The Holocaust in Poland - Ghettos and The Extermination Program

Ghettos and The Extermination Program

The plight of Jews in war-torn Poland can be divided into stages defined by the existence of the ghettos. Before their formation, the escape from persecution did not involve extrajudicial punishment by death. Once the ghettos were created however, death by starvation and disease became rampant, alleviated only by smuggling of food and medicine described by Ringelblum as "one of the finest pages in the history between the two peoples". The escape from the ghettos became the only chance for survival once their brutal liquidation began.

Further information: Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland

The liquidation of Jewish ghettos across Poland was closely connected with the formation of highly secretive killing centers built at about the same time by various German companies including I.A. Topf and Sons of Erfurt, and C.H. Kori GmbH. Civilians were forbidden to approach them. Kulmhof (Chełmno) extermination camp was built as first. It was a pilot project for the development of the remaining sites. Unlike other Nazi concentration camps where prisoners were exploited for the war effort, German death camps – part of Operation Reinhardt – were designed exclusively for the rapid elimination of Polish Jews in ghettos. Their German overseers reported directly to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler in Berlin, who kept control of the extermination program, but delegated the work in Poland to SS-Obergruppenführer Odilo Globocnik. The selection of sites, construction of facilities and training of personnel was based on a similar (Action T4) "racial hygiene" program of mass killings developed in Germany.

Treblinka extermination camp located 100 km (62 mi) northeast of Warsaw, was ready on July 24, 1942. There were two barracks near the railway tracks for storing belongings of prisoners; one disguised as a railway station complete with a wooden fake clock to prevent new arrivals from realizing their fate. Their valuables were collected for "safekeeping". The shipping of Jews from the capital – plan known as the Großaktion Warschau – began immediately. During the two months of summer 1942, about 254,000 Warsaw Ghetto residents were exterminated at Treblinka (or at least 300,000 by different accounts). On arrival, stripped victims were marched to one of ten chambers and gassed in batches of 200 with the use of monoxide gas (Zyklon B was introduced some time later). The chambers, expanded in August–September 1942, were able to kill 12,000 to 15,000 victims every day, with the maximum capacity of 22,000 executions in twenty-four hours. The dead were initially buried in large mass graves, but the stench from the decomposing bodies could be smelled up to ten kilometers away. So, later, they were burned on open-air grids made of concrete pillars and railway tracks. The number of people killed at Treblinka in the next year ranges from 1,000,000 to 1,400,000. The camp was dissolved on on October 19, 1943 following the prisoner uprising, with the murderous Operation Reinhard nearly completed.

Auschwitz concentration camp located 50 kilometers west of Kraków was fitted with the first gas chamber at Auschwitz II Birkenau in March 1942, and the gassing of Jews with Zyklon B, following a "selection", began almost immediately. By early 1943 Birkenau was a killing factory with four crematoria working around the clock. More than 20,000 people were gassed and cremated there each day. Auschwitz II extermination program resulted in the death of over one million Jews from across Europe, among them, 200,000 Jewish people from Poland, delivered in cattle trucks from liquidated ghettos in Bytom (February 15, 1942), Kraków (March 13, 1943), Sosnowiec (June–August 1943), and many other cities and towns including Łódź (August 1944), where the last ghetto in Poland was liquidated. Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria were blown up on November 25, 1944 in an attempt to destroy the evidence of mass killings, by the orders of SS chief Heinrich Himmler.

Belzec extermination camp created near the railroad station of Bełżec in the Lublin district, began operating officially on March 17, 1942 with three temporary gas chambers, later replaced with six – made of concrete – enabling the facility to handle over 1,000 victims at a time. At least 434,500 Jews were exterminated there. The lack of varied survivors however, makes this camp much lesser known. The bodies of the dead, buried in mass graves, swelled in the heat as a result of putrefaction making the earth split, which was resolved with the introduction of crematoria. The last shipment of Jews (including those already dead in transit) arrived in Bełżec in December 1942. The remaining 500 Sonderkommando witnesses of mass extermination who dismantled the camp and incinerated leftover corpses, were murdered in Sobibor extermination camp in the following months.

Sobibor extermination camp disguised as a railway transit camp not far from Lublin, began mass gassing operations in May 1942. As in other extermination centers, Jews taken off the trains from liquidated ghettos and transit camps (Izbica, Końskowola) were forced to hand over their valuables, split into groups and strip. Oberscharführer Hermann Michel in medical coat gave the command for prisoners’ disinfection. They were led to gas chambers which were disguised as showers. Carbon monoxide gas was released from the exhaust pipes of tank engines. Their bodies were burned in open pits partly fuelled by human body-fat, and turned into seven "ash mountains". The total figure of Jews murdered there is estimated at a minimum of 250,000. Heinrich Himmler ordered the camp dismantled following a prisoner revolt on October 14, 1943.

Large Jewish populations in south-eastern Poland (Kraków, Lwów, Zamość, Warsaw) were the reason why Majdanek forced labor camp – also on the outskirts of Lublin – has been revived in March 1942 after an obliterating epidemic typhus. It served as storage depot for valuables stolen from the victims at the killing centers in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, before it became a killing ground for Polish Jews with gas chambers constructed in late 1942. The gassing was performed in plain view of other inmates, without as much as a fence around the buildings. "To drown the cries of the dying, tractor engines were run near the gas chambers" before they took the dead away to the crematorium, according to witness's testimony. Majdanek was responsible for the death of 59,000 Polish Jews. By the end of Operation Harvest Festival in early November 1943, Majdanek had only 71 Jews left.

The scale of the Final Solution would not have been possible without mass transport. The extermination of Polish Jews was dependent on the railways as much as on the Nazi killing factories. The Holocaust trains sped up the scale and duration over which the extermination took place, and, the enclosed nature of cattle wagons also reduced the number of troops required to guard them. Rail shipments allowed the Nazi Germans to build and operate bigger and more efficient death camps and, at the same time, openly lie to the world – and to their victims – about the "resettlement" program. In one telephone conversation Heinrich Himmler informed Martin Bormann about the Jews already exterminated in Poland, to which Bormann screamed: "They were not exterminated, only evacuated, evacuated, evacuated!" Unspecified number of deportees died in transit from suffocation and thirst. Waffenn SS officer Kurt Gerstein wrote in the Gerstein Report that on August 18, 1940 he had witnessed at Belzec extermination camp the arrival of "45 wagons with 6,700 people of whom 1,450 were already dead on arrival." Millions of people were transported to the extermination camps in trains organised by German Transport Ministry and tracked by an IBM subsidiary until the official date of closing the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in December 1944.