page_title: Warsaw concentration camp
section_title: German personnel
hierarchical_section_title: Warsaw concentration camp / German personnel
caption_attribution_description: English: Warning sign near the fence of the Nazi-German “Warsaw concentration camp” (Konzentrationslager Warschau). Inscription in four languages (German, Polish, Hungarian and French) reads: “Attention! Neutral zone. Shooting without warning!” Polski: Wielojęzyczna tablica ostrzegawcza przy ogrodzeniu obozu koncentracyjnego KL Warschau. Napis sporządzony w językach niemieckim, polskim, węgierskim i francuskim głosi: „Uwaga! Strefa neutralna. Bez ostrzeżenia się strzela!”
context_page_description: Warsaw was a Nazi concentration camp built on the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, around Gęsiówka prison. A minor camp, the Warsaw camp is absent from most standard accounts of the Holocaust. Over the course of its operation an estimated 8,000–9,000 prisoners were held at the camp and performed slave labor. About 4,000 to 5,000 of the prisoners are estimated to have died in the camp, during the death march from the camp, the Warsaw Uprising, and hiding after the uprising.
  The camp, which has little coverage in mainstream historiography, has been at the center of a conspiracy theory that asserts that a giant gas chamber was built in a tunnel near Warszawa Zachodnia station and that 200,000 mainly non-Jewish Poles were exterminated at the site.
context_section_description: The camp was first commanded by Wilhelm Göcke until September 1943, then by Nikolaus Herbet and finally Wilhelm Ruppert who commanded the evacuation in July 1944. The Schutzstaffel (SS) force guarding and operating the camp was approximately the size of a company. The original SS unit was gathered from various other camps, including Trawniki concentration camp and Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and following the attachment to Majdanek in May 1944 they were replaced with SS personnel from Lublin.
  The SS personnel mainly guarded the perimeter of the camp and were brutally violent towards the Jews, viewing them as enemies of the state.
  Following the war, eight SS men from the camp were executed for their role in murder; three were sentenced by a Polish court and five by a German court. Walter Wawrzyniak, who was initially sentenced to death in 1950 by an East German court, had his sentence reduced on appeal to a life term. In July 2000, Theodor Szehinskyj, who immigrated to the US, had his US citizenship stripped as a US court found that he had lied in his initial visa application about his SS past.
caption: Multilingual (German, Polish, Hungarian and French) sign at camp fence, reads: "Attention! Neutral zone. Shooting without warning!"
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