The Kulmhof German Nazi extermination camp was the first such centre for the extermination of Jews set up in the Reichsgau Wartheland. It was established in the Greater Poland village of Chełmno, located in the centre of the eastern part of the Reich district, within the remnants of an inactive estate which included a neo-Gothic palace, a granary and a park with gardens.
The camp did not have an official name - official correspondence was mainly directed to Sonderkommando Kulmhof. SS-Sonderkommando - headed by Herbert Lange, the first commander of Kulmhof and the commander of euthanasia operations (T4 - Aktion 4) in the Reichsgau Wartheland - arrived in Chełmno in November 1941. It was made of a dozen or so officers of the Security Police (Sipo) and a group of over one hundred members of the Order Police (Schupo). The entire extermination action was commanded by SS officers from Sipo, while Schupo policemen guarded the camp and escorted victims (the so-called Wachkommando).
In Kulmhof they were organised in three commandos: palace (Schlosskommando or Hauskommando), forest (Waldkommando) and transport (Transportkommando). The Germans settled in private houses in Chełmno. They also took the municipality office building. Policemen were housed in the premises of the local volunteer fire brigade. The local church was taken over - first to serve as a garage, then as the storage of property of the killed Jews. The presbytery was turned into SS headquarters. Several houses and buildings were used for the kitchen, dining hall and canteen.
The first transport of Jews from the Reichsgau Wartheland to Kulmhof arrived on the night of 7 December 1941. The victims came from the county town of Koło, over a dozen kilometres from Chełmno. They were killed the next day – 8 December. The Kulmhof camp was organized in such a way that it would immediately seem to the arrivals that it was only a transition station for their departure for forced labour into the Reich. In front of the palace, which had been deteriorating since World War I, the former property of the Bistram family, German murderers were assuring Jews brought from the ghettos that they would be sent to work, but first they would have to be, among others disinfected and undergo medical examinations. On the first floor of the palace there was a hall arranged into a waiting room, where the victims undressed. From the hall, the Germans directed the Jews to the cellars, telling them that in those premises they would be deloused and undergo medical examinations.
At this stage, the feigned courtesy ended; The Germans, using truncheons, rushed the victims up the stairs, through a long corridor, towards the ramp, and then forced them to enter the waiting trucks, which imitated bathrooms with showers. The extermination was carried out with volatile toxic substances in mobile gas chambers (vehicles). In the truck driver's cabin, there was a device with buttons that connected via two pipes to the track interior used for cargo. In the first months in Kulmhof, carbon monoxide, supplied in cylinders from Berlin, was used for extermination. Later people were killed with exhaust fumes. At the beginning of the camp's operation there were two smaller vehicle-chambers (Spezialwagen). They could contain 80-100 victims. Later a larger truck was brought to Kulmhof. Its cargo part could hold up to 175 victims. The bodies of the victims, gassed at the palace's courtyard, were taken to the Rzuchowski forest, four km away from Chełmno. There, a group of several dozen Jewish prisoners-gravediggers (Waldkommando) buried corpses in hand-dug graves 60 to about 230 meters long.
Sonderkommando Kulmhof's collaborators were Polish prisoners (8), assigned from Poznań Fort VII - the first concentration camp in the occupied Polish lands. These Poles, as Totenkommando ("Death Commando"), had previously gained experience in mass extermination actions under T4, which were commanded by Herbert Lange. They took part in the murder of patients from psychiatric facilities and hospitals, the disabled and the sick from the facilities for the poor and the elderly in Greater Poland, and in the extermination of Jews from the Konin county (in the autumn of 1941). In Kulmhof they formed the so-called Hilfsarbeiter group of and at the beginning they were tidying up the interior of the palace and the area around it. They were also responsible for erecting a wooden fence around the camp. When the extermination camp started its activities, Polish prisoners dug graves in the forest, and later searched dead bodies. One of them, speaking German, sometimes spoke at the palace to Jewish arrivals. Another was collecting valuables and issuing receipts. Polish members of Hilfsarbeiter were to switch the mechanism supplying exhaust fumes to the mobile gas chamber in the vehicle and sit behind the wheel of a gas truck. I
n Chełmno, Polish prisoners had privileges - they could go beyond the borders of the camp with impunity, they carried with them weapons and wore clothes taken from the dead, they flirted with girls in the surrounding villages. They stayed in Kulmhof until April 1943, and after the Germans blew up the palace, they were sent to Fort VII in Poznań.
In Kulmhof, the first to perish were Jews from surrounding ghettos: Koło (7-11 December 1941), Kowale Pańskie, Czachulec and Dobra (13-14 December 1941), Dąbie (17 December 1941), and Kłodawa (10 and 12 January 1942), Bugaj and Nowiny Brdowskie (13 January 1942), Izbica Kujawska (14-15 January 1942) as well as Roma people from the so-called Gypsy camp in the Łódź ghetto (15-16 December, 29-30 December 1941, 5-9 January and 16 January 1942).
From 16 to 24 January, from 26 to 30 January 1942, and then from 23 February to 3 April 1942, transports of Jews from the Łódź ghetto, passing through Koło ended up in Chełmno. Jews arriving by trains from the Radogoszcz station in Łódź were forced to march through the whole town of Koło, from the train station to the synagogue, where they spent the night. German gendarmes convoying marches showed horrifying bestiality – Jews were mocked, rushed and beaten. Then the arriving Jews were immediately directed from the station to the narrow-gauge railway and loaded onto wagons on the Koło-Dąbie route. After coming to Powiercie, victims were forced to walk to the inactive mill in Zawadka. After spending the night there, they were transported by cars to Kulmhof. On the other hand, Jews from the nearby ghettos were transported to Kulmhof by trucks or buses. At the beginning of 1942, groups of people murdered in Kulmhof included: Jews from Sompolno (2 February), prisoners from Poznań forced labour camps, that is the sick persons from the so-called return transports (16 February), from Krośniewice (2 March), Żychlin (3-4 March 3-4), Koźminek (12 March 12) and part of the population of Ozorków (19 March).
People exterminated in Kulmhof in the spring of 1942, included inhabitants of ghettos and prisoners of labour camps from Kutno (20-26 March), Konin-Czarkowa (9 April and 19 May), Grabów (10 April), Łęczyca (11-12 April), Lubraniec (13 April), Brześć Kujawski (14 April), Piotrków Kujawski (15 April), Gostynin (16-17 April), Sannik (17 April), Brzeziny (18 April and 19-21 May), Gąbin (16-17 or 20-21 April), Osięciny (22 April), Poddębice (23 April), Przedecz (24 April), Piątek (25 April), Chodecz (27 April), Ozorków (28 April and 22 may), Włocławek (30 April - 2 May), Łódź (4-15 May), Służew (16 May), Pabianice (17-18 May), Złoczew (27 May), Radziejów (10-11 June). In the summer of 1942, the population of the labour camp in Konin-Czarków was annihilated (8 July and 26 September) as well as the inhabitants from many other places: from the village ghetto in Czachulec (20-21 July), from ghettos in: Warta (22 July), Lutomiersk (29 July), Aleksandrów Kujawski (31 July), Bolesławiec and Kiełczygłów (6 August), Sulmierzyce and Osjaków (7 August), Lututów (11 August), Bełchatów (11, 13 and 15 August), Praszka (12 August), Zelów (12-13 August and 14 September), Wieluń (16 and 17 August, and earlier, on 19 April), Pajęczno (13 August), Szadek (14 August), from labour camps in Przedmoście and Sołtysy, Galewice, Sokolniki and Kraszewice near Wieluń (14, 18 and 22 August), from ghettos in: Wieruszow (21-23 August), Sieradź (23-24 August), Zduńska Wola (25-27 August), Łask (28-29 August), Łódź (1-2 and 7-12 September).
During the first stage of Kulmhof activities, several escapes of prisoners-forced gravediggers took place. The first known escapee from the camp was Abram Rój from Izbica Kujawska. He got away from the palace on 16 January. Three days later (19 January), Szlama Winer, a native of Izbica Kujawska and Michał Podchlebnik from Koło run away from a bus and a truck on the road to the Rzuchowski forest. It was probably the late summer of 1942, when Icchak Justman and Jerachmiel Widawski who had been driven to Kulmhof from the ghetto in Sieradz, fled from the camp.
The fate of Szlama Winer (aka Jakub Grojnowski) deserves special notice. He reached Grabów and Piotrków Trybunalski, and then came to the Warsaw Ghetto, where in the so-called Ringelblum Archive provided a shocking and detailed account of the Kulmhof extermination camp. Abbreviated versions of the account were published in the ghetto press, and reports on its basis prepared by the Jewish underground, got through to the Polish underground and reached the Polish government-in-exile residing in London. Winer did not survive the war and occupation; he was murdered in the Bełżec death camp. Rój, Podchlebnik, Justman and Widawski survived the war; the second one is the most important Jewish witness of the first phase of the camp's operation - the famous "Michał P." from the “Medallions” by Zofia Nałkowska. Not only Winer attempted to alert the world about the genocide in Chełmno. A Pole, Stanisław Kaszyński, a pre-war secretary of the municipality office in Chełmno, a collaborator of the Polish Underground State, reported to secret military organizations about Kulmhof criminal activities. He also tried to notify diplomatic missions in the West but was betrayed by a neighbour and shot by the Germans while trying to escape.
The transports of Jewish victims to Kulmhof were stopped in the late summer of 1942. Due to the epidemiological threat, decaying bodies were exhumed, and then burned in open-air crematoria. In March 1943, it was decided to liquidate the camp. In April, the palace together with its prisoners and crematoria in the forest were blown up. Then the commando left the camp. The Kulmhof death camp resumed its activities in spring-summer 1944. Extermination was carried out in the glades of the Rzuchowski forest. Barracks were built there, and the area adapted to take transports with Jewish victims from the Łódź ghetto. The narrow-gauge railway from Koło reached directly Chełmno. Mobile gas chambers (vehicles) were also improved. On 23, 26, 28, 30 June and 3, 5, 7, 10, 12 and 14 July 1944, Jews from Łódź were killed in Kulmhof.
The extermination process was discontinued in mid-July 1944. Only part of the Bothmann’s Sonderkommando crew remained (from March 1942 to January 1945 the camp commandant was Hans Bothmann, Lange's successor) and a group of 47 Jews, including craftsmen - mainly tailors and shoemakers, imprisoned in a granary on the palace grounds. The evacuation of the camp was ordered on the night of 17-18 January 1945. Members of Sonderkommando Bothmann began murdering prisoners held in the granary. Those who remained inside the building revolted and killed two Germans. The granary with the prisoners was set on fire. Prisoners - Mordechaj Żurawski and Szymon Srebrnik, managed to escape. After the war they testified about the second phase of the Kulmhof extermination camp operations.
No records of the victims of the Kulmhof death camp have been preserved, as almost all German documentation created during its operation. Among the victims of the camp were Polish, German, Austrian, Czech, French and Luxembourg Jews as well as Roma and Sinti. Czech and Polish children, Polish soldiers, Christian clergymen, old people from nursing homes and Soviet prisoners of war were probably also killed there. In the latest publications on the history of this extermination camp, the authors estimate that from about 173,000 up to 200,000 people were murdered there.
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