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The Warsaw concentration camp (Template:Lang-de, short KZ Warschau) was an associated group of Nazi concentration and extermination camps located in German-occupied Warsaw, in Poland.
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 has refrained from making a more precise estimate due to scant evidence. Some other estimates place the number of the camp's victims as high as 200,000 (mostly gentile Poles).[citation needed]
Estalibishment 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 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 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)
- Vernichtungslager (extermination camp) composed of two sub-camps near the Warszawa Zachodnia train station; this part remains controversional
- Gęsia Street concentration camp (formerly Arbeitserziehungslager, or re-education labour camp) in the former Ghetto, known as Gęsiówka; a sub-camp for 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 approximentally 40,000 prisoners. The camp infrastructure included several 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 wasthe 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, 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 tortured to death at "the colloseum" or hanged at the so-called "death wall" at Koło.
Besides mass shootings and other killings, the majority of other deaths resulted from physical exhaustion and the typhus epidemics. Dead bodies were either burned in crematoriums and open-air pyres or were buried under blown-up buildings of the former Ghetto. At the same time, a groups of SS men wearing white coats would pose as medical workers in order to find and execute Jews still hiding in the ruins.
Tunnel controversy
An extremely controversial fact remains the existence of an enormous gas chamber in a railway tunnel on Bem Street near the Warszawa Zachodnia train station. The tunnel was 630 square meters high, large enough to kill up to 1,000 people at a time; the Nazi gas chambers were typically smaller and lower, and using a big tunnel as a gas chamber would be highly irregular and inefficient. It is unknown if Zyklon B or carbon monoxide was used in this case. The tunnel was restored to street traffic after the war, and alleged gassing pumps and connected massive ventilators destroyed during the renovation works in 1996 and 2005.
The now hotly-disputed controversy not publicily 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[citation needed]; 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 parliament appealed for building the memorial and year later rejected the inconclusive findings of the IPN investigation. The new IPN investigation started in 2006 and is excepted 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 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 assist with the destruction of evidence; they were ordered 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, its remaining prisoners were executed and the building was blown up by the Germans.
According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website, the remains of the Warsaw concentration camp were liberated in January 1945 by the Soviet troops. However, it's unlikely there were any live prisoners left at this time.
Communist prison camp
After the Soviet takeover in January 1945, 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.
References
- Template:Pl icon Maria Trzcińska, Obóz zagłady w centrum Warszawy, Polskie Wydawnictwo Encyklopedyczne, Radom 2002, ISBN 83-88822-16-0
- Template:Pl icon Informacja o ustaleniach dotyczących Konzentrationslager Warschau - Institute of National Remembrance, June 2002
- Template:Pl icon Informacja o śledztwie w sprawie KL Warschau - Institute of National Remembrance, May 2003 noobs