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Chelmno Essay

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Long Pham
Mrs. Burnett
U.S. History II block 8
27 January 2010
Chelmno
“A large baseball stadium holds about 55,000 people. If everyone in that stadium were murdered, and if the stadium were filled up again five more times and all of those people were also murdered, what would still be less than the number of Jews killed at Chelmno alone.” (Feldman 220) Chelmno is the first extermination camp and the leading camp in the in-vans asphyxiation killing method that killed hundreds thousands of people in the Holocaust during World War II. Learning and understanding the holocaust, we would be able to know the brutality and inhumanity of the Nazi and to let it never happen again.
Chelmno is a small village in the West Central German – …show more content…

The SS and police of the Special Detachment were then transferred to Yugoslavia to engage in anti-Partisan operations; the Jewish forced laborers were shot. (1941 - 1945 Timeline)
February 14, 1940, leaders of the Nazis called for reopening the killing center at Chelmno. The SS and police previously attending in the operation were assembled. The Germans then constructed two reception barracks and two open air ovens. On June 23, 1944, the killing process is resumed with the deportations of Jews from the Lodz ghetto. Innocent people were killed either by shooting or asphyxiation. On July 14, 1944, transportations of Jews to Chelmno are halted and changed to Auschwitz camp instead. In less than a month from June to July 1944, the SS and police killed more than 7,000 Jews at Chelmno. (1941 - 1945 Timeline) On January 17, 1945 the SS and police ordered Jewish forced laborers to start cleaning all traces at Chelmno: “they exhume and cremate the corpses from the last of the mass graves at Chelmno and then kill half of them” (1941 - 1945 Timeline). Chelmno is abandoned. In total, about 340,000 people were killed in Chelmno, including 5,000 Gypsies, about 100,000 Jews and thousands of others. (Feldman 219) The Holocaust during World War II executed about six million Jews in Europe.

Work cited
Bryers, Ann. The Holocaust Camps. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow, 1998. Print.
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