Warsaw concentration camp
The Warsaw concentration camp (; see other names) was a German concentration camp created on the order of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, on the base of the now nonexistent Gęsiówka prison in what is today the Warsaw neighbourhood of Muranów. It operated from July 1943 to August 1944. The "Encyclopedia on Camps and Ghettos" says that a total of 8,000 to 9,000 inmates were held there. Bogusław Kopka estimates that at least 7,250 of the camp's prisoners, all but 300 of whom were Jews from various European countries who were  used as forced labour to clean the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto and to find and sort whatever precious items were still left on its territory, with the ultimate goal of creating a park in the former ghetto's area. The camp and adjacent ruins were also used by the German administration as a place of execution, where Polish political prisoners, Jews caught on the "Aryan side", and persons rounded up on Warsaw streets were killed. About 4,000 to 5,000 prisoners died during the camp's existence, while the total number of deaths attributable to the camp's activity is  estimated at 20,000. The camp, which played a minor role in the Holocaust and thus seldom appears in mainstream historiography, 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 which operated a giant gas chamber inside a tunnel near Warszawa Zachodnia railroad station and that 200,000 mainly non-Jewish Poles were gassed there. After the Nazis were  expelled from Warsaw by the Red Army, 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. Name. During the first nine months, the Warsaw concentration camp functioned in its own right. At this time it carried the official name of Waffen-SS Konzentrationslager Warschau (often referred to as KL Warschau for short in Nazi documents and in Polish scholarship, or, in most contemporary German-language works, KZ Warschau). In May 1944, the KL Warschau became  a branch of Majdanek concentration camp, so the camp's name changed to Waffen-SS Konzentrationslager Lublin – Arbeitslager Warschau (Waffen-SS Concentration Camp Lublin - Labour Camp Warsaw). It was also sometimes referred to in German sources as Arbeitslager Warschau. In Polish sources, the name Gęsiówka (IPA: ) often appears as a name for the camp. This was due to the fact that the camp occupied the complex of (now non-existent), which were relatively well preserved after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The caserns, at the corner of then-existing Gęsia and Zamenhof streets, were a military prison before World War II , and afterwards accommodated the central prison for the Jewish district, the , as well as the "Judenrat." The prison complex came to be colloquially known as "Gęsiówka" (named for Gęsia street), which nickname transferred to KL Warschau as well. Supporters of the Trzcińska's theory tend to prefer the German name, which Aleksandra Ubertowska says has to do with the name being perceived as more serious. After World War II, the camp, although with changed purposes, was still run by Communist authorities under other names (see the relevant section for details). Creation. According to Bogusław Kopka, the first person behind the  idea of creating a concentration camp in Warsaw was Heinrich Himmler, head of the "Schutzstaffel" (SS), who mentioned it in a letter dated 9 October 1942. The letter informed the local posts of SS and Wehrmacht in the General Government that all Jewish craftsmen who so far had managed to avoid deportation to the extermination camps were to be "collected in the nearest concentration camps on the spot, i.e. in Warsaw and Lublin." These new camps were also intended to host Jewish labourers, who were supposed to be working for the weapons factories operating on-site; these, in their turn , were planned to be successively moved to concentration camps near Lublin, and then farther east. Himmler assumed that concentrating all Jewish labour in the camps controlled by the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office (SS-WVHA) would be the basis for the creation of an SS economic empire in the East. His ideas, however, were met with resistance from the military, the police and civil administration of the General Government, as well as from the Reich Ministry of Armaments and War Production and from German companies using Jewish slave labour. Himmler was thus unable to bring his idea to fruition , so the concentration camp in Warsaw did not appear, nor did all factories using Jewish labour become controlled by SS. As plans to demolish the Warsaw Ghetto appeared, Himmler soon returned to the idea of creating a concentration camp in Warsaw. In a letter dated 16 February 1943, addressed to SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl, head of SS-WVHA, Himmler ordered creating a concentration camp in the "Jewish district" and directed that all German-owned private enterprises operating in the Ghetto be relocated there. The camp, together with its enterprises and inhabitants, was planned to be "transported as quickly as possible  to Lublin and nearby areas". On the same day, Himmler also wrote a letter to SS- Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, Higher SS and police leader for the General Government, which demanded that the buildings of the deserted ghetto after the concentration camp was transported to Lublin be demolished. The task of demolition, it was suggested, was to be handed over to local Jews. The idea's implementation was marred with numerous difficulties, so when the Germans decided to accelerate the deportations on 19 April, they met strong resistance from the Jews, who began the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The concentration camp, again , failed to materialise, and only part of the enterprises, together with some of the Jews, were evacuated to the concentration camps in Majdanek, Trawniki, and Poniatowa. The idea of the camp was revived once again after the failure of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop, who led the efforts aimed at quashing the insurgency, proposed on 16 May 1943, the day the uprising came to the end, to convert the Pawiak prison, used previously by the SD and the "Sicherheitspolizei" (Security Police), to a concentration camp. Himmler agreed to the proposal and issued the order, which read: Eventually , Pawiak's status as a prison did not change, but the concentration camp was erected on the nearby Gęsia street, which was also located inside the Ghetto walls, partially because it was among the only buildings left intact in the area previously occupied by the Ghetto. In addition to that, Bogusław Kopka argues that this position was chosen due to the fact that it was in a deserted area with restricted access to civilians. Another advantage was the camp's proximity to the warehouses at "Umschlagplatz" as well as German militarised units: an SS outpost on street, a strong German  army command at street and the staff of the Pawiak prison, all of whom could be quickly dispatched in case of mutiny. On 19 July 1943, the first 300 prisoners, who were German and predominantly criminals, were transported from Buchenwald concentration camp. This date is considered to be the day when KL Warschau started operation. Description. Location and facilities. The Warsaw concentration camp was created inside a closed and deserted zone of the former ghetto, which was surrounded by walls regularly patrolled by German guards and the police. Gęsiówka, a former military prison, and spaces along Gęsia Sstreet were adapted  for the purposes of the camp. Since none of the buildings in KL Warschauhave survivee, the camp's general appearance and facilities can only be deduced from witness testimony, aerial photography, and photos made during exhumations and after the camp's liberation. According to the evidence, KL Warschau was divided into two parts. The first, called "Lager I" and also known as "the old camp", was located between what is now and , and comprised Gęsiówka proper (the camp's easternmost part) and wooden barracks erected during the initial months of the camp's operation. The camp's second part, between  Smocza and Okopowa Streets, called "Lager II" or "the new camp", contained brick barracks. In total, 21 barracks were built, each around long with a capacity of 600 inmates. The camp was surrounded by high walls guarded by watchtowers. The main entrance was located at what was then Gęsia Street 24. The former military prison and "Judenrat" seat, at what is today 17a, served as a crematorium, where bodies of dead inmates and executed civilians from outside the camp were incinerated. The Germans also started building two other cremation sites, but did not manage to open them before they evacuated  the camp; even the one that existed was not operated in the camp's final days. In addition, one of Gęsiówka's buildings was used as a torture room, while a prison yard came to be an SS officers mess. A bathhouse was built in late 1943 and early 1944, and bunkers were also available on-site. By February 1944 the camp's infrastructure was in an advanced stage of completion, with 90% of "Lager I" finished and 75% of "Lager II", but the whole process was only completed in June 1944 because the inmates had had to undergo quarantine  the previous month. Personnel. About 380 SS officers were maintaining the concentration camp, approximately the size of a company. The original SS unit, was gathered from various other camps, including the Trawniki concentration camp and the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Following the attachment to Majdanek in May 1944, they were replaced with SS personnel from Lublin, and the guard was reduced to 259 people. The leadership positions were occupied by high- and middle-ranking SS members who were pre-war Third Reich citizens ("Reichsdeutsche"), while the rank-and-file were usually recruited among the "Volksdeutsche", mainly from Southeast Europe but also  from other areas. As Bogusław Kopka shows, in comparison with other concentration camps, KL Warschau had a less sophisticated internal structure. For example, the camp lacked the political department ("Politische Abteilung"), and some other positions remained unoccupied. Among the 208 identified members of the camp's administration, SS- Karl Leuckel was the director of the administrative department, SS-Oberscharführer was the "Rapportführer" and the person responsible for prisoner work management, while SS- and SS- were camp doctors. The camp's staff was subordinate to SS-WVHA, but it also was obliged to cooperate closely with the SS and police leader  for the Warsaw District due to an agreement reached between the two SS institutions. The coordination was particularly strong during the pacification that happened at the turn of 1943/44, which was targeted at the Polish population of the capital. There were three concentration camp commandants () in the course of the camp's history: As for the "Schutzhaftlagerführer", who was simultaneously the camp director and the chief of the guards, SS-Obersturmführer served in this role from KL Warschau's creation until his arrest in late April 1944, while SS-Unterscharführer occupied the position for the remainder of the camp's  existence. The Warsaw concentration camp usually featured SS officers who were deemed to be low-value workers. The first two commandants exhibited incompetence and little interest in the functioning of the camp. Many of the "Volksdeutsche" were hardly able to speak German, while some were illiterate. Corruption was rampant and extended up to the apex of the camp's hierarchy, which Andreas Mix attributes to the fact that like the senior SS officers, the "kapos" were Germans, therefore, the SS officers frequently made illicit agreements with them and delegated much more power to the "kapos" than was usual for the  concentration camps. The irregularities were so numerous that SS authorities eventually intervened, presumably due to an escape of a "Reichsdeutsche" prisoner. In late April 1944, Commandant Nikolaus Herbet, "Schutzhaftlagerführer" Wilhelm Härtel as well as "Lagerälteste" (camp supervisor) , were all arrested. The whole command of the camp was dissolved and almost all of its members were relieved of duty. By early May, the guards who were until then performing their duties in Warsaw were transported to Sachsenhausen and were replaced by personnel delegated from Majdanek. This scandal coincided with the degradation of the status of KL Warschau to a subcamp of  Majdanek on 1 May 1944, and was thus renamed "Lublin concentration camp – Warsaw labour camp". According to some sources, it came due to deportations of prisoners to other camps as well as the approach of the Soviet army to Warsaw. Bogusław Kopka and Andreas Mix write, however, that it was the corruption scandal that was the causative agent for the change in status, and that the camp's reorganisation failed to get rid of the corruption issues. Prisoners. General information. The trait that distinguished the Warsaw concentration camp from the other ones was that, with the exception of the initial  transport of 300 Germans, the inmates were uniformly Jewish. Additionally, KL Warschau only accepted prisoners who were previously in concentration camps under the jurisdiction of SS-WVHA; in contrast, it did not accept those prisoners who were to serve in concentration camps due to a decision of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), local Security Police outposts, or new prisoners. These were predominantly young males (under 40 years old), whom the Germans deemed to be suitable for demanding physical work. Only in the last days of the camp's existence was a group of Jewish women from the nearby Pawiak  prison delivered to KL Warschau. The Nazis were trying to transport Jews from various European countries and specifically sought to exclude Polish-speaking Jews, hoping that the lack of knowledge of Polish would prevent them from communicating with the residents of Warsaw. Therefore, few Polish Jews were detained at the Warsaw concentration camp. The first inmates, who previously were German prisoners in the Buchenwald concentration camp, arrived on 19 July 1943. Among these 300 people, 224 were professional criminals (, or for short), 41 were deemed political prisoners, and 35 were considered "asocial". They became prisoner functionaries, such as "kapos" and  Blockältester (block supervisors). Walter Wawrzyniak got hold of the chief position of camp supervisor ("Lagerälteste"). The German "kapo" prisoners, in particular those imprisoned as criminals, intimidated fellow Jewish inmates and acted towards them with cruelty, seeing them as expendable; though, as Gabriel Finder argues, this was not in most cases due to inherent anti-Semitism but rather due to the fact such violence granted them survival. Unlike in most other Nazi camps, Jewish "kapos" were absent from the camp and there is little evidence an internal hierarchy among Jewish prisoners has ever developed. The first transport of Jewish prisoners arrived  from Auschwitz-Birkenau on 31 August 1943, and three subsequent ones were made up to 27 November the same year, bringing 3,683 Jews in total, according to official data. The labourers represented Jews from various countries – the most numerous were Greek Salonican Jews, but some Austrian, Belgian, French, Dutch, German and even 50 Polish representatives of that religion (who only came because Germans had to meet 1,000 people transport quota) arrived to Warsaw as well. The ethnic composition changed substantially in spring 1944, when several trains from Auschwitz delivered 3,000 Hungarian Jews (most of whom originally were deported from ghettoes  in Hungarian-occupied Carpathian Ruthenia, established in the cities of Mukachevo, Uzhhorod, Khust and Tiachiv) who became the majority in the Warsaw concentration camp in the last months of its existence. The exact number of prisoners who went through KL Warschau remains difficult to ascertain, as witness and expert estimates vary from 1,500 to 40,000. As Gabriel N. Finder noted, the Warsaw concentration camp played a minor role in the Holocaust in comparison to other camps and is thus often absent from standard narratives of the period. In his entry in the "Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos," he suggested that  some 8,000–9,000 people were incarcerated there. Bogusław Kopka says in his monograph that at least 7,250 inmates went through the Warsaw concentration camp, including 300 German prisoner functionaries, about 3,700 Jews who arrived in 1943 and 3,000 Jews who came in 1944 from Auschwitz, in addition to 50 highly skilled Jews sent to the camp by the "Ostbahn" in 1943 and 200 Jews moved from the Pawiak prison. Successful escapes were rare and Jews who were caught in the attempt were hanged in front of the assembled prisoner population. Tasks. Prisoners were tasked with constructing the concentration camp they were  residing in, demolishing the remaining ruins of the ghetto, clearing of rubble and with flattening the terrain at above the previous ground level, so as to convert the former ghetto into a park as Himmler envisaged in his order from 11 June 1943. While doing that, the workers were also ordered to salvage building materials (mainly scrap metal and bricks) for the German war effort. of buildings were demolished, with some 8,105 tonnes of metal (of which about 7,300 tonnes of ferrous scrap metals and 805 tonnes of non-ferrous metals) and 34 million bricks salvaged. Tatiana Berenstein and Adam  Rutkowski estimate the value of the materials at 220 million pre-war złotys (i.e. slightly above US$800 million in 2021 dollars), however, Andreas Mix counters that while the camp's construction cost Germans 150 million Reichsmark, the materials were only worth 5 million Reichsmark. In addition to that, a separate search team was formed to find whatever precious items (such as money or jewellery) were left in the ruins; yet another team was working on the "Umschlagplatz" near street, where salvaged items were sorted and stored in warehouses. A couple of thousand Polish civilians, who were paid, worked in  the area, as did dozens of German technicians. At one period, these people, who usually handled more sophisticated tasks, such as the maintenance of demolition machines and handling explosives, outnumbered the inmates. German constructions firms, including Berlinisches Baugeschäft (Berlin), Willy Keymer (Warsaw), Merckle (Ostrów Wielkopolski), and Ostdeutscher Tiefbau (Naumburg), operated there on contract and benefitted from slave labour provided by the prisoners. The Ostbahn railway company assisted them. Conditions. The conditions in KL Warschau were extremely harsh. Prisoners' food rationing was meagre and hunger was common among the inmates, which was exacerbated by lack of food parcels, as these were  not delivered to the camp. The shortages, however, were somewhat alleviated by the presence of Polish workers contracted to remove the ruins of the ghetto, as this was an opportunity for the inmates to clandestinely buy food for whatever valuables they could find in the ruins, and, in later days, when such items became scarce, for gold fillings extracted from their teeth. The Jews were subjected to extermination through labour. The demolition and salvage work were hard and perilous labor, carried out at a brisk pace with no regard to loss of life of the prisoners, so fatal workplace incidents  were commonplace. The guards were violent towards the Jews, viewing them as enemies of the state. Sanitation was sorely lacking to the extent that hungry and drained prisoners were decimated by outbreaks of infectious diseases, and the lack of hygiene gave way to infestations of lice and fleas (though the situation got somewhat better by the time the leadership was changed and the camp's construction was finishing). In particular, a typhus epidemic in January and February 1944 decreased the prison population by two-thirds. The camp infirmary, according to Felician Loth, was "a parody of a sick ward", and  patients who were unable to continue work were usually killed. The guards and prisoner functionaries tortured and murdered prisoners on a whim. For these reasons, almost 75% of original prisoners have died by March 1944, reducing the camp's population to around 1,000 inmates. This prompted the Germans to supply about 3,000 Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz. Just as the Jews in other concentration camps, the inmates in KL Warschau were forced to wear and wooden clogs. The former had the Star of David badge sewn on it and a Latin letter marking the inmate's provenance. The newly arrived prisoners  had their hair cut shortly and then underwent a procedure of bathing and disinsectisation, which, before the bathhouse was built in the camp, was happening in Pawiak prison. Prisoner functionaries, however, were treated differently – they lived in a separate barrack (with the exception of the "Blockältester"), could wear civilian clothes, bear arms, and were even sometimes allowed to go outside the camp's premises. Executions. In 1943–1944, camp inmates, Polish Jews caught hiding on the "Aryan side" of Warsaw or in the ghetto's ruins, Polish political prisoners (Pawiak inmates) and Polish hostages captured during the street roundups ("łapanki") were  executed in the ruins of the former ghetto, which surrounded the camp. During KL Warschau's existence, these executions took place almost daily and in some days, dozens or even hundreds of Poles and Jews were executed there. The bodies were then burnt, first in open air pyres and later in the camp's crematorium. The ruins of the ghetto supplanted previous execution sites, which were operating in the countryside around Warsaw, such as in Kampinos Forest (the site of the Palmiry massacre). The proximity of the Pawiak prison and the isolation of the former ghetto from the rest of  the city, made them – from the German perspective – a far more suitable place for mass killings. Members of KL Warschau personnel, along with the members of other SS and "Ordnungspolizei" formations in Warsaw, were among the executioners. Furthermore, a special "death detachment", composed of the Jewish prisoners of the KL Warschau, was used to dispose the bodies of the victims. The members of the "Sonderkommando" were often murdered after completing the task, too. It is impossible to determine the exact number of victims of executions in the ruins since most of them were not identified. Historians Bogusław Kopka and Jan  Żaryn, who wrote the foreword to Kopka's work, estimate that some 20,000 people died as a result of the camp's activity, of which 10,000 were Poles. The number includes prisoner deaths as well as victims of executions in and around the camp, among whom were Polish political prisoners and Polish Jews caught hiding on the "Aryan side" of Warsaw or in the restricted zone of the former Warsaw Ghetto. The "Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos" gives a smaller estimate of 4,000-5,000 people, counting only prisoners of KL Warschau, while Vági and Kádár suggest 3,400 to 5,000 prisoners . Evacuation and liberation. In summer 1944, as the Red Army was approaching, the Germans decided to evacuate the prisons and camps in Warsaw. By the end of July, "Schutzhaftlagerführer" Heinz Villain demanded that all prisoners who would not be able to endure a march to assemble, promising the sick and exhausted that they would be transported in horse carriages. However, on 27 July, all those who appeared on the camp director's call were shot. The same day, all patients in the camp's infirmary were also killed. In total, around 400 prisoners, including at least 180 Hungarians, died due  to these actions. The evacuation of the Warsaw concentration camp started on 28 July. About 4,500 inmates were then forced to march to Kutno, away, in sweltering heat. During the march, which lasted for three days, the prisoners were not given water nor food; the guards additionally murdered everyone who was unable to proceed or who was too slow to execute orders. Those who survived were loaded in freight carriages on 2 August, where poor conditions and the guards' cruelty added to the tally of dead prisoners. A total of 3,954 prisoners eventually arrived at the Dachau concentration camp on  6 August, of which there were only 280 Jews who originally came from Greece. The "Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos" says that at least 500 inmates died during the operation, while Kopka gives a higher estimate of approximately 2,000 prisoners. Most of the prisoners were subsequently transported to Dachau's subcamps in Mühldorf, Kaufering and Allach-Karlsfeld, while a few were sent to Flossenbürg's subcamp in Leitmeritz (today's Litoměřice in the Czech Republic). The Warsaw concentration camp was still operating, however. Ninety SS personnel stayed there, as did about 400 prisoners who volunteered to stay in the camp  to demolish it. Among those were about 300 original prisoners as well as dozens of Jewish prisoners of Pawiak (38-100 people, including 24 women), who were moved to KL Warschau on 28 July. On 1 August, the Home Army (AK) started an uprising against Germans in Warsaw. In the first day of fighting, the "Kedyw" (sabotage command) for the Home Army District of Warsaw led by Lt. "Stasinek" captured Waffen-SS warehouses on Stawki street ("Umschlagplatz") and a school on nearby street, setting free around 50 KL Warschau prisoners who were working there. By that time, the Home Army  also partially controlled the area of "the new camp", located near Okopowa street. In light of these advances by AK, the concentration camp's staff and the prisoners retreated to the fortified defence positions in "the old camp". In the following few days, the patrol of the insurgent forces made several incursions into KL Warschau, with little success. Meanwhile, Cpt. "Jan", head of the asked his superior, Lt. Col. Jan Mazurkiewicz "Radosław", to storm the buildings of Gęsiówka. Control over the concentration camp's area was important from a tactical standpoint, as the Home Army could gain control over the  road leading to the Old Town via the ghetto's ruins, while also serving a humanitarian purpose of liberating the prisoners, who could be murdered. Mazurkiewicz eventually agreed, and according to the plan, scout Battalion Zośka was handed the task of capturing the concentration camp's premises. KL Warschau was attacked on 5 August at 10:00, when Ryszard Białous "Jerzy", Zośka's commander, and Wacław Micuta, who commanded one of its platoons, started the offensive. The military advantage was on the Polish side due to their prior capture and usage of a Panther tank, which destroyed the camp's watchtowers  and bunkers. The German defence eventually collapsed and SS personnel hid in the Pawiak prison walls. Battalion Zośka's losses were rather small — one person was killed in action, another died of wounds and one person was wounded in action but survived; German losses are unknown but were presumably larger. The Home Army thus liberated 348 Jews, among which 24 were women. Those released were mostly Hungarian (200-250 people) and Greek Jews, with some Czechoslovakians and Dutch Jews, who knew very little Polish. It is known that only 89 people among the liberated had been Polish citizens, and historians  have only been able to identify 73 prisoners by name. The Warsaw concentration camp was the only German concentration camp that was not liberated by main Allied troops, but by resistance fighters. The vast majority of released Jewish prisoners swiftly took part in the uprising, which Gabriel Finder attributes to an informal political group, which he says prevented the camp's inhabitants from moral deterioration. Some of these were fighting along with other soldiers, while others were helping with transport and provisioning issues, rescuing those under ruins as well as extinguishing fires. Morale among Jewish fighters was hurt by displays  of antisemitism, with several former Jewish prisoners in combat units killed by antisemitic Poles, in particular those associated with the National Armed Forces. After the defeat of the uprising, the survivors fled or hid in bunkers. There were as few as 200 Jewish survivors (former prisoners as well as Jews who were hiding on the "Aryan" side) on 17 January 1945, on which date the Red Army . Postwar. After the retreat of the German forces from Warsaw, the former Nazi camp was first operated by the Soviet NKVD for German prisoners of war, as well as for the soldiers of  the Home Army loyal to the Polish government-in-exile and other persons suspected of opposing the Soviet occupation. As in the case of the German period, the prisoners were held in poor conditions and it is probable that numerous executions were taking place in the camp. The camp was then turned over to the Ministry of Public Security (MBP) in mid-1945, when it became known as the Central Labour Camp for Warsaw's Reconstruction () and whose prisoners were used for construction and demolition works in the capital. Most of the prisoners of war were released in 1948 and 1949 , and in November 1949 the labour camp was converted to a prison. The facility, which became known under two names: Central Prison — Labour Centre in Warsaw () or Central Prison Warsaw II Gęsiówka (), did not "de facto" change its purpose, as the inmates were still producing building materials for Warsaw's reconstruction, and it still used forced labour, but instead of prisoners of war, common criminals and people accused by the of economic wrongdoings were sent there. According to Bogusław Kopka, 1,800 people died in the postwar prison; though an estimate of 1,180 victims also appears in the literature. The fact  that the former Nazi camp was taken and run by the communist authorities was the main reason why the Chief Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland ceased its investigation into its history in 1947. The prison was closed in 1956 and was demolished in 1965. No element of the Nazi camp was preserved. As of 2022, the site is occupied by a garden square, residential buildings, and the building of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Inquiries. It did not take long for the newly established Communist government in Poland to start analysing the  events that happened in the camp's history. Already in May 1945, the Warsaw Circuit Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland launched a formal inquiry into the crimes committed in the Warsaw concentration camp. The premises were inspected by prosecutors several times, which yielded rich photographic documentation of the camp's buildings. On 15-25 September 1946, a total of 2180 kg of human corpses were exhumed and analysed (the corpses were then buried again in ); however, the exhumations did not cover the whole territory of the camp. In 1947, the inquiry was halted for the first  time due to political considerations, as the former concentration camp was taken by the Ministry of Public Security, which ran a labour camp in the area. It was only in 1974 that the investigation was continued on the request of the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg, Germany; however, after two years, it was again suspended as the prosecutors deemed it impossible to retrieve more evidence in Poland. In light of the new evidence, the investigation was once again opened in 1986, only to be closed in 1996 due to  the unavailability of the perpetrators for interrogation (who either went missing or were already dead). A parallel inquiry by German federal officials was also closed. The topic of the camp returned to prominence in early 2000s, not least due to the July 2001 Sejm resolution commemorating the victims of the concentration camp, so the Regional Prosecutor's Office in Warsaw decided to open the Warsaw concentration camp case once again in 2002. The case was first managed by the Institute of National Remembrance's District Commission in Warsaw, then it was transferred to Łódź, but was promptly returned to the  capital. On 23 January 2017, the case was closed for the fourth time. Criminal responsibility of perpetrators. Following Allied victory in World War II, some people related to the Warsaw concentration camp's history were convicted in criminal or military courts. In addition to that, Theodor Szehinskyj, a former guard who immigrated to the US in the 1950s, had his US citizenship stripped as a federal court in Pennsylvania found in July 2000 that he had lied in his initial visa application about his past in the SS Totenkopf Division, including in the Warsaw concentration camp; the decision was upheld  on appeal to the 3rd Circuit. Jürgen Stroop's trial in 1950 also included significant evidence relating to the concentration camp (Stroop was hanged in Warsaw in 1952). Most of the staff of KL Warschau, however, did not face consequences for the war crimes. In particular, the whereabouts of Nicolaus Herbet, the second commandant of the camp, as well as "Schutzhaftlagerführer" remained unknown. The IPN's prosecutors inquired about 208 people whom it identified to be staff members of the concentration camp in 2014, but the Ludwigsburg office only sent information about a fraction of them because of staffing issues  related to processing the request of this breadth. In January 2017, IPN's prosecutors speculated that some SS officers involved in KL Warschau might be still alive, but decided to discontinue investigation due to the fact the prosecutors had no confirmation of this. Discredited extermination camp story. Hypothesis. Despite the availability of reliable information about the Warsaw concentration camp, in the 1980s a since-discredited legend or conspiracy theory developed concerning the camp. Maria Trzcińska, a Polish judge who served in 1974–1996 as a member of the Chief Commission for Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes in Poland (after 1991, named Chief  Commission for Investigation of Crimes against the Polish Nation), was assigned to investigate German documents that her counterparts in Ludwigsburg had found. In mid-1988, testimony began to emerge, suggesting that the concentration camp was also located near Warszawa Zachodnia railway station, more than away from Gęsia Street, and included gas chambers; witnesses said that other camps also existed in the vicinity of the camp's generally recognised area. The earliest mention of the gas chambers appeared in the early 1970s in an issue of "Perspektywy," a Polish weekly political magazine. Thereafter Trzcińska advocated commemoration of the concentration camp's victims , based on the testimony from the late 1980s. In 2002 Trzcińska published a book, "Obóz zagłady w centrum Warszawy. Konzentrationslager Warschau" ("The Extermination Camp in the Centre of Warsaw: Konzentrazionslager Warschau"). According to Jan Żaryn, when the idea of a monument to the victims of the Warsaw concentration camp approached fruition, the interested parties were unable to agree on inscriptions to be placed on it, so Trzcińska requested that the Institute of National Remembrance ("IPN") verify which version was correct. The Institute's conclusions, published in a book by Bogusław Kopka, however, diverged so strongly from hers that she retracted  her section of the book and independently published her own conclusions, reiterating the points she had made five years before. These can be summarised as follows: Refutation. The contentions, in addition to not being confirmed by Bogusław Kopka, have also been refuted by the IPN in a later analysis by . The findings were also cast in doubt by other historians, including Władysław Bartoszewski, Tomasz Szarota, Andreas Mix and Jan Żaryn. In particular, they say that: In 2010, the Institute of National Remembrance commissioned a report from historian and aerial-photography expert , which was submitted in December 2016 (it is not  yet published as of January 2022). The report confirmed that the only place KL Warschau existed was on Gęsia street and that no camp infrastructure existed in the areas said to have contained other subcamps. Walkowski also noted that the tunnels were not closed and that vehicles could drive through them, while the two ventilation shafts and a ventilator engine that were supposedly used to pump Zyklon B were only built in the 1970s. It was also shown that during the German occupation, access to the forest near Koło was not restricted for civilians, the barracks were already built in  the 1930s and were used by civilians, while the purported "death wall" only emerged in 1972. Reactions. According to Christian Davies, the discredited story that the Germans built a gas chamber to kill non-Jews, together with the fact of some 200,000 Polish fatalities in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising (for a total of 400,000 non-Jewish deaths in Warsaw, which is the usual estimate of the number of Jews imprisoned in Warsaw), has been used by the story's advocates to seek parity between Jewish and non-Jewish victimhood that would make the Holocaust seem less unique, a notion that  Davies dubbed the "Polocaust". He also pointed to Law and Justice party (PiS) officials' endorsement for , who emerged as one of the main proponents of the extermination camp hypothesis after Trzcińska died in 2011, and IPN's lack of reaction when the commemorative plaque citing Trzcińska's data was unveiled in 2017. "Nasz Dziennik," a right-wing to far-right Catholic newspaper, and affiliated "Radio Maryja," have promoted the hypothesis as an emblem of Polish martyrdom. The media outlets have also advocated for introducing the story into school curricula and for constructing a museum of KL Warschau. In 2001, Bartoszewski  dismissed the gas chamber theory as being propagated among those "who think that too few people have died in Warsaw". Havi Dreifuss, Jan Grabowski, and Gideon Greif have related the gas-chamber story to the current Polish government's history policy and interpreted the account as a conspiracy theory (Grabowski) or fake history (Dreifuss). Walkowski, who said he was bemused by the fact that people were unhappy with his findings about fewer deaths, told reporters he had received threats. Historian Daniel Blatman, on the other hand, while seeing the hypothesis as "one of numberless stories that Holocaust deniers around the  world are posting online", warned against generalising about Polish society or the Polish government. Commemoration. Probably in the 1950s, a Tchorek plaque, which said that "in 1943-1944, Polish patriots were repeatedly shot to death and burnt by the Hitlerites in this building", was installed on a wall of the burnt-out Wołyń Caserns, specifically on the east wall, facing Zamenhof street. The plaque was lost in 1965, when Gęsiówka was demolished. Commemoration efforts were renewed in July 2001, when the Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament, adopted a resolution commemorating the victims of the concentration camp while  calling to create a monument "in remembrance of thousands of Polish inhabitants of Warsaw who were murdered in the Warsaw concentration camp as part of the plan of annihilating the Capital City of Poland, as well as murdered citizens of other nationalities: Jews, Greeks, Gypsies, Belarusians and Italian officers". In March 2004, the Warsaw city council allowed to build a commemoration site on the Alojzy Pawelek square in the southern part of Wola district, next to what Trzcińska contended were gas chambers and subcamps of KL Warschau. It became a place of informal monthly gatherings of supporters of Trzcińska's  hypothesis. Despite the fact that relevant authorities consider the monument an illegal building and do not cover it by protection afforded to other monuments due to citing false historical data, the monument still stands. The resolution that initially allowed the monument's construction was cancelled in October 2009 after consultations with the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites, a governmental body responsible for the preservation of sites of wartime persecution, and it was decided to place a new monument in the neighbourhood of Muranów, on the site of what was then Serbia prison, some away from the  walls of the actual concentration camp. That decision was opposed by supporters of Trzcińska's hypothesis, who argued that placing the monument there would suggest that only Jews were victims of the concentration camp, but the Supreme Administrative Court denied their request to invalidate the new resolution. Supporters of the extermination camp theory have created their own commemoration sites. Their efforts have resulted in the 2004 monument, a plaque on a nearby on , placed in 2009 and consecrated by Archbishop Kazimierz Nycz, and another two in 2017, one on a in the Warsaw district of Praga-Południe and its copy  in the Jasna Góra Monastery in Częstochowa; all of these are repeating Trzcińska's conjecture about 200,000 Poles murdered in the Warsaw concentration camp. An unofficial plaque was also installed in "Lasek na Kole" forest, contending that a place of execution connected with the Warsaw concentration camp existed there. Marius Gudonis and Benjamin T. Jones, in their book "History in a Post-Truth World", relate the fact such plaques appeared to the indifference to established facts and to an ideological devotion to the preferred historical narrative, which, in the case of the 2009 plaque, was further cemented by the approval  of high church authorities. As a result, the only place of commemoration of the Warsaw concentration camp in the area of KL Warschau is a plaque that was initially embedded into a wall of a building at 34 Anielewicza Street in 1994; it was moved in 2018 and is now located on the corner of Anielewicza and Okopowa Streets, which was the south-west corner of KL Warschau. The plaques, written in Polish, Hebrew and English tell about the camp's liberation by Battalion Zośka and the subsequent participation of the prisoners in the Warsaw Uprising. A plaque in remembrance  of the victims was also unveiled near the Museum of Pawiak Prison in November 2013. The camp's name appears on the 1995 German post stamp, prepared for the 50th anniversary of the liberation of prisoners from Nazi concentration camps. In 2020, a 10 PLN silver commemorative coin was issued by the National Bank of Poland, honouring the camp's victims.