Chełmno extermination camp
Chełmno killing center begins mass gassings
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The 'gas chamber' drove away after each killing: it was the sealed cargo compartment of a van whose engine exhaust had been redirected inside.
8 December 1941: the killing begins
On 8 December 1941, the SS and police began killing operations at Chełmno (Kulmhof) in German-annexed western Poland. The victims were approximately 700 Jewish men, women and children from the town of Koło — not from the Łódź ghetto — who had arrived the previous day and spent the night inside the requisitioned manor house.
They were told the manor was a transit point and they would be sent onward for labor. Instead they were forced into the sealed cargo compartments of vans, where engine exhaust killed them; the vans then carried the bodies about four kilometres to graves in the Rzuchów forest.
From mobile unit to fixed site
Chełmno's first commandant, Herbert Lange, had led a unit whose gas-van murders of institutional patients and Jews supplied both the personnel and the method. Assigned in fall 1941 to murder most of the Warthegau's Jewish population, Sonderkommando Lange stopped taking its van from community to community and established a fixed reception-and-killing site.
Three days before the first gassing, thirty Jewish men from Koło were taken to dig the first forest grave; the camp museum says they were probably killed after finishing it.
By nightfall
By nightfall on 8 December, approximately 700 Jews from Koło were dead. Further groups from the Koło area were brought to the manor and murdered over the next several days.
With the 8 December murders, Chełmno became the first stationary facility in which Nazi Germany used poison gas for the mass murder of Jews.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 4 sources 3 audit passes Date corrected
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Date corrected. The research places this at 1941-12-08.