Ochota Massacre - The "Zieleniak" Camp

The "Zieleniak" Camp

On August 5, due to the ever-growing number of people expelled from their flats, the Germans decided to erect a transitional camp (which was a stage to the next transitional camp in Pruszków), located in the area of a former vegetable market, so-called "Zieleniak" (nowadays the area of Hale Banacha). Until the evening of that day, anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 people were rounded up there, eventually culminating in several tens of thousands of inhabitants of the Ochota district and its neighbouring areas.

The brick wall enclosing the camp made escape impossible: the military took quarters in the former administration building of the marketplace, and used caretaker boxes for guard posts. The "Zieleniak" camp became a place of mass crimes: the Germans robbed and forced the Ochota-area residents out of their homes, setting the buildings on fire, and herded the people to the camp. RONA soldiers beat them and shot them along the way, pulling women out to rape them, often killing them afterwards. At the gate of the "Zieleniak" camp, the victims were searched for jewels and money, then forced into the cobbled area of the marketplace. RONA soldiers sometimes shot for fun at the imprisoned people; the prisoners had no sanitary facilities and no water, no food (mouldy bread was sometimes given out), no medicines and no medical aid. Erich von dem Bach, the German armed forces commander assigned to fight the uprising, inspected the camp on the same day and said, "there was nothing wrong there, everything was in order."

By August 7 1944, the camp was jammed with civilians. The dead were laid in piles along the camp wall or buried in a makeshift manner. On the same day, several hundred persons of non-Polish descent were escorted away to a similar camp in Okęcie. On August 9, the first batch of prisoners was escorted from the "Zieleniak" camp into the larger transitional camp in Pruszków. Because of the fall of subsequent points of defence of the Warsaw Uprising, the camp was again filled with people, from the Lubecki Housing Estate (Pol.: Kolonia Lubeckiego) and blocks of the Social Insurance Office (ZUS) in Filtrowa street. The fall of the "Wawel Redoubt" (Pol.: Reduta Wawelska) on August 11, 1944, was followed by the next wave of people expelled from their flats. Bodies of murdered and deceased prisoners were burned in the gymnasium of the neighbouring Hugo Kołłątaj Secondary School. The corpses were transported by conscripted civilians directed to lay them in piles. The RONA soldiers doused them with alcohol and set the bodies on fire. On August 12, a German officer shot and killed three captured boy scouts of the Gustaw Battalion, shooting them in the backs of their heads as they lowered corpses into an excavated pit. On August 13, the final evacuation of civilians into the transitional camp in Pruszków began; Ochota residents stayed briefly at "Zieleniak" camp before being transported away. Selected men where forcibly assigned to units in charge of burning corpses of murdered Warsaw inhabitants (German: Verbrennungskommando).

The camp operated until August 19, when the Germans committed mass murder of 50 patients of the Radium Institute. The RONA SS units withdrew from Ochota on August 22–25, 1944. During the two-weeks of the "Zieleniak" camp's operation, some 1,000 of its prisoners died of hunger, thirst, and extreme exhaustion, or were shot to death by RONA soldiers.