Warsaw concentration camp

Warsaw
Nazi concentration camp
Barracks and watchtowers of KL Warschau during capture of the concentration camp by Battalion Zośka, 5 August 1944
Coordinates	52°14′54.3″N 20°59′23.7″E / 52.248417°N 20.989917°E / 52.248417; 20.989917
Other names	See relevant section
Known for	Discredited extermination camp theory
Location	Warsaw, General Government, German-occupied Poland
Built by	Camp's inmates
Operated by	Nazi Germany
Commandant	Wilhelm Göcke (June 1943 – September 1943) Nikolaus Herbet (September/October 1943 – April 1944) Wilhelm Ruppert (May–June 1944)[1]
Original use	Gęsiówka prison[1]
First built	19 July 1943 – 10 June 1944
Operational	19 July 1943–5 August 1944 as a Nazi concentration camp January 1945 – November 1949 as a labour/POW camp 1949–1956 as a prison
Inmates	Mostly Jews from countries other than Poland (Greece and Hungary in particular)[1] 300 Germans
Number of inmates	8,000–9,000[1]
Killed	4,000–5,000 prisoners total: 20,000
Liberated by	Home Army during the Warsaw Uprising[1]

The Warsaw concentration camp (German: Konzentrationslager Warschau, KL Warschau; see other names)^[2] was a German concentration camp in occupied Poland during World War II. It was formed on the base of the now-nonexistent Gęsiówka prison, in what is today the Warsaw neighbourhood of Muranów, on the order of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The camp operated from July 1943 to August 1944.

Located in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, KL Warschau first functioned as a camp in its own right, but was demoted to a branch of the Majdanek concentration camp in May 1944. In late July that year, due to the Red Army approaching Warsaw, the Nazis started to evacuate the camp. Around 4,000 inmates were forced to march on foot to Kutno, 120 km (75 mi) away; those who survived were then transported to Dachau. On 5 August 1944, KL Warschau was captured by Battalion Zośka during the Warsaw Uprising, liberating 348 Jews who were still left on its premises. It was the only German camp in Poland to be liberated by anti-Nazi resistance forces, rather than by Allied troops. After the Red Army definitively expelled the Germans from Warsaw in January 1945, the new communist administration continued to run the buildings as a forced labour camp, and then as a prison, until it was closed in 1956. All the camp's premises were demolished in 1965.

The Encyclopedia on Camps and Ghettos says that a total of 8,000 to 9,000 inmates were held there, while Bogusław Kopka estimates the number at at least 7,250 prisoners, all but 300 of whom were Jews from various European countries, in particular from Hungary and Greece. The Jewish inmates were used as forced labour to clean the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, with the ultimate goal of creating a park in the former ghetto's area. They also had to find and sort whatever precious items were still left on its territory. The camp and adjacent ruins were additionally used by the German administration as a place of execution, the victims being Polish political prisoners, Jews caught on the "Aryan side", and generally people rounded up on the streets of Warsaw. About 4,000 to 5,000 prisoners died during the camp's existence,^[1] while the total number of people murdered in the camp is estimated at 20,000.^[3][4]

The camp played a comparatively minor role in the Holocaust and thus seldom appears in mainstream historiography.^[1][5] However, it has been at the centre of a conspiracy theory, first promoted by Maria Trzcińska, a Polish judge who served for 22 years as a member of the Chief Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation. The theory, refuted by mainstream historians, contends that KL Warschau was an extermination camp operating a giant gas chamber inside a tunnel near Warszawa Zachodnia railroad station and that 200,000 mainly non-Jewish Poles were gassed there.^[4]