I5 CHELMNO/KULMHOF (PL)

By order of Gauleiter Arthur Greiser, authorities set up an extermination camp in the small village of Kulmhof am Ner in 1941. The location was chosen because of its good transport links to the Lodz ghetto (H11), which was about 70 kilometres away. The aim of the extermination camp was to kill the “people who were unfit for forced labour” from the surrounding towns and villages. The killings took place in what were known as “gas vans”. These were converted lorries into which carbon monoxide was released to suffocate the people who were trapped in the cargo compartment. In December 1941, 4,300 Roma were transferred from Lodz to Kulmhof due to an outbreak of typhus. Within two months, they had all been murdered and buried in unmarked mass graves in Chelmno Forest, alongside 150,000 Jews and thousands of Soviet prisoners of war.