Chełmno and the Holocaust: The History of Hitler's First Death Camp

Foreword

Foreword The small Polish village of Chelmno was the site of the first Nazi death camp, which unlike the larger and better known death camps that followed—Belżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek—used mobile gas vans rather than stationary gas chambers. What has been known about the Chelmno camp until now in mainstream Western and Israeli Holocaust scholarship stems mostly from the investigation and trial of 12 defendants in Bonn in 1962–63. Invaluable as that investigation and trial were as a source of historical knowledge by virtue of the numerous judicial interrogations and interviews that it produced and preserved, its main purpose was to provide evidence and reach judgment concerning the actions of specific defendants, not to write a comprehensive history of the camp. But for historians without knowledge of the Polish language or access to Polish archives at the height of the Cold War, the trial records were the best source with which they had to work. What we now know, thanks to the meticulous and exhaustive research conducted by Patrick Montague, is that great quantities of vital evidence concerning ChelmnowerealsostoredinPolisharchivesbuthadneverbeensufficiently accessed, examined and incorporated into Holocaust scholarship. The full incorporation of this vital evidence from Polish archives into our historical knowledge of the Chelmno death camp is one of the major achievements of Patrick Montague’s book. Equally important, Patrick Montague has written a book that allows the reader to hear the multiple voices of witnesses who experienced the camp in one way or another. In addition to the chilling testimonies of perpetrators taken for postwar trials, the reader encounters the vivid accounts of others: Heinz May, the German forester who supervised the land that became the site of the death camp’s mass graves and crematoria; various Polish villagers, as well as Henryk Mania and Henryk Maliczak, Polish prisoners of the Germans who temporarily ascended to a position of privileged collaborators at Chelmno before descending to the position of victim prisoners at Mauthausen; and above all the harrowing accounts of four escapees, Szlama Winer, Mordechai Żurawski, Michal Podchlebnik and Szymon Srebrnik—the latter two now known to those who have seen Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah. Historical scholarship is a collective endeavor that builds on past achievements and grows as each historian adds his or her own contribution Foreword xv to the pool of knowledge. Thanks to Patrick Montague, what we now know about the Chelmno death camp is significantly greater than before. Christopher R. Browning Frank Porter Graham Professor of History University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Map 1. Reichsgau Wartheland Map 2. Chelmno and Environs Map 3. Chelmno Village and Mansion Grounds Map 4. Forest Camp This page intentionally left blank ...