| Main page | Wersja polska | Public Information Bulletin | Text version |
| Main page |  | Policy | | Against "Polish... | | Nazi German Camps... |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
2006.06.14 12:53
From the Pages of Polish HistoryMotto: “This is what people have done to other people”Zofia Nałkowska After more than one hundred years, Poland regained its independence in November 1918. Not for long, unfortunately. Next door, in Germany, the Nazis under Adolf Hitler won the 1932 elections. Humiliated by the conditions imposed on them by the Versailles Treaty after World War I, and suffering the economic effects of the Depression in the early 1930s, the Germans eagerly fell for Hitler’s promises. After becoming chancellor (prime minister) in January 1933, Hitler introduced a dictatorial government that practically liquidated democracy. Members of the active opposition found themselves in the first concentration camps, which the new government began building in Germany in 1933. Adolf Hitler promised not only a solution for all uncertainties and problems, but also a shining future, prosperity, and jobs for all at decent wages. He pledged new territorial acquisitions for Germany, which needed lebensraum in order to develop. He looked to Eastern Europe for this “living space.” He blamed Germany’s difficulties and setbacks on an internal enemy—the Jews. He insisted that the German people were suffering at the hands of an international conspiracy backed by Jews, communists, and Anglo-American plutocrats. He wanted to change this state of affairs by means of a bloody, brutal war. He matched his words with deeds. Violating international agreements, Hitler’s Germany embarked on intensive rearmament. It rapidly built up and outfitted its own army, which became one of the largest and most modern in Europe. The first victims of the aggressive German policy were Austria and Czechoslovakia. In March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria to the Reich in the Anschluss. In September of that same year, British and French diplomats agreed to the German seizure of significant tracts of its neighbor Czechoslovakia’s territory as the price for peace and avoiding war with the Third Reich. This policy of appeasement led to the breaking up and liquidation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Poland was the next target of the aggressive German policy. The pretext for the attack was the Polish refusal to consent to the German annexation of Gdańsk and to grant Germany an extraterritorial highway and railroad link with East Prussia. The non-aggression pact between the Third Reich and the USSR,1 signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, was a great German success. The two formerly hostile states promised each other neutrality in case of war. Poland lay between them. The official accord was accompanied by an additional secret protocol in which the two allies divided up the territory of Poland, as well as Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Bessarabia region of Romania. The signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, named for the two foreign ministers involved, freed Hitler’s hands and influenced the decision to begin the war against Poland. The additional secret protocol stated that: “[...] 2. In case of territorial-political changes in the territory belonging to Poland, the spheres of interest of Germany and the USSR will be divided approximately along the rivers Narva, Vistula, and San. “The question of whether the interests of the two sides permit, or whether it becomes desirable to maintain an independent Polish state, and where the borders of that state should run, can be resolved definitively in the course of the further evolution of the political situation.” On September 1, 1939, the Germans launched their aggression against Poland without warning. The Soviet army attacked Poland from the east on September 17. Joseph Stalin, the leader of the USSR, was carrying out the agreement with Hitler. Polish, German, and Soviet military forces used in September 1939.
Despite the enemies’ overwhelming preponderance of forces and the necessity of defending against attacks on two fronts, the Polish army fought for 35 days. Warsaw held out until September 28. The last battle against the German army was at Kock on October 2-5. Polish went down to defeat alone. Despite declaring war, its allies, France and Britain, decided not to take any military action against Germany. Europe admired the Poles’ heroic resistance. The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Polish Underground StateFollowing the Soviet aggression against Poland, the state authorities went into exile. On Sept. 30, 1939, the president named a government-in-exile based first in Paris, and then in London. The Prime Minister, Władysław Sikorski, also became commander-in-chief of the Polish army that was formed in France and was based in England after the summer of 1940. The Polish Armed Forces in the West fought in the Battle of Britain, as well as in Norway, France, and North Africa. Polish forces were part of the D-Day operation in 1944, participated in the liberation of France, Belgium, Holland, and Italy, and fought in Germany.2 The population of occupied Poland, like the Allies, recognized the new authorities as the constitutional continuation of the prewar Polish Republic. From the first months of the war, clandestine state institutions loyal to the government-in-exile arose in occupied Polish territory. They are known, collectively, as the Polish Underground State. There were parallel military and civilian structures, with the latter active in areas of public life banned by the occupying power, such as education, culture, science, social welfare, and the judiciary. The underground military—initially comprising the Poland Victory Service, and next the Union of Armed Struggle, transformed in February 1942 into the Home Army—counted approximately 350,000 soldiers by the summer of 1944. Its task was combat against the occupation forces. An armed uprising broke out in Warsaw in August 1944, as a result of which 200,000 people perished and the Germans razed the city to the ground. The underground military also bore responsibility for the security of the civilian structures of the Polish Underground State—protecting its personnel and maintaining contact between Poland and the government-in-exile. The underground military ran intelligence operations vital to the Allies.
* * * German policy towards civilians in the Polish land annexed to the Reich and under occupation (the GG) was differentiated. Territory annexed to the Reich was subjected to intensive Germanization from the very start of the war. The Germans set about expelling hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews from this land. German colonists brought in from the Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) and southeast Europe (Romania) were intended to replace them. By 1941, they had already expelled about 700-800 thousand Poles. About 200 thousand Germans replaced them in the land annexed to the Reich by the end of 1941. Since the Germans had a labor shortage during the war, the Nazi authorities deported civilians on a mass scale from the occupied areas to Germany for slave labor. The number of deported Polish workers rose steadily and exceeded 2.5 million over the course of the war. A special form of Germanization was a campaign directed against Polish children with “German racial traits,” who were seized from their parents, or from orphanages. The number of children transported into the depths of Germany is hard to estimate and remains unknown to this day. A significant proportion of these children were Germanized and never returned to Poland. In the land annexed to the Reich, the Germans fought systematically and ruthlessly against everything Polish. They liquidated Polish education at all levels, from elementary schools to universities. They banned or liquidated Polish cultural, community, and economic institutions. Locking up over a thousand churches, all of which they looted, the Germans persecuted the Roman Catholic Church, which had done much to defend the Polish identity of these territories in the 19th century. They arrested numerous Catholic clergy and placed them in concentration camps in Germany (Dachau). They murdered many priests—in some dioceses, almost half the priests. The General Government, in German plans, was to be a reservoir of slave labor. As soon as military action ended, the Germans embarked on a pitiless anti-Polish policy against the defenseless civilian population. In a speech to Wehrmacht officers on August 22, 1939, Adolf Hitler outlined the tasks assigned to the German army in Poland: “Our strength lies in our swiftness and our brutality. . . . I am indifferent to what the feeble Western European civilization will have to say about me. I have issued my orders and I will have anyone shot who utters even a word against them. The aim of the war is not to achieve a designated line, but the physical annihilation of the enemy. To this end I have prepared for use, at this time only in the East, my Totenkopf units, and have ordered them to kill men, women, and children of Polish origins or of the Polish mother tongue without mercy and without pity. Only in this way will we attain the living space that we need. Who mentions the extirpation of the Armenians today?” The efforts of the occupation forces were directed, in the first place, against the elite of Polish society. A systematic campaign was conducted throughout the war physically to exterminate Polish intellectuals and the Polish leadership.Hans Frank on the principles of German policy towards Polish civilians, and the use of terror against Poles: “It can be said in general that we will have to count on increasing resistance from the intellectuals, the Church, and ex-officers. Organizational forms directed against our control of this country already exist. We need not be intimidated by this, and can calmly await further developments. The slightest attempt at any action by the Poles will lead to terrible, destructive expeditions against them. Then I will not hesitate to use the most brutal terror and its consequences.” A telling example—one of many, unfortunately—was Aktion AB in 1940, which consisted of the arrest and murder of community activists, civil servants, artists, and sports figures. Palmiry - From the onset of the occupation, this tiny village on the edge of the Kampinos Forest near Warsaw became a symbol of Nazi crimes. Executions began in the forest meadow in December 1939 and continued until July 1941. Over 2,000 people, regarded by the Germans as belonging to the Polish elite, were murdered here as part of Aktion AB. The liquidation of the intellectuals was accompanied by actions intended to destroy Polish life and its cultural heritage. The deliberate burning in 1944 of the Polish state archives and National Library, or the blowing up that same year of the Royal Castle in Warsaw, can serve as examples. Harsh punishments and a doctrine of collective responsibility were introduced in order to intimidate civilians. From “A Decree on Preventing Incidents of Violence in the General Government” issued by Hans Frank on Oct. 31, 1939. § 1. Anyone committing an act of violence against the German Reich or the supreme German authorities shall be subject to the death penalty. § 2. Anyone who deliberately damages equipment belonging to the German authorities, any property used in the work of the German authorities, or any public facilities, shall be subject to the death penalty. § 3. Anyone who incites or induces to disobedience of the decrees or regulations of the German authorities shall be subject to the death penalty. § 4. Anyone who commits an act of violence against a German because of his German nationality shall be subject to the death penalty. [...] § 6. Instigators and accomplices shall be punished like perpetrators, and attempted acts like acts committed. [...] § 9. Anyone obtaining information about the intention to commit the offenses defined in §§ 1-5 who fails to inform the authorities or any person at risk from such a crime immediately, in order for them to prevent the intended crime, shall be subject to the death penalty. Public mass executions in the cities were symbols of the extermination policy. The Germans drew up lists of hostages and published them as posters on the walls of buildings or on the streets. Not only resistance movement members, but anyone at all could fall victim to German terror. Even people caught at random in street roundups could be deported to a concentration camp or sent to forced labor in the Reich. The occupation authorities applied terror in the villages as well as in the cities. For supporting the Polish resistance, the Germans burned down whole villages and murdered the inhabitants. It is estimated at present that over 1.5 million Poles died at German hands during World War II.3 * * * From the end of military action in September 1939, the degree of mortal danger was fundamentally different for the Polish and Jewish communities. Against Poles, the Germans mostly applied selective terror in order to intimidate them, enslave them, and deprive them of the will to resist. In the case of the Jews, all of them, without exception—from infants to the elderly—were sentenced to death by the Germans for the reason that they had been born Jewish. A German faced no consequences at all for killing a Jew. In the General Government, the Germans set up about 400 ghettos in which they confined Jews. The ghettos were an element in the German policy of exterminating the Jewish people. Polish Jews were gathered there under compulsion, isolated from the outside world, and forced to perform slave labor for the Germans. The great overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions, starvation, and the sense of being cut off all contributed to a high death rate. The legal status of the Jews, whom the Germans did not regard as persons with rights, was far worse than the status of Poles. Under Nazi regulations, Jews had no right to possess any form of property or to use public transportation. After October 1941, they faced the death penalty for being outside the ghetto walls. German policy exacerbated conflicts between the Poles and the Jews, and the ubiquitous anti-Semitic propaganda inflamed unfavorable attitudes towards the Jews. There were pogroms, and Jews were even murdered. Such tragic events occurred in the summer of 1941 in several localities in eastern Poland, where part of the Polish population murdered their Jewish neighbors. A certain proportion of the Poles, especially those morally disoriented by the war, counted on material gain from the murder of the Jews. Incidents of blackmailing and informing upon Jews in hiding, and extorting money or property from them, were not infrequent. The organs of the Polish Underground State unequivocally condemned and harshly punished this disgraceful practice. At the same time, elements of the Polish population attempted to aid Jews. It is worth emphasizing that, in Poland, the Nazi authorities threatened the death penalty for such aid. Sheltering Jewish fugitives from the ghetto, or even feeding or clothing them, was punished by the death of the entire family, and even the neighbors, of the person rendering aid. It is estimated that, in spite of the great danger, at least 200,000 Poles—many of whom the Germans murdered—were involved in the campaign to rescue Jews. Private individuals, religious orders, and institutions set up for this purpose by the Polish Underground State aided Jews. The most important such institution was the “Żegota” Jewish Aid Council, founded in 1942, which operated on funds from the Polish government-in-exile and Jewish organizations in the USA. Despite the most severe penalties in Europe for aiding Jews, the most “Righteous among the Nations of the World” (almost one-third of them) come from Poland. * * * In the face of this extermination policy, it is easy to understand the new role assigned to the concentration camps. New, because such camps had existed in Germany for many years. The first concentration camps were founded in Germany immediately after Hitler came to power. The camp in Dachau, outside Munich, opened as early as March 1933. It became a model for later concentration camps. New camps opened in Sachsenhausen outside Berlin, Buchenwald near Weimar, Neuengamme near Hamburg, Mauthausen in Austria (annexed to the Reich) and Flossenbürg in Bavaria. In 1934, authority over the network of German camps was entrusted to Reichsführer SS (supreme commander) Heinrich Himmler, who also became head of the German police in 1936. In the initial phase of their existence, the tasks of the concentration camps included the isolation and neutralization of the Nazis’ political opponents. Therefore, the first people imprisoned there were German communists, social democrats, labor union members, Catholic and protestant clergy, and, after Kristallnacht (November 9-10, 1938), German Jews. People regarded as “undesirable elements” were also placed in the camps. This category encompassed criminal recidivists, vagabonds, beggars, prostitutes, homosexuals, and even Jehovah’s Witnesses (“Students of Holy Scripture”) and Roma and Sinti (“Gypsies”). People were confined in concentration camps on the basis of administrative rulings by the police, motivated by the necessity of protecting the state and society of the Third Reich from the negative influence or detrimental activities of the individuals involved. By the time the war began, 170,000 people had passed through the concentration camps in Germany. * * * During the war, the purpose of the concentration camps underwent a fundamental change. Not only did the number of prisoners rise; the proportion of their ethnic origins also changed. The camps were no longer only places of detention and isolation, but also, and above all, places for the mass extermination of prisoners. This new task resulted from the aims of German policy in occupied Poland. According to the ideological premises of Nazism, Polish territory was to be Germanized, and the population previously living there was to be removed. Cleansed of the “racially superfluous element,” the land would be colonized by Germans. During World War II, two basic categories of camps can be distinguished:
From 1939 to 1945, the Germans set up several central concentration camps within the present Polish borders, at Sztutowo (KL Stutthof) near Gdańsk, Oświęcim (KL Auschwitz) in Upper Silesia, Rogoźnica (KL Gross-Rosen) in Lower Silesia, Majdanek in Lublin (KL Lublin), and Cracow-Płaszów (KL Plaszow). Each of these camps had numerous sub-camps. Political prisoners made up the largest category of concentration camp prisoners. On their outer garments, the “stripes,” they wore a red triangle. Categories of prisoners in Auschwitz and their insignia Jews (usually two triangles forming a six-cornered star) – the most numerous category from 1943 on. Political prisoners (red triangle) – the majority were Poles arrested in various repressive operations or for resistance movement activity. Asocial prisoners (black triangle) – this category included Gypsies and the few prostitutes sent to the camp. Prisoners of war (marked with the letters SU—Sowjet Union) – in Auschwitz, this category was reserved exclusively for Soviet POWs. Reeducation prisoners (marked with the letters EH—Erziehungshäftling) – imprisoned in the camp for actual or alleged violations of work discipline. Criminals (green triangle) – not a numerous category (several hundred prisoners). Jehovah’s Witnesses (purple triangle) – imprisoned for behavior and attitudes resulting from their religious conditions. Homosexuals (pink triangles) In Auschwitz, prisoners had identification numbers tattooed on their left forearms. Almost all the concentration camps either had their own factories or farms, or were located near large plants belonging to German companies. Production was usually connected with the armaments industry. Prisoners labored like slaves in these factories, forced to do inhuman work that left them suffering from exhaustion, or dead. Labor exceeding human capacity was only one of the methods for destroying people. Sickness, permanent hunger, physical and mental exhaustion, and the unfettered whims of the SS supervisors decimated the prisoners. The prisoners were held in dreadful conditions. They lived in overcrowded barracks that remained unheated even in subfreezing temperatures. Prisoners were subjected to pseudo-medical experiments. For example, Dr. Carl Clauberg, a German professor of gynecology, conducted criminal sterilization experiments on women prisoners in Auschwitz. Some of the women died during the experiments, and others were put to death so that autopsies could be performed. Those who survived were maimed for life. * * * Beginning in 1942, when the Jews were already confined to the ghettos, new types of camps—intended exclusively for the mass murder of the entire Jewish population—arose. In January 1942, when the first technical experiments in mass murder had already been carried out, the decision was taken at a meeting of high Third Reich officials in Wannsee, outside Berlin, to deport the Jewish population en masse from all over Europe to death camps located in occupied Poland, and to go on expanding the genocide apparatus. Responsibility for carrying out this operation in the General Government was undertaken by Odilo Globocnik. In the remaining countries of Europe—with the exception of those areas to the east of the General Government, which were left to the Einsatzgruppen4—Adolf Eichmann was in charge. For this purpose, the Nazi Germans erected special centers—extermination camps (Vernichtungslager), devoted entirely to murdering people. In addition to the existing Kulmhof extermination center, these included Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. Parts of the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek concentration camps were also assigned to this task. The closer the end of the war, the more important the complete destruction of the Jewish population became to the Germans. The extermination centers therefore took on the form of gigantic factories that murdered whole transports of people day and night. All the camps were established by the German authorities to carry out Nazi German policy. Germans or Austrians directed the camps. The income of the camps, derived in part from plundering the property that the victims brought with them, went into the Nazi state treasury, which financed the German war effort. Historians assert that political, logistical, propaganda, and economic considerations, and above all the size of the Jewish Polish population, determined the choice of Polish territory as the site for the mass murder of the Jews. No documents or statements by Nazi leaders indicate that they counted on the collaboration of Poles in exterminating the Jews. Poles were not involved either as guards or as personnel in the extermination camps. The harsh repressive measures that the Germans introduced in Poland from the beginning of the war made it possible to keep potential observers of the atrocities in a state of intimidation and passivity. * * * KL AUSCHWITZOn April 27, 1940, Auschwitz Concentration Camp was founded, on Himmler’s orders, on the outskirts of Oświęcim, a Polish town annexed to the Reich in 1939. It was the largest camp that the Germans created, not only in occupied Poland, but also in all of occupied Europe. Army barracks buildings were chosen for the location of the camp. Auschwitz was intended for Poles from Upper Silesia and the General Government. Its founding was directly related to the overcrowding of prisons and the German authorities’ plans for further preventive arrests in connection with the growth of the Polish resistance movement. The camp commandants were, in turn, Rudolf Höss (until November 1943), Arthur Liebehenschel (until May 1944), and Richard Baer (until January 1945). The first prisoners, 30 criminals of German nationality, were brought here from Sachsenhausen concentration camp in May 1940 and entrusted with the role of prisoner functionaries, carrying out orders from the SS. They exercised direct and brutal supervision over other prisoners. On June 14, 1940, the first transport of 728 Polish political prisoners, including several Polish Jews, arrived in Auschwitz from the prison in Tarnów, near Cracow. On June 14, 1940, the Nazis sent the first transport of 728 political prisoners to the newly founded Auschwitz concentration camp. They were Poles, including several Polish Jews, transported from the prison in Tarnów. Most of them were young members of clandestine independence organizations and soldiers from the September 1939 campaign who had been attempting to reach Hungary, in order to travel onwards to France and join the Polish army forming there. Beginning in 1941, prisoners were sent to the camp from various occupied European countries, including Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic), Slovakia, Russia, Yugoslavia, Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Hungary, and Norway. There were even citizens of the USA, Great Britain, Bulgaria, and Switzerland. The camp underwent systematic expansion throughout its existence. The entire Polish population of the Zasole district was expelled, and their homes demolished. By the end of 1941, Polish civilians were also expelled from the nearby villages of Babice, Budy, Rajsko, Brzezinka, Broszkowice, Pławy, and Harmęże. A so-called camp interest zone (Interessengebiet) of 40 sq. km. was formed from the depopulated area. A high double barbed-wire fence, electrified at high voltage, surrounded the grounds of the camp proper. Spotlights mounted on the fence posts illuminated the camp at night. SS men, armed with machine guns, sat in watchtowers spaced along the fence. Entry to the camp was through a gate above which, on the pattern of other German concentration camps, an inscription read Arbeit macht frei (“work sets you free”). Located on the north side of the camp, this gate was inaccessible and not visible to prying eyes. Camp director Karl Fritzsch welcomed newly arrived prisoners at their first roll call with the words: “I tell you that you have not come to a health resort here, but to a German concentration camp from which the only way out is through the crematorium chimney. Anybody who doesn’t like it can go and jump on the high-voltage barbed wire. If there are any Jews in the transport, they have no right to live any longer than two weeks, priests one month, and all the rest three months.” An integral part of Auschwitz was the network of sub-camps subordinated to the Main Camp (Stammlager) in Oświęcim. The Auschwitz complex thus had three parts: the Auschwitz I Main Camp, the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp three kilometers away in the village of Brzezinka, and the complex of over 40 sub-camps that came to be known as Auschwitz III, which exploited prisoner slave labor in German industrial plants or on farms. One of the largest of these sub-camps stood at the depopulated villages of Dwory and Monowice, near the German IG Farbenindustrie plant, which exploited the slave labor of 35,000 people, including about 10,000 concentration camp prisoners (January 1945). The network of Auschwitz branch camps covered Silesia and extended as far as Brno, in Moravia (now the Czech Republic). The Auschwitz-Birkenau Death CampAs early as his first visit to the Auschwitz camp in March 1941, Himmler picked the village of Brzezinka as the site for a future camp. It was initially planned to hold 100,000 Soviet prisoners of war. Construction work on the new camp began that October. It was to be made up of four parts, called segments. In the end, two segments, capable of holding 80,000 prisoners, were built, and the construction of a third segment, scheduled to hold 60,000 prisoners, was begun. This camp served, above all, the Germans’ “final solution of the Jewish question” in occupied Europe. 600 Russian prisoners of war and 250 sick prisoners selected from the camp hospital were experimentally gassed on September 3-4, 1941, at the initiative of Auschwitz camp director Karl Fritzsch. Zyklon-B, intended for pest control, was used to put the victims to death. Zyklon-B - Hydrogen cyanide (Prussic acid). A highly poisonous chemical compound intended for insect and rat control. In the form of a preparation called “Zyklon-B,” it was used to put people to death in gas chambers in the death camps and concentration camps. It acts by stopping respiration at the cellular level. Poisoning by hydrogen cyanide is accompanied by symptoms of irritation of the respiratory tract, combined with a feeling of fear, dizziness, and vomiting. Killing 1,500 people requires from 5 to 7 kg. of Zyklon. More than 20 tons were used in Auschwitz in the years 1942-1943 alone. Zyklon-B was manufactured by the Degesch company (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung GmbH—German Pest Control Company), with headquarters in Frankfurt am Main, a part of the IG Farbenindustrie cartel. The cellars of Block no. 11 in the Auschwitz I Main Camp were chosen as the site of the experiment. The windows and doors were sealed before the gas was released inside. Commandant Rudolf Höss’s account of the liquidation of a prisoner transport with Zyklon-B. “While the transport was being unloaded, several holes were made in the roof of the morgue. The Russians had to undress in the forecourt, after which they went perfectly calmly into the morgue; after all, they had been told that they were going to be deloused. The transport precisely filled the entire morgue. Then the door was locked and the gas poured in through the openings. I do not know how long the killing took, but a sort of rustling could be heard for a long time. When the gas was thrown in, several POWs shouted ‘gas!” Afterwards came loud howls, and they began pressing against the door from inside, but the door held. Only after several hours was it opened and the room aired out.” The experiments determined the minimum amount of Zyklon-B required to murder an entire transport in about 20 minutes. Once its effectiveness had been confirmed, the decision was made to use this means of killing people in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. From the spring of 1942, the new Auschwitz-Birkenau camp began serving as a center for the immediate extermination of Jews from western, southern, and northern Europe, and parts of central Europe. The Germans continually improved the technology of the killing process. They built four gas chambers with crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau that were capable of killing and burning about 8,000 people per 24-hour period. Crematorium III, along with the underground section containing the gas chamber, “opened” on June 25, 1943. It functioned until the SS blew it up on January 20, 1945, during the liquidation of the camp. In 1943, the SS authorities established the capacity of Crematoria II and III as 1,440 corpses per day each; that of Crematoria IV and V as 768 each; and that of Crematorium I, in the Auschwitz I Main Camp, as 340. This capacity, however, was far exceeded during the peak arrivals of transports in 1943 and 1944. A total of up to 5,000 corpses were burned per 24 hours in crematoria II and III, and a total of 3,000 in crematoria IV and V. The first Jewish deportees, over 3,000 people from Slovakia and France, arrived in Auschwitz in March 1942. The largest group of Jews was brought from Hungary to die in Auschwitz-Birkenau in the summer of 1944. About 438,000 Hungarian Jews were brought here between late April and July; the majority were put to death in the gas chambers immediately upon arrival. Initially, victims arrived by train at the camp unloading platform near the Auschwitz prisoner blocks. In 1942, a second unloading platform, or ramp, the Judenrampe, began operating. Transports of Jews arrived there from all over Europe, and were then led on foot or carried in trucks to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In May 1944, an unloading ramp was built inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, between segments BI and BII, leading to the gas chambers in crematoria II and III. It was on this ramp that the camp SS physicians, one of whom was Dr. Josef Mengele, carried out the new arrivals. They directed a significant proportion of them—especially small children, the elderly, and the sick—straight to the gas chambers. A few—the strong and healthy—went to labor in the camp. An account of selection on the Auschwitz Birkenau ramp, from Dr. Martin Foeldi’s testimony during the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem: “We did not really know what was happening. They told us that the men must stand on the right side with children over 14, and the women with the younger children on the left. Prisoners walking among us told the women, ‘Give your child to grandma and you’ll go to work.’ And that is what they did. My cousin gave her children to grandmother. The women began walking away. We stood there and suddenly, a moment later, they were gone. I was standing there with my 12-year-old son. We suddenly began moving. I came to a certain man—I do not know who he was. He was wearing a German army uniform. He was quite elegant. He asked me what my occupation was. I knew that lawyers would not be of any use, so I said that I was a retired officer. He looked at me and asked, ‘How old is this boy?’ At that moment, I could not lie. I replied, ‘He is 12.’ Then he said, ‘Where is his mother?’ I said, ‘She went to the left side.’ And then he told my son, ‘Run after your mother.’ I went to the right and saw how he was running. I wondered whether he would be able to find his mama. There were so many men and women there. But I managed to spot my wife. My son ran up to her. How did I recognize her? Our little daughter was wearing a bright red coat. That red spot meant that my wife was there. The spot got smaller and smaller. I walked away and never saw them again.” Prisoners of other ethnic backgrounds were also sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp or sentenced to death in the Main Camp for various infractions. One of the numerous groups imprisoned in Birkenau were the Roma and Sinti, for whom a “family camp” was established in February 1943. About 23,000 people, mostly from Germany, Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, and also from Poland (the Białystok region) were held there. The “Gypsy Camp” (Zigeunerlager) was liquidated on August 2, 1944, with the final group of over 2,800 Sinti and Roma being murdered in the gas chambers. * * * The balance sheet for this largest of the death factories is horrific. After the war, various estimates arose as to the number of victims. Figures of many millions were often cited. It took long years and interdisciplinary research to be able to grasp the dimensions of the murder in a more precise way. It is estimated that about 1,300,000 people arrived at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, of whom there were some 1,100,000 Jews from all over Europe (including about 300,000 Polish Jews and 440,000 Hungarian Jews), 140,000 to 150,000 Poles, about 23,000 Roma and Sinti, about 15,000 Soviet POWs, and about 25,000 of other ethnic backgrounds (Czech, French, Yugoslavian, Byelorussian, Ukrainian, German, Austrian, and others). The overwhelming majority of the people who arrived at Auschwitz were not registered. These were mostly Jews, who were directed straight from the trains to the gas chambers. Throughout the camp’s existence, only 400,000 prisoners were registered. Among the 1,100,000 people killed in Auschwitz, the most numerous were about 960,000 Jews, followed by about 70,000 to 75,000 Poles, about 21,000 Roma and Sinti, about 15,000 Soviet POWs, and about 10,000 to 15,000 prisoners of other ethnic backgrounds. When the Soviet army entered the Auschwitz camp on January 27, 1945, there were only about 7,000 prisoners there. Many of them died soon after liberation. Just after the war, prisoners who survived the hell of Auschwitz issued an appeal to the world, in which they wrote: “Before the international community, we the undersigned, freed by the Red Army from the bloody reign of the Nazis, accuse the German government headed by Adolf Hitler of committing the worst mass murder and savagery in human history . . . We address to the international community an appeal to shed light on the fate of millions of missing persons of various nationalities, and to rescue the prisoners who are still enslaved in Nazi Germany . . . In the name of humanism, we ask that everything possible be done to prevent crimes like those committed by the Nazis from ever being repeated in the future, so that the blood of the innocent victims will not have been shed in vain. Together with approximately 10,000 prisoners of various nationalities, we ask that the Nazi atrocities not go unpunished.” * * * While Auschwitz was the largest concentration camp and extermination camp that the Germans created on Polish soil, it was not the only one. Other camps scattered throughout various parts of occupied Poland had similar functions. As early as September 1939, the Germans established a concentration camp in the village of Sztutowo near Gdańsk—Stutthof concentration camp. It was intended for Poles from the Gdańsk region. Beginning in the spring of 1944, the Germans began incarcerating prisoners from other regions here, including Home Army soldiers and women couriers from the Warsaw Uprising. In the final phase, a large contingent of Jewish women prisoners was sent here. People from the Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia), Scandinavia (Norway and Denmark), and other Western European countries were also held here. The commandants were Max Pauly (until August 1942) and Paul Werner Hoppe. It is estimated that nearly 130,000 prisoners passed through the camp; various estimates place the number of those murdered at 60,000 to 90,000. The camp existed until January 25, 1945, when the Germans ordered its evacuation and organized a “death march” into the depths of the Reich for the prisoners who remained alive. In August 1940, a labor camp (KL Gross-Rosen from 1941) was established near the small town of Rogoźnica near Wałbrzych in the southwestern corner of Poland. The camp underwent expansion throughout its existence, until January 1945. The prisoner population on January 1, 1945 amounted to 76,000. These prisoners were employed producing granite blocks at the local quarry and in factories established here by numerous German industrial firms, including Siemens und Halske and Blaupunkt. Barbed wire, electrified under high voltage, surrounded the camp terrain. The prisoners came from many European countries and included resistance movement members from France, Belgium, and Holland, who were murdered covertly as part of the Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) operation. The commandants, in turn, were Arthur Rödl, Wilhelm Gideon, and Johannes Hassebrock. Gross-Rosen had a highly developed network of sub-camps where prisoners were gradually murdered through exhausting slave labor. Some of them toiled at the secret Riese project, which involved drilling gigantic shafts and underground corridors in the Sowie Mountains for purposes that remain unclear to this day. Under a decree from Himmler, a camp for Soviet POWs was established at Majdanek, on the outskirts of Lublin, in October 1941. Its official name was originally Kriegsgefangenenlager der Waffen SS in Lublin (Prisoner-of-War Camp in Lublin), later changed to Konzentrationslager der Waffen SS Lublin (Lublin Concentration Camp). In reality, it had many other functions. It was simultaneously a concentration camp, POW camp, death camp, labor camp, penal camp, and transit camp. Plans called for 250,000 prisoners to be held within grounds of over 500 hectares. Setbacks to the German war effort significantly limited the project. In the end, 280 buildings of different types were erected on 270 acres. The central part of the camp consisted of barracks located in 5 “prison fields” separated by grass strips and barbed wire. Each “field” contained 22 wooden barracks, with 500 to 700 prisoners sleeping on wooden bunks or the bare earth in each of them. Construction of 5 gas chambers began in August 1942, and was finished that October. Carbon dioxide released directly from pressurized containers was used in the gas chambers, as well as Zyklon-B. The furnaces in the crematorium could burn up to 1,000 bodies in a 24-hour period. Until 1942, it was mostly Poles and Soviet POWs who were held in Majdanek. From the summer of that year, Majdanek began functioning as a death camp—mainly for Jews from the Lublin region. On November 3, 1943, the Germans conducted a one-time operation involving the shooting of Jewish prisoners. This operation, called Erntefest (Harvest Festival), also extended to other camps. It was supposed to conclude the process of exterminating Jews in the General Government. The Germans shot almost 18,000 Jewish prisoners at Majdanek that day. Majdanek was one of the camps where many children under 15 were held. They made up 6.2% of the prisoners. Prisoner Tadeusz Czajka dedicated a poem to them: Little Slipper I found a little slipper So tiny-- Right here on the path From the showers. How did you keep going, little child? So many stones... Such jagged gravel... How could you have known Where you were going... .................... A little shoe, like new... Surely For the journey Dear mama... .................... Oh, what a red stain .................... Tiny little shoe, What will I do with you? Whom can I return you to? Whom can I ask? Listen, you women! Whose child is this? Majdanek prisoners also labored at numerous industrial plants and farms belonging to the SS. Red Army soldiers liberated the camp in July 1944. It is estimated that over 360,000 people were imprisoned here, mostly Poles and Jews, but also representatives of more than 52 ethnic groups from 29 countries. Of the 300-360 thousand prisoners, 80 thousand were murdered—about 60 thousand of them Jewish.5 The Germans did not manage to demolish the camp buildings and remove the evidence of the crimes committed here. It was decided as early as 1944 to set up a martyrdom museum at the site of the German Majdanek camp. On July 2, 1947, the Polish Sejm (parliament) voted to recognize the Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau sites as state museums. * * * The Germans also located camps of an exceptional type in occupied Poland—camps for direct extermination, with hardly any prisoners. These were exclusively death factories. They were the scene of the largest-scale slaughter committed by any state in history: the extermination of the European Jews. The first center of this kind was Kulmhof (in Chełmno nad Nerem), designated even before the Wannsee conference for exterminating the Jewish population of the Wartheland (western Polish territory incorporated into the Reich). Exhaust gas was used to murder Jews in specially constructed trucks at this camp. The victims were brought from the ghettos, stripped of their clothing, and quickly packed into the trucks that served as mobile gas chambers. The bodies were initially buried in pits, and later burned on special frames and in the crematoria that were built subsequently. The number of victims is estimated at over 150,000. In addition to Jews, several transports of Roma and Sinti, Catholic priests and nuns, and Polish children from the Germanized Zamość region were murdered here. The “final solution of the Jewish question” in the General Government went under the code name “Aktion Reinhard.” The plan was entrusted to a special staff, based in Lublin, under the supervision of Odilo Globocnik, the SS commander there. In total, the “Aktion Reinhard” staff and personnel numbered 92 Germans and about 350 guards. Most of the guards were Red Army deserters of Ukrainian ethnic background, or Ukrainian nationalist volunteers. They were prepared for their duties at a training camp in Trawniki, near Lublin. The operation began with the liquidation of the ghettos in the General Government in the spring of 1942. Three direct extermination camps were built and put into operation between March and July 1942: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. These centers lay along the River Bug, in the border corridor dividing the General Government, the Reich Commissariat of the Ukraine, and the Białystok District, in the vicinity of small railroad stations on important communication routes, at a considerable distance from any larger towns. The Germans counted on being able to conceal the mass atrocity from public knowledge. Beginning in the early spring of 1942, the inhabitants of ghettos were herded to nearby train stations and transported to the extermination centers in cattle cars, under horrible conditions (with 80, 100, or 120 persons in each car). The trains arrived at special railroad spurs and the Jews were forced from there straight to an open square, where their hand baggage and clothes were taken from them. Then the women and children were separated from the men. Occasionally, a handful of strong, healthy men had the chance to live for a few days or weeks more—exploited at backbreaking labor sorting clothing and suitcases, or emptying the gas chambers and burning the bodies. Then they were murdered. The victims, including children and pregnant women, were herded into “bathhouses.” In fact, these were gas chambers, where they were murdered with exhaust fumes from diesel tank engines. Account of the extermination of Jews at Bełżec, given by Obersturmführer SS Kurt Gerstein on May 4, 1945: “ (. . . ) At about 7:00 the next morning, I was told: ‘The first transport arrives in 10 minutes.’ Several minutes later, a train did indeed arrive from Lviv; 45 cars with 6,700 Jews, 1,450 of whom were already dead. . . . The train stopped. 200 Ukrainians opened the doors and, lashing out with leather whips, drove the Jews from the cars. The next orders were given by megaphone: undress completely, also removing artificial limbs, eyeglasses, etc.; hand over valuables (with no receipt), tie your shoes neatly together. . . the women and girls were next sent to the barber, who cut their hair off with two or three strokes of his scissors and threw it into potato sacks . . . Next, the procession began moving . . . At the front--a young girl, pretty as a picture . . . So they all walked naked, men, women, and children . . . Mothers with infants in their arms—they slowly entered the gas chambers. At the door stood a stout SS man, who spoke in a fatherly tone to these miserable people: ‘In you go, don’t hold things up! Breathe deeply in the chamber, this inhalation is necessary to prevent sicknesses and epidemics.’ When asked what would become of them, he replied ‘The men will work, naturally, building houses and roads, but the women won’t have to work. Should they so desire, they can help in the kitchens or the homesteads’ . . . Finally, the chambers were packed tight . . . People stood one against the other, 700 to 800 people in 25 sq. m., in 45 sq. m. The SS pushed them against each other as long as this was possible. The doors were closed, and the rest waited naked outside for their turn. The people were to be killed with diesel exhaust fumes. But the motor wouldn’t start . . . Only after 2 hours and 49 minutes did the motor start running . . . 25 more minutes passed. Now, surely, most of them are dead. This can be seen through a small window, when the lights in the chamber go on for a moment. After 28 minutes, only a few people are still breathing. Finally, after 32 minutes, no one is alive. People from the labor detail open the wooden doors on the far side. For performing this repulsive work, the Jews are promised freedom and a one-thousandth share of any valuables found . . .The corpses, wet with sweat and urine, their legs befouled with excrement and menstrual blood, are dragged out. Children’s corpses are tossed. Not a moment can be lost. The Ukrainians’ whips whistle among the labor detail. Two dozen dentists use hooks to rip the jaws apart and check for gold. The ones with gold go to the left, and the ones without gold to the right. Other dentists use pincers or little hammers to break the gold teeth and crowns out of the jawbones. Captain Wirth strolled nearby. He was in his element. Several workers were checking for gold, diamonds, and valuables in the sex organs and anuses . . . The naked corpses were carried on stretchers about a meter long to a pit measuring 100 x 20 x 12 meters. Then they were covered with ten centimeters of sand, so that only the occasional head or hand stuck out.” This means of murdering Jews was applied at the Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor extermination centers. The Germans did not build crematoria at these camps. In the first phase, the bodies were buried in deep pits after gassing. Beginning in the spring of 1943, the decomposing corpses were exhumed and burned on great open-air pyres along with the bodies of people just murdered. The Jewish victims were brought on trains from all over the General Government, and from many countries in western and southern Europe. Apart from the Jews, there were instances of Poles from the Zamość region and Sinti and Roma from Poland, Germany, and Austria being slaughtered in these centers. The victims’ property (including the gold teeth extracted after their death) was confiscated, sorted, and sent to Berlin in special transports. It is exceptionally difficult to estimate the number of extermination camp victims. In view of the nature of the crime, the desire to conceal it from international public awareness, and the very method of committing the murders, the Germans kept no records on the people brought here to die. Nor was there any extensive camp documentation as at Auschwitz and other concentration camps (see table for current estimates). Heroic armed uprisings, permitting some prisoners to break out through the barbed wire, occurred at extermination camps. Fear of a public reaction then accelerated the removal of every sign of these camps. During a mutiny at Treblinka in August 1943, about 200 prisoners broke away from the burning camp. Some of them survived. In October 1943, about 300 prisoners made a dash for freedom during a mutiny at the Sobibor camp, and 58 of them managed to escape. The extermination camps along the River Bug were liquidated in the second half of 1943. After the murder of the last prisoners, the killing equipment, camp garrison quarters, and prisoner barracks were liquidated. The sites were leveled and planted over. No one was ever supposed to find out what had happened there. Table German camps in occupied Poland functioning exclusively as extermination centers
* * * The fact that German concentration camps existed in Poland was known, and not only to local civilians. From the moment the camps began functioning, the underground Polish authorities were informed as to their purpose and the conditions under which the prisoners existed. This information came from escapees and also from the prisoners themselves, who formed clandestine organizations inside the camps. An example of uncommon sacrifice is the biography of Polish Army cavalry-platoon commander Witold Pilecki, who volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz in order to help set up a resistance organization within the camp itself, steal evidence of German crimes, and escape. Prisoners also conveyed information by way of the local civilians who risked their lives to supply medicine and additional food to labor details working outside the camp. At least 1,200 civilians engaged in this activity in the land of Oświęcim. The leadership of the Polish Underground State set up the special “Żegota” Jewish Aid Council and, through the government-in-exile, informed free-world governments and the international public about the atrocities being committed in the camps. In 1942 and 1943, Polish underground organizations published a series of flyers and brochures with information about the camps. They sounded the alarm for the world and appealed for steps to aid the prisoners. Auschwitz—Death Camp - One of the first brochures with information about Auschwitz. It was written by Natalia Zarembina, a prisoner who managed to get out of Auschwitz and describe her experiences. The book first appeared in occupied Warsaw in December 1942, in a print run of 2,500 copies. It was published in the free world in eight different languages, including Chinese, between 1943 and 1945. As early as 1941, a representative of the Polish government-in-exile in London suggested to the British authorities that they bomb Auschwitz. The British rejected such a solution. British Air Marshal Richard Peirse’s response to the Polish government’s suggestion to bomb Auschwitz in 1941, in a letter to the Polish prime minister and commander-in-chief, Gen. Władysław Sikorski: “I have very carefully reviewed the proposal . . . regarding an air attack on the concentration camp in Oświęcim . . . we have decided . . . and I inform you with regret that a successful attack on Oświęcim is not feasible in practice. There are two major reasons for this. First, our bomber forces have the primary task of attacking certain industrial centers . . . Second, we know from our experience that sporadic attacks on such targets as Oświęcim would most probably fail to achieve the desired result, that is, destroying the barbed wire fence and ammunition stores in such as way as allow the POWs to escape.” As a courier for the Polish Underground State, Jan Karski (Kozielecki) reached the West with accounts of the situation in occupied territory. During his second mission in the autumn of 1942, he delivered a report on the situation of the Jews in occupied Poland and the way they were being murdered, along with a plea for help, to representatives of the Polish government-in-exile and then to British and American politicians (including the US president). Karski had obtained his information from representatives of underground Jewish organizations. He entered the Warsaw ghetto himself on two occasions, and managed to reach a camp in Izbica Lubelska, where he witnessed Jews being transported to their deaths at the extermination camp in Bełżec. Similarly, international Jewish organizations asked the Allies in 1944 to destroy the Auschwitz-Birkenau death apparatus, to no avail. American and British strategists regarded defeating the Third Reich and bombing industrial targets in Germany as higher priorities. The Americans also referred to the inadmissibility of using military force for non-military purposes.
It is estimated that about 70,000 people were members of the German garrisons throughout the Nazi concentration camp system. The postwar international and local justice systems apprehended and sentenced only a few of them. * * * After the war, thanks to the efforts of former prisoners and survivors, the remains of the most important camps were preserved in memory of the victims and as a warning to future generations. Today, these places are important to Jews, Poles, Roma, Sinti, and many other ethnic groups. On occasion, conflicts have erupted around these sites over the methods of commemoration. In order to head off such disputes, the Polish prime minister has established an International Auschwitz Council made up of specialists from around the world. In various countries, voices were raised after the war denying the existence of the death camps. However, Nazi records, accounts by former prisoners and eyewitnesses, along with the ruins of the camps and the killing apparatus, make it possible to refute the deniers with the truth about the perpetrators and victims. Today, with the passing of the generation of former prisoners, new dangers have arisen, including distorted judgments resulting from oversimplification and a lack of reliable knowledge about World War II and the functioning of the Nazi German camp system. Ignorance sometimes leads to a refusal to believe that people are capable of such deeds. One sometimes hears the unique tragedy of the Holocaust being incorrectly compared with other varieties of genocide. One sometimes hears the words “Polish concentration camps” being uttered by ignorant people who know the history neither of Poland nor of the Second World War. The saddest fact is that, even today—in a time of peace—people are doing far too little to shield others from the real danger of systematic hatred and genocide. Various centers around the world, such as the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem or the Holocaust Museum in Washington, are counteracting this tendency. In Poland, too, many institutions are contributing to preserving the memory of the crimes of genocide committed in the Nazi German camps. Young people in Poland learn in school history lessons about this tragic human experience. The memory of the Nazi crimes and their innocent victims rests upon on accounts by prisoners and eyewitnesses to this greatest slaughter in human history. AdDRESSES The International Auschwitz Council www.auschwitz.gov.pl Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Sonderkommando Belzec der Waffen-SS
Konzentrationslager Gross-Rosen
Vernichtungslager Kulmhof
Konzentrationslager Lublin
SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor
Konzentrationslager Stutthof
SS-Sonderkommando Treblinka
1USSR – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – a communist state created in 1922 and located in Eastern Europe and north and central Asia. After the Germans attacked it in June 1941, the USSR was one of the major allies in the coalition against the Nazis, along with the USA and Great Britain. 2In 1943, Polish military formations were created in the USSR under communist command. They fought alongside the Red Army on the Eastern Front and joined in combat in Germany, including the conquest of Berlin. 3The USSR also applied a policy of terror in the land it occupied. Polish citizens died in camps, were murdered in prisons, and were deported into the depths of the USSR. It is estimated at present that more than 600,000 Polish citizens suffered repression. 4Einsatzgruppen – (Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitsdienstes [SD] und der Sicherheitspolizei [SIPO])—special Security Service and Security Police groups assigned to carry out special tasks to the rear of the Wehrmacht. Beginning in 1941, they sought out the enemies of the Reich, including communists, Gypsies, and, above all, Jews, and murdered them on a mass scale. It is estimated at present that almost 2 million people fell prey to the Einsatzgruppen. 5According to 2005 estimates by historians at the Majdanek State Museum. |
|
© 2002-2005 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland Al. J. Ch. Szucha 23, 00-580 Warsaw tel. (+4822) 523 9000 |
|
| Last change: 14.10.2008. |
 
|