Warsaw concentration camp

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Aerial photo of the camp, 1943 (US Air Force)

Warsaw concentration camp (German: Konzentrationslager Warschau, short KL Warschau) was a group of Nazi concentration and extermination camps in German-occupied Warsaw.

Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) estimates number of victims to be "not less than tens of thousands" (mostly Gentile Poles), but refrains from making more precise estimates due to scant evidence. Some other estimates place the number of victims as high as 200,000 people.

1 Date controversy
2 Organization
3 Methodology of the crime
4 Liquidation and liberation
5 References
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Date controversy

The earliest known official mention of the KL Warschau comes from June 19, 1943 to refer to concentration camp in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, however it is often used to describe all such camps including those that existed earlier. It is estimated that KL Warschau was operated between autumn 1942 and the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. The first commander of the camp was SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Goecke, former Mauthausen Concentration Camp commander. In addition to the genocidal purposes, camp was designed as to provide a work force to change leveled ruins of the former Warsaw Ghetto into a future big park for the SS.

The exact date of its creation is unknown. Some historians (IPN among them) argue that it was created following the orders of SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl on June 11, 1943. However, others (among them historian and IPN judge Maria Trzcińska) claim that it must have been already operational prior to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The factual basis of this claim is that on October 9, 1942 Heinrich Himmler issued an order in which he stated:

I've issued orders and requested that all the so-called arms factories workers working only as tailors, furriers or bootmakers be grouped in the nearest concentration camps, that is in Warsaw and Lublin.

[edit] Organization

The camp was composed of five parts located in different parts of Warsaw, all connected by railway and under unified organization and one command. In chronological order of opening:

a Konzentrationslager concentration camp at Koło area (until 1942 a Kreigsgefangenenlager POW camp for Polish Army soldiers captured in 1939)
a Vernichtungslager death camp composed of two sub-camps near the Warszawa Zachodnia train station
an international concentration camp in Gęsia Street (known as Gęsiówka, formerly Arbeitserziehungslager "re-educational labour camp", with a sub-camp for Jews on Nowolipie Street) in the former Ghetto
Bonifraterska camp near Muranowski Square in the former Ghetto
a former Gestapo prison on Pawia Street (known as Pawiak)

The overall area was 1.2 km², with 119 barracks for about 40,000 prisoners. Guards included Ukrainians and Latvians. Camp infrastructure included several crematoriums, including an electrical one.

[edit] Methodology of the crime

According to German plans (so-called Pabst Plan) before the Warsaw Uprising, Warsaw was to be turned into a provincional German city. To ensure this, the population of the city was to drop from well over a million to less than 500,000 inhabitants. To accomplish this goal all Jews were grouped in the Warsaw Ghetto and then exterminated. The next step was exterminating Gentile population.

Gentile population of Warsaw was initially a target of the łapanka policy, in which the forces of SS, Wehrmacht and police rounded up civilians on a street and took all of them as prisoners. Most of them were either shot or transported to various concentration and death camps. Between 1942 and 1944 there were approximately 400 victims of łapanka in Warsaw daily; these caught were first transferred to the KL Warschau complex.

According to IPN, most people died due to shootings (both in the camps and in an adjusting "security zone", including by machine guns; some victimes were shot in a public executions in the streets of Warsaw), physical exhaustion and typhus epidemic. Bodies were either burned in crematoriums and open-air pyres or buried, including under a blown-up buildings. Many others were gassed in gas chambers at Gęsia Street; ater the war, considerable amount of Zyklon B was found there. A relatively small number was also either hanged at the "death wall" at Koło or tortured to death.

A very controversial point is existence of a gas chamber in a railway tunnel near the Warszawa Zachodnia train station. The high tunnel had size of 630 square meters, enough to kill up to 1,000 people at a time. Gas chambers were typically smaller and low, and using huge tunnel as a gas chamber would be highly atypical and inefficient. It is also unknown if Zyklon-B or carbon monoxide would had been used.

At the same time, groups of SS men wearing white clothes would pose as medical workers in order to find and kill remaining Jews still hiding in the ruins of Ghetto.

[edit] Liquidation and liberation

On July 20, 1943 SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Koppe ordered the complex to be liquidated. Most of the prisoners were killed or transferred to other concentration camps (mostly to Dachau, Gross-Rosen and Ravensbrück). Between July 28 and July 31 four major railway transports left Warsaw, containing some 12,300 prisoners.

A small group of approximately 360 inmates (mostly Jews from various European countries) was left in Pawiak and Gęsiówka to help in destruction of the evidence. Special Leichenverbrennungskommando, composed of guarded Jews, dug out and burned buried bodies. The files of the camp were burnt, and the railway tunnel and prisons were mined for demolition.

Prisoners of Gęsiówka and the Szare Szeregi soldiers

On August 5, 1944 the Armia Krajowa (AK) assault group stormed the Gęsiówka camp located in the former Warsaw Ghetto and set free the remaining 360 men and women. Most of them joined the struggle and fought in the Warsaw Uprising.

After a failed insurgent attack, Pawiak was blown up by Germans on August 21, 1944.

According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website, Warsaw Concentration Camp was liberated in January 1945 by the Soviet troops. After the takeover the camp continued to operate as a prison camp for former AK fighters and other "enemies of the people's power" under the Soviet NKVD and then Polish MBP until 1954.