder", the court sentenced three criminals to 13 years, one to 8 years, one to 7 years, three to 13 months and 2 weeks in prison and the rest were acquitted. It is difficult to provide you with credible figures for the amount of people murdered in Chelmno Camp. Hitherto existing publications cannot come to an agreement about this figure. Bednarz estimated it to be around 350,000. The lowest acceptable amount - 152,000 people was estimated during the court trial in Bonn. Most of the victims were Jews, but probably among the murdered were also groups of Poles, Soviet war prisoners, about 5,000 Gypsies and children from the Czech village of Lidice. These are shocking facts. This crime must never be forgotten.

Children from an orphanage in Marysin district of Lodz, Poland wait in line to board a truck which will take them to the Chelmno concentration camp where they will be murdered.

Author : Marcin Olowek