Top Photo: A child who has been selected for deportation, bids farewell to his family through the wire fence of the central prison, during the "Gehsperre" action in the Lodz ghetto. Mendel Grosman. September 1942. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Moshe Zilbar

Among the Nazi concentration camp system, a few camps stood apart for their purposes of death and destruction. At the three “Operation Reinhard” camps of Treblinka, Bełżec, and Sobibór, the Nazis murdered nearly 1.7 million people between March 1942 and November 1943. At the “hybrid” concentration–death camps of Auschwitz and Majdanek, the number of those killed combined also far exceeded 1 million. Yet, one camp within the Nazi system stood out for its lack of clear categorization: Chełmno. 

Often described as an “experimental” death camp, historian Konnilyn Feig called Chełmno “the pilot extermination project—rude and crude, conferring death by three gas vans, borrowed from the Eastern Front.”1  Indeed, it was at Chełmno that the Nazis tested various methods of exterminating people en masse while they sought an alternative to the Einsatzgruppen’s mass shootings. The result was one of the most horrific spaces to ever exist, a camp where 172,000 Jews were murdered and only seven survived.2  As a result, it is scarcely documented and even less well remembered.3  But its role in the escalation of killing during the Holocaust remains irrefutable.

The Experimental Death Camp

The origins of Chełmno are best understood when paired with the timeline of World War II. As Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, neared its apex on the outskirts of Moscow, the mass killing operation ordered on its heels in June 1941 faced its own issues. Although the Einsatzgruppen, which followed behind the Wehrmacht, had rounded up and executed over 1.5 million Jews, Nazi leadership—namely Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich—worried about the mental toll shooting so many innocent men, women, and children face-to-face, day-after-day would have on the perpetrators. As historian Doris Bergen writes, “Mass shootings at closer range were labor intensive. The procedure required a lot of weapons and ammunition, and each shooter could only kill one victim at a time. … Many of the killers found the work physically and psychologically challenging, and they finished their shifts covered with blood. Massive consumption of alcohol, rampant sexual assault, and a carnival atmosphere prevailed.”4 Thus, at some point after Barbarossa began, high-ranking Nazi officials began seeking a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem,” as they coined these terms. 

Gassing people to death had already been employed by the Nazi Schutzstaffel (Protection Squad, or SS) during the so-called Aktion T4 “euthanasia” program in which the SS murdered hundreds of thousands of disabled people at special killing facilities throughout the Third Reich. There, the SS murdered victims using carbon monoxide gas in rooms disguised as showers. Hitler officially halted this program after public knowledge and protest in August 1941 (though it continued in secret). Yet, in the words of historian Patrick Montague, the “Chełmno death camp would be the first to adopt this model for the ‘assembly line’ extermination of Jews in the Wartheland.”5  As an experiment in switching from killing Jews by mobile killing squads with bullets to killing them with gas in static locations, Chełmno was, to quote Feig, “not a camp in the true sense—the Germans had no intention of accommodating the prisoners for any length of time.”6  Hence, the camp itself was rudimentary, consisting of an old manor house, granary, two wooden huts, and an open field. When the SS fenced this space off, it covered no more than two hectares.7 

The Gas Vans

Killing began on December 8, 1941, when local Jews (soon followed by Jews from the large ghetto in Łódź) were rounded up and sent by truck to the Chełmno facility. There, an SS man told the new arrivals they were being sent eastward to work and that they needed to take baths and be disinfected. From there, they undressed inside one of the buildings before walking down a corridor leading to a large van waiting outside.8  The vans had been specially modified, however, so that the engine exhaust filled the enclosed and now sealed-off cargo section of the van, where the victims sat. The Nazis used three gas vans, which they called Sonderwagen (special cars), each capable of holding between 80 and 100 people.9

Gassing Van used to liquidate Jews at the Kulmhof (Chelmno) extermination camp and near Konitz. Archives of the Polish Ministry of Justice

This was not the first time the Nazis had used converted vehicles to murder people. In January 1940, the SS utilized a gas van lined with metal sheets and a peephole to the cab to murder patients of mental homes in areas of occupied Poland, including Poznań and Kościan. The killers forced patients into the back of a van or sealed trailer with an advertisement on the side for Kaiser’s Kaffe Geschäft (Kaiser’s Coffee Company). As the van drove from the mental hospital to nearby forests, carbon monoxide canisters or an altered exhaust pipe released gas into the sealed cabin, asphyxiating all those inside. The bodies were then removed once the van reached its destination in the woods. The numbers of those killed in this manner is unclear, though at Kościan alone, scholars estimate the number at over 3,000.10

At Chełmno, the first van probably used bottled carbon monoxide and was likely the same Kaiser’s Kaffe van. However, by early 1942, new vans arrived with the reconfigured exhaust pipes. The sealed cargo compartments were specially ordered from a firm in Berlin called Gaubschat, and the conversion process was as simple as boring a hole in the compartment and manufacturing a removable exhaust hose that could be fitted on top of the exhaust itself to channel deadly carbon monoxide into the cargo bay where people were sealed inside. Records also show that the men who altered the vans installed another pipe that prevented those locked inside from interfering with the apparatus.11  

Szlamek Bajler (also known as Jacob Grojanowski) was a Polish Jew who escaped from working as a gravedigger in the forests of Chełmno and made it to the Warsaw Ghetto. Bajler recorded what he witnessed in a document buried in the Oyneg Shabes Archive, where he described the van: “It looked like a normal large lorry, in grey paint, with two hermetically closed rear doors. The inner walls were of steel metal. There weren’t any seats. The floor was covered by a wooden grating, as in public baths, with straw mats on top … the gas generator was in the cab, where the same driver sat all the time.”12

Children from the Marysin colony who were rounded-up during the "Gehsperre" action in the Lodz ghetto, march in a long column towards a deportation assembly point. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Instytut Pamieci Narodowej

Though the SS believed the entire killing procedure would last 15 minutes, in reality, according to Montague, “the gassing procedure practiced in Chełmno was more horrific, if such is possible, than one might imagine. Death did not come quickly. The victims were loaded into the van, the doors locked, and the engine started. After some minutes, as the screaming and knocking on the sides of the van diminished, the victims were driven off to the pits in the forest for burial.”13  Local Poles living near the camp confirmed this killing procedure, including one who saw a broken-down gas van on the side of the road as he rode his bike. “As he passed by, he heard screams coming from inside. The van was started. Up and drove past him only to stop once more. As he pedaled by the van a second time, he again heard screams.”14 

In fact, to better conceal their activities, the SS later adjusted the killing process so the vans idled near the manor house in the camp itself to ensure most had died before the van left on its journey to the mass grave beyond the camp’s fences. A local Pole named Józef Budynek actually noticed a gas van that had stopped on the side of the road during this later process, and he witnessed two bodies fall out and be thrown back inside before the door was shut again.15     

By mid-1942, the bodies buried in the forest grave near Chełmno had saturated the nearby area with a horrible odor. To address this, the SS brought in ovens and ordered Jewish prisoners to unearth and burn the bodies.16  The Germans did the same at other death camps, especially at Treblinka, where they initially buried bodies before the smell became so noticeable to nearby Poles that the SS also switched to burning.17  In fact, maintaining a small squadron of Jewish prisoners, often called Sonderkommando, became a fixture at Treblinka and the other two Reinhard camps. The Sonderkommandos’ only right to exist at these camps was to perform the brutal tasks associated with mass murder, and their work in the final days of their lives was as horrifying as it was heartbreaking. Bajler, for instance, wrote, “I remained lonely as a piece of stone. Out of my entire family, which comprised sixty people, I am the only one who survived.”18  Bajler later escaped by jumping out of a window of a bus on the way to the forest one morning, sparing his own life for a few months before he was later murdered at Bełżec.

Jews board a passenger train during a deportation action in the Lodz ghetto. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Robert Abrams

Yet, other facets of Chełmno did not appear at the Reinhard camps that followed. Following the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, the SS built three death camps with larger, nonmobile gas chambers at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. The switch away from mobile killing in vans was likely a result of simple logistical problems that arose at Chełmno, including the breakdown of the vans, the maintenance required on the vehicles (which alerted local Poles to the vans’ functionality in some cases), and the limited capacity of the sealed compartment compared to the bigger gas chambers that could be built at a death camp. 

Therefore, partly because the Reinhard camps became operational while the killing of targeted groups at Chełmno was slowing down, and partly because their killing capacities (and later that of Auschwitz) could handle all the Third Reich’s future “murder needs,” the SS decided to end the killing at Chełmno in September 1942. In their eyes, they had accomplished the mission of the camp, which, as spelled out by SS officer Rolf-Heinz Höppner, was “to finish off those of the Jews who are not employable by means of some quick-working device.” In other words, these “useless eaters” needed to be exterminated in a way “that would be more pleasant than to let them starve to death.”19 

Legacy of Mass Murder

Aside from being an experimental death camp that used death vans as the primary means to murder Jews, Chełmno also was unique in that it was “reactivated” for a few months in the middle of 1944 to murder nearly 25,000 Jews who were left in the Łódź Ghetto. A group of Jewish prisoners were then tasked with further clearing the site, though the group of 48 men revolted on January 17, 1945, the date on which they were supposed to be shot, and several escaped this fate. 20 

In 1962, 12 former SS men, including a driver of one of the vans, were brought to trial in Germany. Three were acquitted, three were given light sentences (of 13 months and two weeks), and six receive sentences from between 3-and-a-half years to 15 years in prison for their complicity in mass murder. The number of others who facilitated the killing spree at Chełmno but escaped justice is likely far larger. In 1964, the Polish government erected a monument on the site and in 1990 a museum was also added.21 The site is visited by tourists, scholars, and students regularly today.

Chełmno memorial.  Lestat (Jan Mehlich), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

However, Chełmno remains somewhat of an enigma. Given the horrific method of mass murder there, the large number of Jews killed, and the relatively few survivors, the camp has become synonymous with Nazi brutality. More than that, however, the camp’s role as an experimental death camp at the exact moment when the Nazis were looking for a more “efficient” killing method in switching away from mass shooting, make it crucial in understanding the development of the sequence of “final solutions” that made up the Holocaust. From a purely functionalist perspective, therefore, Chełmno serves as the bridge between the “Holocaust by bullets” and the gas chambers at places like Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and even Auschwitz. 

Those who experienced the hell of Chełmno, however, leave us the darker legacy of the camp as it truly was. In a written account that was later buried in a milk can under the Warsaw Ghetto, Bajler wrote of encountering a rabbi soon after escaping Chełmno. His words are eternally haunting: “He looked at me as if I was mad. I told him: ‘Rabbi, don’t think I am crazed and have lost my reason. I am a Jew from the nether world. They are killing the whole nation, Israel. I myself have buried a whole town of Jews, my parents, brothers and the entire family.”22  

• 1

  Konnilyn G. Feig, Hitler’s Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1981), 30.

• 2

  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Chełmno,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, accessed June 27, 2025, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/Chełmno.

• 3

  Patrick Montague, Chełmno and the Holocaust: The History of Hitler’s First Death Camp (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 2.

• 4

  Doris L. Bergen, War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, 4th ed, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2025), 274.

• 5

  Montague, 13. 

• 6

  Feig, 268.

• 7

  Feig, 268.

• 8

  Feig, 269.

• 9

  Feig, 270. 

• 10

  Artur Hojan and Chris Webb, “Koscian – Euthanasia in the Warthegau,” Holocaust Historical Society, 2013, https://www.holocausthistoricalsociety.org.uk/contents/euthanasia/koscian.html. 

• 11

  Montague, 200-203.

• 12

  “Escapee from Chełmno Documents Atrocities,” Jewish Virtual Library, accessed June 27, 2025, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/escapee-from-Chełmno-documents-atrocities.

• 13

  Montague, 205.

• 14

  Montague, 205-206.

• 15

  Montague, 206. 

• 16

  Bergen, 281.

• 17

  Jacob Flaws, Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024).

• 18

  Montague, 206-208.

• 19

  Montague, 37.

• 20

  “Chełmno Concentration Camp: History & Overview,” Jewish Virtual Library, accessed June 27, 2025, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/history-and-overview-of-Chełmno.

• 21

  Montague, 179-180.

• 22

  “Escapee from Chełmno Documents Atrocities.”