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74 years since the beginning of end of Warsaw Concentration Camp

PR dla Zagranicy
Victoria Bieniek 27.07.2018 13:15
Poland on Friday marks the 74th anniversary of the start of the liquidation of the German Nazi Warsaw Concentration Camp.
Warsaw Concentration Camp in 1944. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)Warsaw Concentration Camp in 1944. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

The camp was set up initially to house German criminals, and later for Jews from Poland and elsewhere in Europe, after the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Some 20,000 people died in the camp, according to official figures from the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, as a result of illness, exhaustion and executions.

The Nazis started evacuating people from the camp when Soviet troops drew close to Warsaw in July 1944.

Camp officials offered horse cart rides to anyone who said they would be unable to walk during their evacuation, but shot anyone who took up the offer, as well as all of the camp hospital's patients, some 400 people in total.

The remaining prisoners had to walk with no food or drink – about 2,000 people did not survive the journey – before being loaded onto wagons and taken to Germany.

The camp was liberated on August 5, 1944, during the Warsaw Uprising, by soldiers of Poland's underground Home Army, rescuing nearly 350 Jews, including 24 women.

After WWII, the camp was turned into a prison by the NKVD – a forerunner of the Soviet Union's secret police organisation the KGB – and was later used to hold political prisoners.

It was shut down in the late 1950s and the building was taken down.

The site of the former concentration camp is now a residential area and home to the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. (vb/pk)

Source: IAR

tags: WWII
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