Video: 'kulmhof chelmno' (8 clips)

(Monday, December 8, 1941; during the The Holocaust, part of World War II) — The first Nazi Germany’s six extermination camps was established today at Chelmno, located 31 miles north of Lodz, near the village of Chelmno nad Nerem in occupied Poland, as SS and police began mass gassing operations.

80 Jews who had arrived the previous night from Kolo, Poland, were the first to be gassed this morning. They were forced into a special mobile gas van that piped deadly engine exhaust fumes into the trucks’ hermetically sealed interior compartments and driven to a clearing in a nearby forest.

Video: 'Memory of the Camps (full film) | FRONTLINE'

The first people transported to the camp were the Jewish and Romani populations of Kolo, Dabie, Sompolno, Klodawa, Babiak, Izbica Kujawska, Bugaj, Nowiny Brdowskie and Kowale Panskie.

A total of 3,830 Jews and around 4,000 Romani would be murdered by gas before February 1942.

Five more Nazi extermination camps would open or become operational in the coming months at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau.