A: the ‘Schlosslager’ (the Castle camp) in Chelmno village (where the
SS kommando and the gaswagen were based);
B: the ‘Waldlager’ (the Forest camp) in Rzuchów forest (where the bodies were taken in the gaswagen and dumped in mass graves, and later incinerated);
C: the large brick mill at Zawadki (just south of Powierce), which was used as a holding facility for up to 1,000 deportees at a time.
The Schlosslager in Chelmno village was the centre of operations – this was where the SS officers and kommando were based, this was where the Sonderkommando was housed, this was the place where the gaswagen queued up to collect their loads of deportees, who had been transported to the Schloss. In 1944, the deportees were indeed held in Chelmno village, but not at the Schloss (which had been destroyed in 1943), but in the Catholic church next door. One of the most devastating realities of what happened at Chelmno is the knowledge that in July 1944 thousands of deported Jews spent their final nights in the Chelmno church, and then the gaswagen backed up to the church doors to take them to their deaths.
There were two distinct phases in Chelmno’s operational existence as an extermination centre – the first was from 7 December 1941 to 7 April 1943; the second ran from 23 June 1944 to 18 January 1945.
At the beginning of the first phase, in December 1941, most of the victims were Jews from the towns and villages closest to Chelmno (like the places we’d driven through earlier today). The majority of them were simply transported on trucks directly to the Schloss at Chelmno, but if there were too many for the gaswagen to deal with immediately, the deportees would be taken to the mill at Zawadki, just outside Koło, and imprisoned there overnight, without food or water. When larger numbers started to be transported in early 1942 – for example, 5,000 Roma from the ‘Zigeunerlager’ (the Gypsy camp) in Lodz in January 1942, and 10,000 foreign Jews who had been housed in the Lodz Ghetto in January and February 1942 – they would then be sent by train to Koło, and afterwards on to a smaller, single-gauge railway to Powiercie, two kilometres from Koło. From here they would subsequently either be transported straight to the Schloss to be killed, or on to Zawadki, to be held overnight. Eventually, in July 1942, the single-gauge railway was extended from Powiercie to Chelmno village, and so most of the deportees arrived at the Schloss by train.
By late summer 1942, with well over 100,000 Jews and Roma already murdered and buried in mass graves, the SS realised that the combination of decomposing bodies and the hot summer meant a major possibility of epidemics breaking out, and so the decision was made to build open-air crematoria pits in the Waldlager in Rzuchów forest, and from this time on, all the bodies from the gaswagen were burnt. Meanwhile, the Jewish Sonderkommando were forced to dig up the decomposing bodies so that they too could be incinerated.
By early 1943, with the other (more efficient) extermination camps such as Treblinka and Birkenau now working at full capacity, and the vast majority of the local Jewish population already exterminated, the orders came to close down the Chelmno operation. All signs of both camps were to be eradicated, because the SS didn’t want to leave any traces of their crimes behind. The Schloss in Chelmno was blown up on 7 April 1943, and the crematoria in the Waldlager were also destroyed; the remaining bodies were burnt, and then the bones and ashes dumped in the River Warta. When this process took too long, the authorities purchased a Knochenmuhle (a bone-crushing machine) from Schriever and Company in Hamburg.fn1 The local gauleiter, Arthur Greiser, and the SS camp commandant, Bothmann, organised a special dinner at the Hotel Riga in Koło to thank the SS officers in the kommando ‘on behalf of the Führer for the work … done in Kulmhof’ (the German name for Chelmno). All SS men in the kommando and the police guards received four weeks’ special leave, and an invitation to stay at Greiser’s country estate.
However, this was not the end of Chelmno/Kulmhof as a killing centre – there was to be a second phase. Bothmann’s kommando returned from the Balkans a year later, in May 1944, to reopen a smaller extermination operation to deal with the last of the Jews from the Lodz Ghetto – the last ghetto which had been producing war supplies for Germany. Because the Schloss had been destroyed, the church in Chelmno was now used as the main ‘reception centre’ for deportees. And in the forest new buildings and crematoria pits were constructed. The Jews were then either put in gaswagen at the church, or transported to the forest camp, made to undress and give up their valuables there, before being forced into the gaswagen and killed. Their bodies were burnt immediately afterwards. Between 23 June and 14 July, 7,196 Jews from the Lodz Ghetto were murdered in this second phase of Chelmno’s operations.
After mid-July 1944 the SS deported the remaining Jews from Lodz directly to Auschwitz-Birkenau, so operations at Chelmno were shut down for the second time, and the gaswagen were sent back to Berlin. In September the SS began another attempt to remove evidence of the exterminations, and when the Sonderkommando had completed this task, forty of them were executed. The forty-seven remaining Jewish members of the last Chelmno Sonderkommando were executed by the SS on the night of 17 January 1945, as the Soviet army was approaching. Miraculously, a fifteen-year-old boy, shot in the head, managed to survive. This was Simon Srebnik whose unforgettable testimony opens Lanzmann’s film Shoah.
*
We set off alongside the main road we had come in on earlier this evening, but it’s pitch-black now and extremely cold again. We wrap scarves around our faces, only leaving slits for the eyes. Slipping on the ice, passed by thundering lorries, after about half an hour we reach a turn-off to the right. This must be where the first railway terminated at the village of Powiercie, and then the deportees would have been taken from the trains and forced down the lane we’re now walking, towards the river, and the large brick mill at the hamlet of Zawadki where up to 1,000 people could be held overnight. The following day they would have been transported in trucks to the Schlosslager in Chelmno village, where they were told they were going to have baths, and be deloused, before being sent on to a work camp. Moments later, they were forced into the gaswagen, and murdered during the five-kilometre journey to Rzuchów forest. In the middle of the forest, teams of Sonderkommandos then worked clearing the trucks, extracting gold teeth and then burying the dead in mass graves, in later years burning them on vast pyres.
Beyond any houses now, the lane leads through a pine wood. Our talking thins to a trickle. There’s no way I’d walk here alone. It feels heavily sinister. I register the age of the trees; some of the more massive pines would have been saplings in the 1940s. Eventually we’re through the trees and arrive at a bend in the road. There are a couple of weak street lights here that cast a cold glow and we can make out a very ugly square building that was formerly the Gestapo headquarters; now, as Gilbert tells us, a peasant family lives there. Quite unimaginable to live in such a place. A little further, there’s another bend in the road, where the River Warta comes to meet it, and four or five more houses. We’re reading Gilbert by torchlight and we realise this lumpy patch of rubble and rough ground between the lane and the river must be where the mill once stood – there are only foundations now and outcrops of brick here and there, which we can see by scraping the snow away with our feet. We scramble over to the river and look back. The desolation of this place seems more total even than Auschwitz, even than Monowitz, if that’s possible. There, some buildings have survived; here there is not even a wall. No record, no trace of what was suffered here, where, each day, up to a thousand human beings were crowded together in their last hours on earth. Some on nights like this, with the temperature well below freezing; some in the summer when thirst would have been desperate. Would the guards have walked the few yards from the river to the mill to stop these cries or would they have regarded it as a waste of time, considering the families packed together in the mill only had hours left to live?