Скачать или смотреть Chełmno: The Camp That Pioneered Gas Vans Before Auschwitz

In December 1939, the small Polish town of Chełmno fell under Nazi occupation. Its isolation, forests, and river access made it strategically ideal for a secretive experiment. Under SS officer Herbert Lange, Chełmno became the first site of systematic, mechanized mass murder in occupied Europe. What began as logistical surveys—mapping forests, testing transport routes, and requisitioning buildings—quickly evolved into something far darker.
By 1940, forced laborers—Jews, Roma, and Soviet POWs—were used to prepare the grounds and, in many cases, became the first test subjects of killing methods. Trucks were converted into mobile gas chambers, their exhaust systems redirected into sealed compartments. Victims, deceived with promises of resettlement, were loaded inside. Timed like experiments, their deaths were measured in minutes.
Chełmno pioneered the use of gas vans not only as a killing tool but as a bureaucratic system: efficient, mobile, and meticulously documented. Each convoy, each death, was logged as data, stripped of humanity. This cold innovation would become the prototype for Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the machinery of the Final Solution.
Chełmno’s forests witnessed the birth of industrialized genocide—a place where geography, technology, and ideology converged to transform mass murder into a process, and human lives into numbers.