page_title: Dębica
section_title: World War II
hierarchical_section_title: Dębica / History / World War II
caption_attribution_description: Polski: Góra Śmierci Rekonstrukcja (3)
context_page_description: Dębica is a town in southeastern Poland with 46,693 inhabitants, as of 2 June 2009. It is the capital of Dębica County. Since 1999 it has been situated in the Podkarpackie Voivodeship; it had previously been in the Tarnów Voivodeship. Dębica belongs to the historic province of Lesser Poland, and for centuries it was part of the Sandomierz Voivodeship.
context_section_description: The occupation of Dębica by Nazi Germany started on September 8, 1939. The Germans created a ghetto for the town's Jewish population, eventually killing most of them either on the spot or in the Auschwitz concentration camp. In the forested hills south of the town, strong underground forces operated, with numerous units of the Home Army (AK). It was too dangerous for AK officers to stay in Dębica, thus the headquarters of a local underground district (known as Deser) were located at a nearby village of Gumniska, located in the hilly area south of the town. Resistance fighters were very active here, often attacking the main Kraków-Lwów rail line, used by German troops. In early 1944, units of the local Armia Krajowa district unsuccessfully tried to blow up a train with Hans Frank, which was passing through the village station at Czarna Tarnowska, some 15 kilometres (9 miles) west of Dębica. As a reprisal, on February 2, 1944, the Germans murdered 50 Poles by the rail track in Dębica (also see Otto Schimek).
  On the outskirts of Dębica in the village of Pustków near Blizna and several neighboring ones, the Germans established a massive military base in the fall of 1941 for weapons testing and the training of new Ukrainian collaborationist military formations including the SS Galizien Division. It is estimated that over the duration of the SS Heidelager training base operation, some 15,000 slave-labour prisoners perished there, including 7,500 Jews, 5,000 Soviet POWs, and 2,500 Poles, on top of an estimated 1,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the area during the Nazi-Soviet war. Their remains are buried in the cemetery along the road to Pustków Drips. Originally, the cemetery was located inside the ring IV (Dąbrówki). Later, the graves of soldiers were exhumed and moved. A Russian colonel killed in the fighting is buried in one of the tombs.
  Implicated in war crimes was SS-man Alois Kurz (ID 382378) who, from 1940 to 21 April 1941, served in the SS Regiment Westland, then was assigned to a construction battalion for the SS training ground and labor camp serving the SS Truppenubungsplatz Heidelager (de) in Pustków. Also implicated in war crimes was Wilhelm Schitli, commander of the "Jewish camp" at the SS training area HL-Heidelager from October 1942 to September 1943.
caption: Reconstructed camp barracks with a watchtower and the barbed-wire fence in the village of Pustków
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