Warsaw concentration camp

The Warsaw concentration camp ( _de. Konzentrationslager Warschau, short "KZ Warschau") was an associated group of the Nazi concentration camps, including possibly a dedicated extermination camp, located in German-occupied Warsaw, capital city of Poland. The various details regarding the camps are very controversial.

The Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) estimates that the number of victims who died at these camps to be "not less than tens of thousands". However, it refrains from making a more precise estimate due to scant evidence. Some estimates place the number of the camp's victims as high as 200,000 (mostly gentile Poles). Others estimate the amount of deaths at 20,000 to 35,000 (not including some 37,000 executed at Pawiak), with a proportionally larger percentage of the Polish and European Jews among the dead. Other, smaller groups of victims included Greeks, Romani people, Belarusians and officers of the Italian Army. [http://www.ipn.gov.pl/portal/en/]

Establishment date controversy

The earliest official mention of the "KZ Warschau" is from June 19, 1943, which referred to the concentration camp in the ruins of the former Warsaw Ghetto. However, the term "KZ Warschau" was also used to describe similar camps that were discovered at an earlier date.

Nevertheless, it is estimated that "KZ Warschau" was in operation from the autumn of 1942 until the Warsaw Uprising. The First Commander of the camp was "SS-Obergruppenführer" Wilhelm Goecke, a former Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp commander. In addition to genocidal purposes, the camp was designed to provide the Nazi Party with a work force to clean up the leveled ruins of the former Warsaw Ghetto into a future recreational area for the SS.

The exact date of the camp's creation is unknown. Some historians (IPN among them) have suggested that it was created following the orders of "SS-Obergruppenführer" Oswald Pohl on June 11 1943. However, others have (among them historian and IPN judge Maria Trzcińska) claimed that the camp was already operational prior to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The factual basis for this aforementioned 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 in Lublin."

Organization

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

#"Konzentrationslager" (concentration camp) at Koło area (formerly a "Kreigsgefangenenlager" POW camp for the Polish Army soldiers captured in 1939); this part remains controversional
#"Vernichtungslager" (extermination camp) composed of two sub-camps near the Warszawa Zachodnia train station; this part remains controversional
#Gęsia Street (now: Anielewicza Street) concentration camp (formerly "Arbeitserziehungslager", or re-education labour camp) in the former Ghetto, known as Gęsiówka; a sub-camp for the foreign Jews was located on Nowolipie Street
#Bonifraterska Street camp near Muranowski Square in the former Ghetto
#Former "Gestapo" prison on Pawia Street, known as Pawiak.

The overall area of the camp was 1.2 km², with 119 barracks purposely built to hold approximately 40,000 prisoners. The camp infrastructure included five crematoriums (including one electrical), and the guards included Ukrainians and Latvians.

Operation

Pabst Plan

According to the Pabst Plan, prior to the Warsaw Uprising, Warsaw was to be turned into a provincial German city. To ensure this modification, the population of the city was to be reduced from over a million to less than 500,000 inhabitants. To accomplish this goal, the Jewish population was grouped together in the Warsaw Ghetto before being eventually removed and exterminated. The Nazis' next step in their plan was the removal of the gentile population.

The gentile population of Warsaw became the target of the "łapanka" policy, in which "Wehrmacht" and police rounded up civilians on a street. Between 1942 and 1944, there were approximately 400 victims of łapanka in Warsaw daily. The individuals caught were first transferred to the KZ Warschau complex; from there, many were transported to other concentration and labor camps in Poland.

Executions

According to IPN, most victims were executed by gunfire, mostly using machine guns, both in the camps and in an adjoining "security zone", with some of the hostages publicly executed in the streets of Warsaw. Numerous others were gassed in the gas chambers at Gęsia Street, where a considerable quantity of "Zyklon B" was found after the war (the first gassing there happened on October 17 1943, killing 150 Poles from the Warsaw roundups and 20 Jews from Belgium). A relatively small number of victims were murdered by drunken guards at so-called "amphitheatre" at Gęsiówka or hanged at the so-called "death wall" at Koło. There was also a mysterious T-shaped building in the forest at Koło where the truckloads of prisoners were sometimes shipped but never returned.

Besides mass shootings and other killings, the majority of other deaths resulted from physical exhaustion and the typhus epidemics. The dead bodies were either burned in crematoriums and open-air pyres, including on the former stadium, or were buried under blown-up buildings of the former Ghetto. At the same time, a group of SS men wearing white coats would pose as medical workers in order to find and execute Jews still hiding in the ruins.

Ulica Bema tunnel controversy

An extremely controversial fact remains the existence of an enormous gas chamber in the pre-existing tunnel on Józef Bem Street near the Warszawa Zachodnia train station. The tunnel was 630 square meters, large enough to kill up to 1,000 people at a time - other known Nazi gas chambers, typically smaller and lower, and the used of a large tunnel as a gas chamber could be highly irregular and inefficient (according to the propagators of the gassing theory, the traffic tunnel could be ued to kill multiple truckloads of prisoners).

The tunnel was restored to street traffic after the war. The alleged gassing pumps and connected massive ventilators (used to remove the gas into the atmosphere prior to removal of bodies in the large Nazi gas chambers) were destroyed during a renovation works in 1996 and early 2000s. It is unknown if "Zyklon B" or carbon monoxide could be used in this case.

The now hotly-discussed controversy was not publicly debated and almost completely unknown during the era of the communist rule in Poland. One of the possible reasons behind this secrecy was to increase the number of the perceived victims in the Warsaw Uprising; this uprising was initiated by the non-communist Polish Home Army against the Germans in August 1944, resulting in a massive number of civilian casualties. In 2001 the Polish Sejm appealed for building the memorial; in the meantime, a part of the tunnel was turned into an unofficial mausoleum by citizens of Warsaw.

In 2002 Sejm rejected the inconclusive findings of the Warsaw's IPN investigation. The new IPN investigation by another unit started in 2006 and is expected to end in 2007.

Liquidation and liberation

On July 20 1943, "SS-Obergruppenführer" Wilhelm Koppe ordered the complex to be liquidated and dismantled. The majority of prisoners were either executed or were transferred to other concentration camps, such as Dachau, Gross-Rosen and Ravensbrück. Between July 28 and July 31 1943, four major railway transports left Warsaw, containing some 12,300 prisoners. A small group of several hundred inmates, mostly Jews from European countries, were left in Pawiak and Gęsiówka to dig up and burn bodies. The camp's documentation was burnt, and the railway tunnel and the prison were mined for demolition.

On August 5 1944, the assault group of Polish Home Army (AK) stormed the Gęsiówka camp located in the former Warsaw Ghetto and set free the remaining 360 men and women. Later, these survivors fought in the uprising. On August 21, 1944, after the failure of an insurgent attack on Pawiak, all but seven of its remaining prisoners were executed and the building was blown up by the Germans.

Communist prison camp

After the Soviet takeover of Warsaw in January 1945, the camp continued to operate as a prison camp for the former AK fighters and other "enemies of the people's power" under the Soviet NKVD and then Polish MBP until 1954 (the last prisoners left in 1956). It was the second biggest prison after the Mokotów Prison. [http://www.bankier.pl/pogodzinach/1645200,IPN-wydal-ksiazke-o-obozie-KL-Warschau.html]

References

#pl icon Maria Trzcińska, "Obóz zagłady w centrum Warszawy", Polskie Wydawnictwo Encyklopedyczne, Radom 2002, ISBN 83-88822-16-0
#pl icon [http://wilk.wpk.p.lodz.pl/~whatfor/kl_warschau_4.htm Informacja o ustaleniach dotyczących Konzentrationslager Warschau] - Institute of National Remembrance, June 2002
#pl icon [http://www.ipn.gov.pl/sled_klw_090503.html Informacja o śledztwie w sprawie KL Warschau] - Institute of National Remembrance, May 2003

ee also

* Camps in Poland during World War II
* List of Nazi-German concentration camps
* Gęsiówka
* Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles
* Pawiak
* Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
* Warsaw Uprising

External links

* [http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/KL_Warschau Polish Wikipedia article]
* [http://wilk.wpk.p.lodz.pl/~whatfor/kl_warschau.htm KL Warschau]
* [http://wiadomosci.onet.pl/1619463,11,1,0,120,686,item.html Wieniec i kamienie pamięci ku czci ofiar KL Warschau] Onet.pl
* [http://www.zw.com.pl/zw2/index.jsp?place=Lead01&layout=0&news_id=169312&news_cat_id=259&page=text Zapomniany KL Warschau] "Życie Warszawy"
* [http://hotnews.pl/artpolska-116.html Dowody KL Warschau]
* [http://www.wychowawca.pl/miesiecznik/04_136/07.htm Czas upamiętnić ofiary KL Warschau]
* [http://www.medianet.pl/~naszapol/0803/0803kopi.php Prawda o KL Warschau - Tygodnik Nasza Polska]