Video: 'Chelmno Extermination Camp English Version'

(Saturday, January 20, 1945; part of The Holocaust during World War II) — Chelmno, a Nazi German extermination camp situated 31 miles from Lodz near the Polish village of Chelmno nad Nerem, was liberated today by the Soviets, two days after operations had ceased.

At least 152,000 people were murdered at the camp since operations began on December 8, 1941, making it the fifth deadliest extermination camp after Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibór. However, during the Chelmno trials of 1962–65, West German prosecutors, citing Nazi records, laid charges based on a minimum of 180,000 victims.

Early postwar Polish estimates suggested much higher figures, with totals reaching up to 340,000 men, women, and children. The Kulmhof Museum of Martyrdom estimates the number of victims to be around 200,000.

The vast majority were Jews from west-central Poland, along with Romani people from the region and foreign Jews from Hungary, Bohemia and Moravia, Germany, Luxembourg, and Austria, transported to Chelmno via the Lódz Ghetto.

Additionally, Soviet prisoners of war were among the victims. These individuals were murdered using gas vans.

Chelmno was a site of early experimentation in the development of the Nazi extermination program.