The Janowska camp uprising

19 November 1943 was the last day of the Jewish Janowska camp in Lwów (Lviv). From the morning onwards German police shot its prisoners in a nearby ravine, and late that evening, on the eastern outskirts of the city, the Jewish prisoners of Sonderkommando 1005 revolted – the so-called “Death Brigade”, which for five months had been digging up mass graves and burning the victims’ bodies. Several dozen of them managed to escape; only a handful survived the war.

Popular chronologies merge the two events into one: the prisoners are said to have revolted and fled when ordered to cover up the traces of mass murder. In reality these were two separate affairs on the same day. Most of the camp’s prisoners had no chance at all of resisting – they were killed on the spot, and only a few tried to break through the wire. The revolt came from the commando that had been erasing the traces of the crime since June and whose members knew they would be killed once their work was done. The ending of that account, on the other hand, is true: most of the escapees were caught and murdered.

The camp on Janowska Street

The camp was set up in the autumn of 1941, a few months after the Germans entered Lwów, the July pogroms and the murder of the Lwów professors. Odilo Globocnik’s men then established, at 132/134 Janowska Street, on the site of a former milling-machinery factory, a Lwów branch of the SS company Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke (DAW). Its manager was SS-Untersturmführer Fritz Gebauer. At first several hundred Jewish craftsmen worked there; at the end of October 1941 they were confined to barracks on the factory premises, and on 1 November a forced labour camp sign went up over the gate.

From 1 March 1942 the camp – officially the Zwangsarbeitslager für Juden – was run as a separate establishment by SS-Untersturmführer Gustav Willhaus (PL), who answered to the SS and Police Leader of the District of Galicia, Fritz Katzmann. Formally it was a labour camp, but it quickly became something far worse. During the deportations from the Lwów Ghetto and from other towns of Eastern Galicia it served as a transit camp: “selections” were carried out here, and from here people were sent to the Bełżec extermination camp. Right next to it, in a sandy ravine known as the Piaski (“the Sands”), Jews were shot throughout the camp’s existence – after Bełżec was closed in December 1942, the Piaski became the main killing site for the Jews of Lwów and the surrounding area.

The Janowska camp was reputed to be the most terrible in Galicia. The guards beat, tortured and killed prisoners for amusement; the deputy commandant, Richard Rokita, set up a camp orchestra made up of pre-war Lwów musicians, which had to play during roll calls, marches and executions. The piece that, according to survivors’ accounts, it played most often has gone down in history as the “Tango of Death”. Among the camp’s prisoners was Simon Wiesenthal, who later became a hunter of Nazi criminals.

1943: the liquidation of the ghetto and the covering of tracks

In June 1943 the Germans finally liquidated the Lwów Ghetto; nearly 7,000 of its inhabitants were confined in the Janowska camp, and thousands of others were murdered. On 30 June Katzmann submitted his report “Solution of the Jewish Question in the District of Galicia”, in which he stated that 434,329 Jews had been “resettled” from the district. In July SS-Hauptsturmführer Friedrich Warzok (PL) became commandant of the camp; Willhaus volunteered for the front.

As their defeats on the Eastern Front mounted, the Germans began to erase the traces of their crimes. The secret Aktion 1005 was directed by Paul Blobel, the same man whose commando had carried out the massacre at Babi Yar in 1941. In mid-June 1943 a first group of about 40 prisoners was picked out of the Janowska camp – officially for road building. They formed the Lwów Sonderkommando 1005, which the prisoners themselves called the “Death Brigade”. Over time, according to various studies, it numbered between 85 and about 130 men. They were guarded by some 80 German policemen from a battalion of SS-Polizei-Regiment 23 under the orders of a few Sicherheitspolizei officials headed by SS-Untersturmführer Walter Schallock. According to the Polish literature on the subject, Blobel came to Lwów in July and personally instructed the commando’s German personnel.

For almost three months the prisoners dug open the pits in the Piaski, with their bare hands and later with hooks, pulled out the decomposing bodies and burned them on huge pyres layered with wood. The bones were ground in a machine resembling a concrete mixer, the ashes were sifted for gold, and the emptied graves were filled in, levelled and sown with grass. From 7 September the commando was moved to a tent camp in the forest near Lesienice (PL), where people had been shot since 1941. In October the prisoners also burned the remains of the professors murdered on the Wulka Hills and the bodies of Soviet prisoners of war from the Lwów Stalag. The commando also burned, as they came, the bodies of people shot while it was at work – during such executions the prisoners were locked in their tents under the pretext of an “air-raid alarm”. The sick and exhausted were killed, and for every attempted escape several of the escapee’s comrades were shot.

A surviving member of the commando, Leon Weliczker (later Leon Wells), testified before a Soviet commission that between June and November the brigade burned more than 310,000 bodies. This figure is many times higher than historians’ present-day estimates, but his account is among the most important testimonies about Aktion 1005.

The decision to liquidate

In the autumn of 1943 the Janowska camp was the largest and one of the last labour camps for Jews in the District of Galicia; in October it held about 4,000–5,000 prisoners. The German historian Dieter Pohl links its end to a decision by Heinrich Himmler, who after the Sobibór uprising and the earlier revolts in Treblinka and Białystok decided in October to kill most of the Jewish forced labourers in the General Government. At the beginning of November the Germans murdered more than 42,000 Jews in the camps of the Lublin District in Operation Harvest Festival (Aktion Erntefest), as well as the prisoners of the camp at Szebnie in the Kraków District. Pohl does not rule out that news of the capture of Zhytomyr by the Red Army contributed to the haste in Lwów. Other authors have suggested that the Germans had learned of a conspiracy within the camp itself.

Such a conspiracy did indeed exist. From early 1943 a group of prisoners was active in the camp, including the poet Michał Borwicz and Henryk Axer. It maintained contacts with the Home Army and with the Council to Aid Jews, “Żegota”, passed information about the camp to Home Army intelligence, obtained some weapons and forged documents, and aimed at a revolt and a mass escape. An armed rising never took place, however – possibly because of betrayal. With Żegota’s help Borwicz managed to escape from the camp that autumn, and after the war he described it in his book Uniwersytet zbirów (The University of Thugs).

Around 25–26 October the Germans took more than a thousand prisoners to the area of Lesienice and shot them there. On 12 November they moved into the camp all the Jews who until then had been living on the DAW premises.

19 November

On the morning of 19 November 1943 the camp was surrounded by strong detachments of the Ordnungspolizei and a company of volunteers from the Caucasus under the command of Sicherheitspolizei officers. Some of the prisoners, sensing what was coming, tried to escape: a small group broke through the barbed-wire fence under fire into the nearby forest, while others put up armed resistance, which was quickly crushed. Nearly 3,000 prisoners were herded onto the roll-call square and led in groups to the Piaski, where they were shot. The same fate befell nearly 2,000 Jews brought to Janowska from labour details working in the city, mainly from the railway workshops. According to historical studies, about 4,000–5,000 people were killed in all that day. According to witnesses’ accounts, the musicians of the camp orchestra were also murdered when the camp was liquidated; the details of these accounts, written down years later, differ from one another, however.

Late in the evening of the same day, in the camp near Lesienice, the “Death Brigade” rose in revolt. The conspirators were led by the commando’s chief kapo, a prisoner named Herches. The plan was for the prisoners to kill their police guards silently, take their weapons and uniforms, and flee into the forest. They succeeded in killing two guards, but the noise alerted the others. In a chaotic exchange of fire in the darkness, about 50 prisoners got out of the camp, according to the Polish literature on the subject; some English-language sources speak of as many as about 120. Most were caught in the following days and murdered. According to historians’ findings, only a dozen or so of the escapees lived to see the end of the occupation. Among them was Leon Weliczker, who for several months hid with a dozen or so other Jews in the cellar of a Polish family. Four German policemen were later tried before an SS and police court for dereliction of duty.

The revolt at Lesienice was one of several uprisings by prisoners of the Aktion 1005 commandos in the autumn of 1943 – on 29 September the prisoners burning bodies at Babi Yar escaped, and in December there was to be an escape from the Ninth Fort in Kaunas. Every such escape meant that witnesses to what the Germans were trying to hide were loose in the world.

After the liquidation

At the end of November the Germans formed a new commando, which over four weeks burned the bodies of the several thousand prisoners murdered on 19 November; its members were then shot as well. The camp stood empty for more than a month. On 13 January 1944 the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office turned it into a subcamp of Majdanek, again under Warzok’s command. From then on its prisoners were mainly Poles and Ukrainians, along with about a hundred Jews caught in hiding. In July 1944, just before the Red Army took Lwów, the camp was evacuated westwards; few of its last prisoners survived the war, Wiesenthal among them.

How many people died in the Janowska camp is not known precisely. After the war the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission stated that at least 200,000 people had been murdered there – a figure historians regard as greatly inflated. The Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos estimates that about 100,000–120,000 people passed through the camp, most of them Jews, almost all of whom perished – on the spot or in Bełżec and Sobibór. Estimates of the number murdered in the camp itself and in the Piaski vary: from 35,000–40,000 to about 80,000 (Thomas Sandkühler, Waitman Wade Beorn).

The perpetrators

Most of the organisers of the crime went unpunished or were punished only after many years. Katzmann hid in West Germany under a false name until his death in 1957. Willhaus was killed in 1945 as an officer of the SS division “Handschar”; Warzok vanished without trace after the war. Gebauer made a career in East Germany, fled to the West in 1960, and only in 1971 was he sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Saarbrücken. Proceedings against Rokita were discontinued in 1968 on account of his health, as was the case against Schallock, who had earlier, in 1948, been given three years’ imprisonment in Denmark. His deputy in Sonderkommando 1005, Johann Rauch, was extradited to Poland and executed in 1949 after being sentenced by a court in Kraków. Blobel was sentenced to death at the Einsatzgruppen trial and hanged in 1951.

Significance

19 November 1943 brought to a close the destruction of the Jews of Lwów, one of the largest Jewish communities of pre-war Poland – of the more than a hundred thousand Jews living in Lwów when the Germans entered in 1941, by July 1944, according to various estimates, between several hundred and several thousand remained in the city. The liquidation of the Janowska camp was also part of a wider plan: after Harvest Festival in the Lublin District, the Germans were killing the last Jewish forced labourers throughout the General Government, while the Aktion 1005 commandos burned the bodies so that no trace of the crime would remain.

The revolt of the “Death Brigade” did not stop this plan, but it undermined it. The dozen or so survivors of the commando, together with escapees from other Aktion 1005 commandos, became witnesses whose accounts served the Soviet commission in 1944 and later courts in Poland, Germany and Israel – Leon Weliczker-Wells testified in 1961 at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. His Brygada śmierci (The Death Brigade), published in 1946, was one of the first accounts of how the Germans tried to erase the traces of the Holocaust.