Deportations from Łódź to Chełmno

In mid-January 1942 a “resettlement” began in the Łódź Ghetto, the second-largest ghetto in occupied Europe. That was what the German orders called it, and that was how the inhabitants of the closed district in Bałuty and the Old Town spoke of it. People whose names were put on the lists had to report with a little luggage to assembly points, from where they were taken to Radegast station in Marysin. They were told they were going to work in the countryside. In reality the trains went to Koło, and from there lorries took people to the village of Chełmno on the Ner, where the first German death camp had been operating since December 1941. No one from these transports came back.

War chronologies usually give 15 January as the date on which the deportations began. According to the consensus of Polish and foreign historians, however, the first train left Radegast on 16 January 1942, and by 29 January some 10,000 people had been deported in this way. It was the beginning of an operation that by May 1942 had claimed some 55,000 inhabitants of the ghetto, and by September more than 70,000.

The Warthegau and the Łódź Ghetto

Łódź, renamed Litzmannstadt in April 1940, was incorporated into the Reich as part of Reichsgau Wartheland (the Warthegau), a district ruled by Reich Governor and Gauleiter Arthur Greiser. Greiser wanted to make his district a model German province – which meant one without Poles or Jews. A ghetto was established in Łódź in February 1940 and sealed off on 30 April that year. Some 160,000 people were crammed into little more than four square kilometres of the poorest part of the city. The ghetto was supervised by the German Ghetto Administration under Hans Biebow, while the Jewish administration was run by the Eldest of the Jews, Chaim Rumkowski. Rumkowski believed that the ghetto would survive if it became indispensable to the German war economy, and under the slogan “Our only path is work” he turned it into a network of workshops that produced, among other things, uniforms for the Wehrmacht.

In the autumn of 1941 the ghetto took in thousands of new people. Between 16 October and 4 November some 20,000 Jews arrived in Łódź from Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Luxembourg – the first Jews deported to the East from the Reich and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia after the compulsory wearing of the star had been introduced there. Among them were elderly people, doctors, lawyers, merchants and First World War veterans, unprepared for life in overcrowded, unheated rooms. Thousands more Polish Jews were brought to Łódź from ghettos being liquidated in the smaller towns of the Warthegau. In addition, between 5 and 9 November 1941, 5,007 Roma and Sinti from the Austrian Burgenland, including 2,689 children, were brought to a separate quarter of the ghetto surrounded by a double barbed-wire fence. In this so-called Gypsy camp, without water, latrines or fuel, an epidemic of typhus soon broke out. According to the surviving records more than 700 prisoners died or were murdered there.

The birth of the Chełmno camp

The idea of solving the “problem” of the overcrowded ghetto by murder had surfaced in the Warthegau as early as the summer of 1941. On 16 July the head of the SD in Poznań, Rolf-Heinz Höppner, wrote to Adolf Eichmann about proposals discussed in the Reich Governor’s office: given that the Jews could not be fed through the winter, would it not be “the most humane solution” to finish off those unfit for work “by some quick-acting means”? A fortnight or so later Hermann Göring instructed Heydrich to prepare a “total solution of the Jewish question” in Europe.

The man to carry it out was found locally. SS-Hauptsturmführer Herbert Lange, an officer of the Poznań Gestapo, had since late 1939 commanded a unit that, as part of Aktion T4, murdered psychiatric patients in the Warthegau and East Prussia. His men had tested killing with carbon monoxide in a cell at Fort VII (PL) in Poznań, and then in hermetically sealed vehicles. The killing of the sick in the Reich was formally halted in August 1941, but the people and methods of T4 remained. In the autumn of 1941 Lange’s unit began murdering Jews in the Konin area. It was subordinate to the Higher SS and Police Leader in the Warthegau, Wilhelm Koppe, and through him to Heinrich Himmler.

Lange chose Chełmno, a village on the Ner between Koło and Dąbie, with an empty manor house in a park and the Rzuchów Forest (PL) a few kilometres away. The inhabitants were moved out, the manor was fenced off and pits were dug in the forest. The camp had no official name; in documents it appeared as SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof or Sonderkommando Lange. The killing was done in lorries with an airtight compartment into which engine exhaust was piped (according to some researchers, in the first weeks bottled carbon monoxide was also used). The victims were told that before leaving for work they had to bathe and hand over their clothes for disinfection. The undressed people were driven along a corridor from the cellar of the manor onto a ramp and straight into the back of a lorry. By the time the vehicle reached the forest, they were dead. The bodies were buried in mass graves by Jewish prisoners, who were themselves murdered at intervals.

The first transport, some 700 Jews from the ghetto in Koło, was brought to Chełmno on 7 December 1941; the killing began on 8 December, the date historians take as the start of the camp’s operation. Next came the Jews of Dąbie, Kłodawa, Bugaj and Izbica Kujawska. Between 4 and 12 January 1942 some 4,300 Roma and Sinti who had survived the epidemic were taken from the Łódź Gypsy camp to Chełmno. All were murdered. Some of the camp staff caught typhus from them.

The lists

In December 1941 the German authorities demanded that Rumkowski designate 20,000 people for “resettlement”. By his own later account, he managed to bargain the number down by half, to 10,000 for the first stage. The selection was left to the Jewish administration. A resettlement commission set up within the Eldest of the Jews’ administration was to draw up the lists, and the Jewish Order Police were to bring people to the assembly points. Rumkowski decided that the first to leave the ghetto would be those classed as criminals, together with their families, as well as some 2,000 Jews who had been moved to Łódź from Włocławek and its surroundings, and the families of men taken to forced labour camps. Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate were exempted from the first stage, which was received with bitterness in the ghetto.

In his speeches Rumkowski reassured the ghetto that the deportees’ fate would not be tragic and that farm work awaited them. It is not known when he learned where the trains were really going. Historians disagree in their assessment of his role. For many years he was regarded as the embodiment of collaboration. Some present-day researchers stress that he acted under duress, in the conviction that he was saving the majority at the expense of the minority, and that the German decisions on extermination did not depend on him. What is certain is that in January 1942 the Jewish administration was drawn into selecting the victims, and that the inhabitants of the ghetto, half-starved, in the depths of a bitter winter and amid epidemics, had no means of resisting.

The trains from Radegast

On 16 January 1942 the first train left the ramp in Marysin. The transports carried between 700 and about 1,200 people each. By 29 January more than a dozen had left, carrying some 10,000 people in all. The route ran through Kutno to Koło. There people were led from the station to a small synagogue, where they spent the night, and in the morning they were driven by lorry to Chełmno. After protests from the local authorities, in the spring of 1942 the transfer point was moved to a narrow-gauge railway and a mill in the village of Zawadka. The luggage, clothes and documents of the murdered were sorted, and some of them were sent back to the ghetto to be reworked in the workshops. In time it was these things, rather than the official reassurances, that told the ghetto’s inhabitants what had happened to the deportees.

The second wave of deportations, from 22 February to 2 April 1942, took some 34,000 people; the third, in May, almost 11,000, this time mainly Jews from the Reich, Austria, the Czech lands and Luxembourg. By mid-May some 55,000 people had been deported from the ghetto to Chełmno.

A witness from the Rzuchów Forest

Knowledge of Chełmno spread beyond the camp as early as January 1942 thanks to people who managed to escape. The most important of them was a tailor from Izbica Kujawska, Szlama Ber Winer. On 6 January the Germans picked him out of a transport, together with several dozen other men, for the forest detail that pulled the bodies out of the lorries and buried them in the pits. For almost two weeks he watched the transports from Kłodawa, Bugaj, Izbica and Łódź, as well as the Roma, being killed; his parents and brother died there. On 19 January 1942 he jumped out of the window of the bus taking the prisoners to the forest. That same day he reached the ghetto in Grabów, where he told everything to Rabbi Jakub Szulman (PL). The rabbi wrote a letter warning relatives in Łódź on 19 January, and on 21 January, when a second escapee, Mordechaj Podchlebnik, reached Grabów, another letter to Warsaw.

In February Winer reached the Warsaw Ghetto. His account was written down by members of Emanuel Ringelblum’s underground archive, Oneg Shabbat. On its basis a report on the events at Chełmno was compiled and passed on to the Polish Underground State and from there to the Polish government in London. It was the first known written account by an escapee from a death camp, and for the Jewish underground the first convincing proof that the Germans were systematically wiping out entire Jewish communities hundreds of kilometres behind the front. Winer used the name Jakub Grojnowski; in foreign literature the distorted form “Grojanowski” became established, and his true identity was established only in the early twenty-first century by Przemysław Nowicki. Winer himself died in April 1942 at Bełżec, deported from the ghetto in Zamość.

The Polish underground was also gathering information on Chełmno. At the end of January the Łódź District of the Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ) reported the killing of Jews and Roma in the forests near Dąbie, and in February 1942 a short report on the murders around Koło appeared in the clandestine Biuletyn Informacyjny.

Place in the war

Four days after the first train left Radegast, on 20 January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich gathered representatives of ministries and agencies in a villa by the Wannsee lake in Berlin to co-ordinate with them the “final solution of the Jewish question” throughout Europe. Chełmno shows that by the time of that meeting extermination was no longer a plan but a practice. In the Warthegau it had been under way for six weeks, as a regional undertaking agreed between Greiser and Himmler. On 1 May 1942 Greiser wrote to Himmler that the “special treatment” of some 100,000 Jews in his district, which Himmler had approved in agreement with Heydrich, would be completed within the next two or three months.

Chełmno was the first permanent site for the mass killing of Jews by gas. The experience of the Warthegau and of Aktion T4 was put to use in the spring of 1942 in the camps of Operation Reinhard – Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka – where permanent gas chambers fed by engine exhaust were built instead of lorries. In March 1942 Lange was recalled and Hans Bothmann became commandant of Chełmno. That summer Paul Blobel began experiments there with burning bodies exhumed from the graves in order to cover up the traces of the crime. In September 1942, during the Gehsperre (PL) (the “Great Curfew”), the Germans took more than 15,000 children, elderly and sick people from the Łódź Ghetto. It was then that Rumkowski called on parents to give him their children.

The camp was suspended in April 1943 and reopened in June and July 1944 for the last transports from Łódź; most of the ghetto’s remaining inhabitants were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944, Rumkowski among them. The number of Chełmno’s victims is disputed. In the trial of members of the camp staff in the early 1960s, a West German court accepted a minimum of some 152,000 murdered; the museum at Chełmno considers about 200,000 the most likely figure; and older Polish estimates, based on the post-war investigation by Judge Władysław Bednarz, spoke of more than 300,000. The overwhelming majority were Jews from the Warthegau, including the Łódź Ghetto; the victims also included Roma, children from the Czech villages of Lidice and Ležáky, and Soviet prisoners of war. Only a handful of people managed to escape from the camp. Greiser was sentenced by the Supreme National Tribunal and hanged in Poznań in 1946, Bothmann committed suicide in British custody, and a dozen or so members of the camp staff were tried years later in Poland and Germany.