Warsaw concentration camp
Warsaw | |
---|---|
Nazi concentration camp | |
Coordinates | 52°14′54.3″N 20°59′23.7″E / 52.248417°N 20.989917°E |
Other names | See relevant section |
Known for | Discredited extermination camp theory |
Location | Warsaw, General Government, German-occupied Poland |
Built by | Camp's inmates |
Operated by | Nazi Germany |
Commandant | Wilhelm Göcke (June 1943 – September 1943) Nikolaus Herbet (September/October 1943 – April 1944) Wilhelm Ruppert (May–June 1944)[1] |
Original use | Gęsiówka prison[1] |
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)[1] 300 Germans |
Number of inmates | 8,000–9,000[1] |
Killed | 4,000–5,000 prisoners total: 20,000 |
Liberated by | Home Army during the Warsaw Uprising[1] |
The Warsaw concentration camp (
Located in the ruins of the
definitively expelled the Germans from Warsaw in January 1945, 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 the camp's premises were demolished in 1965.The
The camp played a comparatively minor role in the Holocaust and thus seldom appears in mainstream historiography.[1][5] However, it 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 operating a giant gas chamber inside a tunnel near Warszawa Zachodnia railroad station and that 200,000 mainly non-Jewish Poles were gassed there.[4]
Name
During the first nine months, the Warsaw concentration camp functioned in its own right. At this time it carried the official name of Waffen-SS Konzentrationslager Warschau (often referred to as KL Warschau[6] for short in Nazi documents and in Polish scholarship, or, in most contemporary German-language works, KZ Warschau).[7][8] In May 1944, KL Warschau became a branch of Majdanek concentration camp,[a] 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.[9]
The name Gęsiówka (IPA: [ɡɛ̃ˈɕufka]) often appears in Polish sources. This is due to the fact that the camp occupied the complex of now non-existent Wołyń Caserns , 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 World War II. During German occupation, they accommodated the central prison for the Jewish district, the correcting labour camp of the Sicherheitspolizei , as well as the Judenrat.[10] The prison complex became colloquially known as Gęsiówka (named for Gęsia street), which nickname transferred to KL Warschau as well.[11][12] Supporters of the Trzcińska's theory tend to prefer the German name, which Aleksandra Ubertowska says has to do with the name being perceived as more serious.[13]
After World War II, the camp, although with changed purposes, was still run by Communist authorities under other names (see the relevant section for details).[14][15]
Creation
According to
As plans to demolish the Warsaw Ghetto appeared, Himmler soon returned to the idea of creating a concentration camp in Warsaw. In a letter dated 16 February 1943, Himmler instructed SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl, head of SS-WVHA, to create a concentration camp in the "Jewish district" and ordered all German-owned private enterprises operating in the Ghetto to be relocated there.[16] 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 that the buildings of the deserted ghetto be demolished after the concentration camp was transported to Lublin.[16] The task of demolition, it was suggested, was to be handed over to the local Jews.[23] 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.[23][24][25] The concentration camp failed to materialise again, and only part of the enterprises, together with some of the Jews, were evacuated to the concentration camps in Majdanek, Trawniki, and Poniatowa.[23][26]
The idea of the camp was revived once again after the failure of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
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 to Oswald Pohl ordering him to make the Jews completely flatten the destroyed Warsaw Ghetto, 11 June 1943 (emphasis in original)
Eventually, Pawiak's status as a prison did not change, but the concentration camp was created on nearby Gęsia street, which was also located inside the Ghetto walls. One of the reasons why Gęsiówka was chosen was because it was among the only buildings left intact in the area previously occupied by the Ghetto.[30] In addition to that, Bogusław Kopka argues that its position within a deserted area with restricted access to civilians was also a factor. Another advantage was the camp's 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.[10]
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.[1][31]
Description
Location and facilities
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 the police.
The camp was surrounded by high walls guarded by watchtowers.[35] The main entrance was located at what was then Gęsia Street 24.[12] The former military prison and Judenrat seat, at what is today Karmelicka Street 17a, served as a crematorium for bodies of dead inmates and executed civilians from outside the camp.[36] The Germans also started building two other cremation sites, but did not manage to open them before they evacuated the camp; even the one that existed was not operated in the camp's final days.[5] Additionally, one of Gęsiówka's buildings was used as a torture room, while a prison yard came to be an SS officers' mess.[37] A bathhouse was built in late 1943 and early 1944, and bunkers were also available on-site.[38] By February 1944, the camp's infrastructure was in an advanced stage of completion, with 90% of Lager I and 75% of Lager II finished[39] (Berenstein gives figures of 95% and 60%, respectively).[40] However, the construction was repeatedly halted due to the recurring typhus epidemic, which decimated the inmate population and forced the camp's administration to quarantine the premises twice (in January and February 1944, see below, and again in April and May). Therefore, work on the camp was only completed in June 1944.[41]
Personnel
Initially, about 380 SS soldiers were maintaining the concentration camp, approximately the size of a
In comparison with other concentration camps, KL Warschau had a less sophisticated internal structure.[44] Bogusław Kopka writes that the camp lacked the political department (Politische Abteilung), and some other positions remained unoccupied. Conversely, the Institute of National Remembrance's report on the investigation of the crimes committed in KL Warschau says that the Politische Abteilung did exist, but it was directly subordinate to the commandant of Sicherheitsdienst and Sicherheitspolizei in Warsaw, instead of being the main department of the camp's administration.[45] Among the 208 identified members of the camp's administration,[46] 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.[44] The camp's staff was subordinate to SS-WVHA, but it also was obliged to cooperate closely with the SS and police leader for the Warsaw District due to an agreement reached between the two SS institutions.[45] The coordination was particularly strong during the pacification that happened at the turn of 1943/44, which was targeted at the Polish population of the capital.[47]
There were three concentration camp commandants (German: Lagerkommandant) in the course of the camp's history:[48]
- SS-Obersturmbannführer Wilhelm Göcke served until September 1943, when he was transferred to the newly created concentration camp in Kaunas in Generalbezirk Litauen;[1]
- SS-Hauptsturmführer Nikolaus Herbet commanded the camp from September[1] or October 1943[48] 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 simultaneously the camp director and 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.[49]
The Warsaw concentration camp usually featured SS officers who were deemed to be low-value workers.
In late April 1944, Commandant Nikolaus Herbet, Schutzhaftlagerführer Wilhelm Härtel as well as
Prisoners
General information
The trait that distinguished the Warsaw concentration camp from the other ones was that, with the exception of the initial transport of 300 Germans, the inmates were uniformly
The first inmates, who previously were German prisoners in the Buchenwald concentration camp, arrived on 19 July 1943.[23][30] Among these 300 people, 224 were professional criminals (Berufsverbrecher, or BV for short), 41 were deemed political prisoners, and 35 were considered "asocial".[9] They became prisoner functionaries, such as kapos and Blockältester (block supervisors).[9] Walter Wawrzyniak got hold of the chief position of camp supervisor (Lagerältester). Most of the German kapo prisoners, in particular those imprisoned as criminals, intimidated fellow Jewish inmates and acted towards them with cruelty, seeing them as expendable;[1] 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.[29] Unlike in most other Nazi camps, Jewish kapos were absent from the camp and there is little evidence an internal hierarchy among Jewish prisoners has ever developed.[29]
The first transport of Jewish prisoners arrived from
The exact number of prisoners who went through KL Warschau remains difficult to ascertain, as witness and expert estimates vary from 1,500 to 40,000.
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.[59][56] While doing that, the workers were also ordered to salvage building materials (mainly scrap metal and bricks) for the German war effort. 10,000,000 m2 (110,000,000 sq ft) of buildings were demolished, which yielded 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.[1][55] 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.[55][56]
Tatiana Berenstein and Adam Rutkowski estimate the value of the pre-war houses demolished at 220 million pre-war
A couple thousand Polish civilians, who were paid, also worked in the area, as did dozens of German technicians.[60][56] 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 companies, 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.[61] The Ostbahn assisted them.[1]
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 from the outside, as these were not delivered to the camp.[29][55] 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.[1] However, the gold contained there was also of interest of the SS guards, who strictly forbade removal of the teeth. They sought to enrich themselves by getting the precious metal after the death of the labourers.[59][29]
The Jews were subjected to
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.[64] 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 were even sometimes allowed to go outside the camp's premises.[9] Jewish inmates speaking German and/or Polish also had slightly better conditions, the former because they could easily understand the guards' orders and communicate with them, while the latter could barter more efficiently with the Polish workers.[29]
Executions
In 1943–1944, camp inmates, Polish Jews caught hiding on the "Aryan side" of Warsaw or in the ghetto's ruins, Polish
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.[69] Members of KL Warschau personnel, along with the members of other SS and Ordnungspolizei formations in Warsaw, were among the executioners. Furthermore, a special Sonderkommando, composed of the Jewish prisoners of the KL Warschau, was used to dispose the bodies of the victims.[68] The members of that detachment were often murdered after completing the task, too.[11]
It is impossible to determine the exact number of victims of executions in the ruins since the documents related to the camp were destroyed during its evacuation.[70] Bogusław Kopka and Jan Żaryn estimate that some 20,000 people died as a result of the camp's activity, of which 10,000 were Poles. The number includes prisoner deaths as well as victims of executions in and around the camp, among whom were Polish political prisoners and Polish Jews caught hiding on the "Aryan side" of Warsaw or in the restricted zone of the former Warsaw Ghetto.[65][3][8] Kopka later clarified that 10,000 people at most could have died in the camp itself.[70] The Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos gives a smaller estimate of 4,000-5,000 people, counting only prisoners of KL Warschau,[1] while Vági and Kádár suggest 3,400 to 5,000 prisoners.[51]
Evacuation and liberation
In summer 1944, as the Red Army was approaching, the 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, including at least 180 Hungarians, died due to these actions.[51][71]
The evacuation of the Warsaw concentration camp started on 28 July. About 4,500 inmates were then forced to march to
The Warsaw concentration camp was still operating, however. Ninety SS personnel stayed there, as did about 400 prisoners who volunteered to stay in the camp to demolish it.[11] Among those were about 300 original prisoners[29] as well as dozens of Jewish prisoners of Pawiak (38-100 people, including 24 women), who were moved to KL Warschau on 28 July.[1][72]
On 1 August, the
In the following few days, the patrol of the insurgent forces made several incursions into KL Warschau, with little success.
KL Warschau was attacked on 5 August at 10:00, when Ryszard Białous "Jerzy", Zośka's commander, and Wacław Micuta, who commanded one of its platoons, started the offensive. The military advantage was on the Polish side due to their prior capture and usage of a Panther tank, which destroyed the camp's watchtowers and bunkers.[77] 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; German losses are unknown but were presumably larger.[78] The Home Army thus liberated 348 Jews, among which 24 were women.[23][79] Those released were mostly Hungarian (200-250 people)[51] and Greek Jews, with some Czechoslovakians and Dutch Jews, who knew very little Polish.[2] It is known that only 89 people among the liberated had been Polish citizens,[80] and historians have only been able to identify 73 prisoners by name.[45] The Warsaw concentration camp was the only German concentration camp in Poland that was not liberated by main Allied troops, but by resistance fighters.[51][81][d]
The vast majority of released Jewish prisoners swiftly took part in the uprising, which Gabriel Finder attributes to an informal political group which that prevented the camp's inhabitants from moral deterioration.[29] Some of them were fighting along with other soldiers, but most, given their lack of combat experience, were helping with logistical issues, rescuing those under ruins as well as extinguishing fires.[2][79] Morale among Jewish fighters was hurt by displays of antisemitism, with several former Jewish prisoners in combat units killed by antisemitic Poles,[1]: 1514 in particular those associated with the National Armed Forces.[2] After the defeat of the uprising, the survivors fled or hid in bunkers. There were as few as 200 Jewish survivors (former prisoners as well as Jews who were hiding on the "Aryan" side) on 17 January 1945, on which date the Red Army entered Warsaw .[1]
Postwar
After the retreat of the German forces from Warsaw, the former Nazi camp was first operated by the Soviet
The camp was then turned over to the Polish Ministry of Public Security (MBP) in mid-1945, when it became known as the Central Labour Camp for Warsaw's Reconstruction (Centralny Obóz Pracy dla Odbudowy Warszawy). Its 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.[15] The facility, which became known under two names: Central Prison — Labour Centre in Warsaw (Centralne Więzienie – Ośrodek Pracy w Warszawie) or Central Prison Warsaw II Gęsiówka (Centralne Więzienie Warszawa II Gęsiówka),[14] did not de facto change its purpose. The inmates were still producing building materials for Warsaw's reconstruction, and Gęsiówka 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.[14] According to Bogusław Kopka, 1,800 people died in the postwar prison;[83] though an estimate of 1,180 victims also appears in the literature.[84] The fact that the former Nazi camp was taken and run by the communist authorities was the main reason why the Chief Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland ceased its investigation in 1947.[85]
The prison was closed in 1956 and was demolished in 1965. No element of the Nazi camp was preserved.[86] As of 2023, the site is occupied by a garden square, residential buildings, and the building of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.[87]
Inquiries
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 launched a formal inquiry into the crimes committed in Warsaw concentration camp.[88] Prosecutors inspected the premises several times, which yielded rich photographic documentation of the camp's buildings.[89] On 15–25 September 1946, a total of 2180 kg of human corpses was exhumed and analysed (the corpses were then buried again in Wola Cemetery ); however, the exhumations did not cover the whole territory of the camp.[45][90]
In 1947, the inquiry was halted for the first time due to political considerations, as the former concentration camp was functioning converted to a labour camp under the Communist Ministry of Public Security.[85] 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. 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.[91]
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,[92] so the Regional Prosecutor's Office in Warsaw decided to open the Warsaw concentration camp case once again in 2002.[93] The case was first managed by the Institute of National Remembrance's District Commission in Warsaw, then it was transferred to Łódź,[94] but was promptly returned to the capital. On 23 January 2017, the case was closed for the fourth time.[45]
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 SS 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.[1][95]
- Some members of KL Warschau staff were convicted in 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 and was hanged in 1947, though he was indicted in a different trial, which concerned the Mauthausen-Gusen camp.[96]
- East German court in 1950, but this was reduced to life imprisonment on appeal.[97]
- Third Majdanek Trial. In 1981, a court in Düsseldorf in West Germany gave him a 6-year prison term.[98]
Additionally,
Most of the staff of KL Warschau, however, did not face consequences for the war crimes.[102] In particular, the whereabouts of Nicolaus Herbet, the second commandant of the camp, as well as Schutzhaftlagerführer Wilhelm Härtel remained unknown. The Institute of National Remembrance's (IPN) prosecutors inquired about 208 people whom it identified to be staff members of the concentration camp in 2014, but the Ludwigsburg office only sent information about a fraction of them because of staffing issues related to processing the request of this breadth.[103] In January 2017, IPN's prosecutors speculated that some SS officers involved in KL Warschau might be still alive,[45] but decided to discontinue the investigation due to the fact the prosecutors had no confirmation of this.[46]
Discredited extermination camp story
Hypothesis
Despite the availability of reliable information about the Warsaw concentration camp,
Thereafter Trzcińska advocated commemoration of the concentration camp's victims, based on the testimony from the late 1980s. In 2002 Trzcińska published a book, Obóz zagłady w centrum Warszawy. Konzentrationslager Warschau (The Extermination Camp in the Centre of Warsaw: Konzentrazionslager Warschau).[107] According to Jan Żaryn, when the idea of a monument to the victims of the Warsaw concentration camp approached fruition, the interested parties were unable to agree on inscriptions to be placed on it, so Trzcińska requested that the IPN verify which version was correct.[108] The institute's conclusions, published in a book by Bogusław Kopka, however, diverged so strongly from hers that she retracted her section of the book and independently published her own conclusions,[109] reiterating the points she had made five years before.[93][f] These can be summarised as follows:
- KL Warschau started its operation in October 1942, just after
- 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 subcamps 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.[5][g] These are said to have extended over an area of around 120 hectares (300 acres), containing 119 barracks capable of housing 41,000 inmates.[114][115]
- KL Warschau, as Trzcińska purported, operated as an extermination camp for Poles.[5] Around 200,000 people, mostly ethnic Poles, were said to have been killed by gassing and mass shootings.[4] A road tunnel under the railway line, which is today part of Aleja Prymasa Tysiąclecia (then part of Józef Bem Street ), was allegedly converted into a gas chamber, which she claimed played a central role in that extermination.[4]
- 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 the information about the functioning of Soviet NKVD and Polish Communist MBP administrations in KL Warschau.[4]
Refutation
These contentions, in addition to not being confirmed by Bogusław Kopka, have also been refuted by the IPN in a later analysis by Zygmunt Walkowski .[45] The findings were also cast in doubt by other historians, including Władysław Bartoszewski, Tomasz Szarota,[11] Andreas Mix[5] and Jan Żaryn.[116] 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;[5] as for three other camps which supposedly existed, available testimony is scarce, is contradictory and contains few details.[117] There is also no evidence for a POW camp in Koło neighbourhood that had allegedly existed before KL Warschau,[118] or in general of any spatially separated camps;[5]
- there is no credible evidence for the hypothesis that KL Warschau was an extermination camp, or that it featured a giant gas chamber under the railway tracks. 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.[119] The oral and written submissions Trzcińska relied on were created more than 40 years after the war, and their veracity is dubious.[4] 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 the 1970s[120] and that in 1960, the technical plan of Warszawa Zachodnia station did not have any gas chambers detected;[121]
- 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.[122] 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.[119]
In 2010, the Institute of National Remembrance commissioned a report from historian and aerial-photography expert Zygmunt Walkowski , which was submitted in December 2016 (it is not yet published as of August 2022).[106] The report confirmed that the only place KL Warschau existed on was on Gęsia Street and that no camp infrastructure existed in the areas said to have contained other subcamps.[106] Walkowski also noted that the 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 into the tunnel were only built in the 1970s.[123] 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 the 1930s and were used by civilians, while the purported "death wall" only emerged in 1972.[4][106]
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
In 2001, Bartoszewski dismissed the gas chamber theory as being propagated among those "who think that too few people have died in Warsaw".
Commemoration
Probably in the 1950s, a Tchorek plaque, which said that "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.[131] Bogusław Kopka says, though, that during his visit to Warsaw in 1959, Richard Nixon, then Vice President of the United States, managed to lay a wreath in front of the main building of the former concentration camp.[70]
Commemoration efforts were renewed in July 2001, when the
In March 2004, the Warsaw city council allowed to build a commemoration site on the Alojzy Pawelek square in the southern part of
The resolution that initially allowed the monument's construction was cancelled in October 2009 after consultations with the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites, a governmental body responsible for the preservation of sites of wartime persecution, and it was decided to place a new monument in the neighbourhood of Muranów, on the site of what was then Serbia prison, some 200 m (660 ft) away from the walls of the actual concentration camp.[134][135][i] 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.[134]
Supporters of the extermination camp theory have created their own commemoration sites. Their efforts have resulted in the 2004 monument, a plaque on a nearby church on Józef Bem Street , placed in 2009 and consecrated by Archbishop Kazimierz Nycz,[136] and another two in 2017, one on a church in the Warsaw district of Praga-Południe and its copy in the Jasna Góra Monastery in Częstochowa; all of these are repeating Trzcińska's conjecture about 200,000 Poles murdered in the Warsaw concentration camp.[124][114] An unofficial plaque was also installed in the Lasek na Kole forest, contending that a place of execution connected with the Warsaw concentration camp existed there.[137] Marius Gudonis and Benjamin T. Jones, in their book History in a Post-Truth World, relate the fact such plaques appeared to the indifference to established facts and to an ideological devotion to the preferred historical narrative, which, in the case of the 2009 plaque, was further cemented by approval of high church authorities.[110]
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;
The camp's name appears on the 1995 German post stamp, prepared for the 50th anniversary of the liberation of prisoners from Nazi concentration camps.[140] In 2020, a 10 PLN silver commemorative coin was issued by the National Bank of Poland, honouring the camp's victims.[141]
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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 nearPawiak Prison
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Commemorative plaque placed in Warsaw 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". Its copy was placed in Częstochowa
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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
Notes
- ^ Majdanek also served as an extermination camp
- ^ The "Lublin camp" (Majdanek) was already functioning when the letter was written
- ^ The initial project of the Warsaw concentration camp created by Hans Kammler assumed that three camp sectors would have appeared by late February 1944, but the third never materialised, and the camp's capacity was halved.[9]
- US Army, by the NSZ's Holy Cross Mountains Brigade on 5 May 1945, days before World War II ended in Europe.[82]
- ^ According to the scheme, a ventilation shaft, which was located closer to the railway station and is seen on the left of the scheme, pumped in air from the outside. In the meantime, hydrogen cyanide gas appearing from Zyklon B was transported by two pipes to the ventilators, where the gas was mixed with air, and then blown into the tunnel via vents in its walls that could be closed. These were the two gas chambers that Trzcińska alleged to have existed. The gas was then pumped out of the gas chambers by the ventilator engines and released into the atmosphere. The scheme says that the Institute of National Remembrance and the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites are to blame for the destruction of what is said to be the remnants of the gas chamber infrastructure in 1996.
- ^ This English Wikipedia article about the Warsaw concentration camp was created in 2004 and for 15 years presented Trzcińska's extermination-camp story as fact, despite it having been discredited by 2007.[110] The story was removed in August 2019 and drew media attention in October 2019, when Omer Benjakob of Haaretz[111] called it "Wikipedia's longest-standing hoax".[112]
- Jerusalem Avenuerunning from Niemcewicza street to the road tunnel).
- ^ For publications advocating Trzcińska's thesis since she died in 2011, see:
- Zaorska, Aldona (2013). KL Warschau. Historia obozu zagłady w Warszawie [KL Warschau. History of an extermination camp in Warsaw] (in Polish). Warsaw: Bollinari Publishing House. OCLC 855590248.
- Bojarski, Włodzimierz Witold, ed. (2014). Plan zagłady Warszawy: KL Warschau [Plan of Warsaw's extermination: KL Warschau]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo "Myślę Ojczyzna". OCLC 924728007.
- Modelska-Creech, Mira (2015). KL Warschau: to miała być zbrodnia doskonała... [KL Warschau: it was supposed to be a OCLC 939908797.
- Zaorska, Aldona (2013). KL Warschau. Historia obozu zagłady w Warszawie [KL Warschau. History of an extermination camp in Warsaw] (in Polish). Warsaw: Bollinari Publishing House.
- ^ As of March 2022, the monument in Muranów has not yet appeared.
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- ^ ISSN 0514-7409.
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{{cite book}}
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Bibliography
- Bartoszewski, Władysław (1970). Warszawski pierścień śmierci 1939–1944 [Warsaw Ring of Death 1939-1944] (in Polish). Warszawa: Interpress.
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- ISBN 978-83-63444-27-3.
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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. - survivor's account
- 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. ISSN 2657-3571.
- Mannheimer, Max (2000). Spätes Tagebuch. Theresienstadt - Auschwitz - Warschau - Dachau (in German). ISBN 9783858423740. - survivor's account
- Panasiuk, Agnieszka; Niezgoda, Arkadiusz (25 August 2001). "Tunel pod pomnik". Polityka (in Polish). Retrieved 14 September 2021.
- Zezza, Stefania (2020). "We are a strict, iron group: from Salonika to Warsaw via Auschwitz". Sephardic Horizons. 10 (3–4). Retrieved 14 November 2021.
External links
- Scheme of the camp, partially superimposed on current layout of the streets (in Polish)
- A tool comparing 1944 aerial photographs of Warsaw with today's satellite imagery or Warsaw Uprising Museum
- Photograph of the informal commemorative plaque in Lasek na Kole, as taken in 2020
- Collection of materials related to the Warsaw concentration camp (particularly related to Kopka's book and controversy about Trzcińska's findings), in Polish