The Ghetto of Lodz in Holocaust Propaganda

1. The Ghetto of Lodz

After the Warsaw Ghetto, the ghetto of Lodz (German name Litzmannstadt) was the second-largest Jewish ghetto in Poland during the Second World War. It was established in February 1940 and had 140,000 occupants by the end of that year. Because of the enormous number of everyday objects of all kinds produced there, particularly in the area of textiles, the ghetto rapidly became a critical center of production for the German economy.

The percentage of the Jews brought here for labor deployment was always very high: for instance, in the period from 6 to 12 October 1942, a total of 74,735 Jews (32,571 men and 42,164 women)[1] worked in 137 departments, which represented almost 84% of the total population of 89,200.[2] Because of its great economic importance, the ghetto survived until 1944 and was finally evacuated in the summer of that year under the threat of the advancing Soviet forces.

The last known statistic concerning the population of the ghetto comes from 1 March 1944. At that time, a total of 77,679 Jews lived there in the following age groups:[3]

As reported by the Statistical Department of the ghetto, youths in the age groups 9 to 17 (birth years 1927 – 1935) were counted in the working categories. For instance, the Hat Department employed a total of 337 youths, 33 of whom were boys and 304 girls; among these, 6 boys and 71 girls were nine years of age.[4] Four hundred youths were employed in the Metal Department, 397 boys and 3 girls; among these, three boys and three girls were nine years of age.[5]

According to the official history, the evacuation of the Lodz Ghetto proceeded toward two different, precisely defined destinations: first, to the alleged death camp of Chełmno (German: Kulmhof), where over 7,000 Jews are supposed to have been murdered in gas vans, and then to the alleged death camp of Auschwitz, to which the last of the surviving Jews of the ghetto were deported, and in which most of them were purportedly finished off in the gas chambers.

2. The Alleged Transports to Chełmno

We will first examine the alleged transports to Chełmno. On this, the Enzyklopädie des Holocaust has this to say:[6]

“In early 1944 the Germans decided to liquidate the ghetto. To this purpose, they reactivated the extermination camp of Chełmno. On 23 June 1944, deportations thence were resumed under the pretext that it only concerned transfer to forced labor in Germany. […] Up to 15 July 1944, 7,176 persons were deported to Chełmno and there murdered.”

What are these statements based on? An official publication of the state museum of Lodz helps us solve this puzzle. It says that from 23 June to 14 July, ten transports left the Lodz Ghetto for Chelmno, and were murdered there.[7] No source for this is given, but on Page 97, two lists are presented with this legend: “Names of 562 people deported to Chełmno in this transport.” The succeeding fragmentary list is comprised of 39 names in alphabetical order with the following heading: “To labor from the Lodz Ghetto on 23 June 1944.” In reality, this list has nothing to do with those listed in it, as the last part comes from a completely different group of documents and presents the first of ten lists of the names of Jews transferred out of the Lodz Ghetto. These lists are alphabetically ordered, and every page (or sequence of pages) lists the names beginning with a particular letter. But the list here discussed is indeed alphabetically ordered, but no page breaks are provided between initial letters: the first name begins with “A,” but the thirty-ninth name begins with “R,” so that a complete list could not include more than sixty names. Furthermore, none of the names is to be found in the complete list, of which the subject list is supposed to be a part.

The ten lists mentioned have to do with ten transports of Jews – men and women – from the Lodz Ghetto in the period from 23 June to 14 July 1944.[8] Their particulars are in the following table:

It allegedly concerns transports of Jews from Lodz to Chełmno, but what evidence has been adduced for the fact that the Jews involved actually arrived at Chełmno? Absolutely none! Tellingly, the Jewish-Polish historian Artur Eisenbach wrote in 1946 in his well-known collection of the documentation of the Lodz Ghetto of the evacuation in retrospect:[9]

“Camp Chełmno was suddenly liquidated, for which reason the Jews were sent to Auschwitz as well as other camps.”

In this connection, Eisenbach mentioned the first three transports of the table shown above.[9] It is thereby clear that he, who had deeply studied the documentation in the possession of the Central Jewish Historical Commission, had not detected the faintest indication therefrom that the ten transports of Jews were bound for Chełmno. In the event, no documentation of any such import exists, and it may be understood of the deportations only that they had “left the Lodz Ghetto for labor.”

Other Jews had previously been sent forth from the Lodz Ghetto “to labor outside the ghetto” of Lodz: 750 on the 4th and 800 on the 16th of March 1944.[10] As A. Eisenbach, using the documents reposing in the Archives of the Warsaw Jewish Historical Institute, informs us, these 1,600 Jews were sent to the armaments factory in Skarzysko-Kamienna, a place about 45 kilometers southwest of Radom.[11]

Let us return to the 7,170 Jews transferred between 23 June and 14 July 1944. The manifests here are of fundamental importance for answering the question of whether they were deported “for labor”. Of these, the birth dates of 6,763 are given. Although the ages of these range from 6 to 70 years of age, noteworthy exceptions attach to the youngest and oldest of these: there were only three children six years of age; children of seven years, four; children of eight years, seven; children of nine years, eight; and children of ten years, nine. At the other end, men aged 70, 69 and 66, one each; men aged 65, two; men aged 64, six; men aged 63, two; men aged 62, seven; men aged 61, four; and 17 men aged 60. The following table displays the age distribution of the deportees:

It is herewith abundantly clear that the overwhelming majority of those deported were of ages capable of working, and the greater part of them engaged in the various trades of the ghetto. Numerous documents confirm that the ghetto administration reported losses of manpower in particular trades on the days of the deportations.[12] Proceeding from an assumption of a policy of extermination, it would be sheer idiocy to murder 7,170 Jews, most of them capable of work; it would be much more-logical to gather up the almost 11,200 children under nine and old people over 60, and ship them off to the putative death camp of Chełmno.

Another important circumstance helps us understand why small children were included in the transports: the deportees were not selected according to their ages, or at least not exclusively so, but rather in part according to their membership in families. This may be seen from both the names and the addresses of the persons concerned. For example, one of the three six-year-old children, Johanna Dahl, born in 1938, was deported in the third transport together with Greta Dahl, born in 1912, where almost certainly the latter would have been the child’s mother deported with her; both had the same address, Kräter 25.[13] The second 1938-born child, Dora Gerstel, was deported in the second transport together with Edith Gerstel, date of birth 1904; both lived at Siegfried 14.[14] Finally, the third nine-year-old child, Monit Sztycki, was transported in the fourth transport together with the 1900-born Gela Sztycki; both lived at Hohenstein 13.[15]

The conclusion at this point is obvious: The ten mentioned Jewish transports did not go to be gassed at Chełmno, but rather to work in concentration camps.

3. The Transports to Auschwitz

According to the official record, the second, significantly larger stream of transports from the Lodz Ghetto went to Auschwitz.

In his study on the number of victims of that camp, Franciszek Piper claimed that in 1944, 60,000 to 70,000 Jews had been deported from the Lodz Ghetto to Auschwitz.[16]

In a table with the heading “Transports of Jews from Poland (of the pre-war boundaries) to Auschwitz,” he enumerates the Jewish transports from Lodz, taken from Danuta Czech’s Kalendarium, and estimates the total number to be 55,000 to 65,000 deported.[17]

The document on which D. Czech bases her account is the list of Jewish transports,[18] copied from original documents, that was secretly compiled by inmates. The list contains the date, registration numbers and origin of the transports numbered in series, beginning with A or B. For the Origin of Lodz, the following registrations are reported:

The 97 Jews registered on 15 September, who had received the numbers B-10173­ ‑ B-10269, were sent to the oil refinery at Trzebinia.[19] This is the only known list of registered detainees from Lodz.[20]

In the first German edition of her Chronicle, Danuta Czech wrote in reference to the ghetto of Lodz with monotonous regularity, after she had indicated the number of Jews registered in Auschwitz: the others were gassed.[21] On the date of 23 August, she also speaks of a transport of forty cars, whose occupants were gassed without exception. The source here is a message of the resistance movement of the camp,[22] which does not, of course, contain chronological information; a later-added note of Czech’s claims arbitrarily that the information goes back to the 22nd of August, because the reference to the forty cars identifies the transport that arrived in Auschwitz on that day.[23]

In a later promotion of her Chronicle, D. Czech spoke of 70,000 Jews from the Lodz Ghetto who were “consigned to extermination in Auschwitz.”[24] Thus, about 66,900 would have been gassed.

The witness upon whose statements this allegation of gigantic mass murder is based seems to be the self-proclaimed “eyewitness” Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, who in his memoirs published in Hungarian in 1946, and later translated into several other languages, had written that, from the ghetto of Lodz, 70,000 Jews had come to Auschwitz, of whom 95% – 66,500 persons – had been gassed.[25]

In the second German edition of her Chronicle, D. Czech made two changes of critical importance. First, according to the new version, the unregistered Jews were not all gassed; some of them had been sent onward unregistered to the transit camp of Birkenau. This new interpretation was reflected in new formulations: “The Jews classified as unfit for work are killed in the gas chambers. Young and healthy people are likely to be kept back in the camp as ‘ready reserves’,” or “a part of the young and healthy are likely to be withheld as so-called ‘ready reserves’ in Birkenau.”[26]

Secondly, D. Czech no longer considered the transports from the 7th to the 18th of September as actual transports from the ghetto of Lodz, but as the delivery and registration of the Lodz Jews who had been interned in the transit camp of Birkenau. For example, she noted in her entry for the date 7 September 1944:[27] “The numbers B-9372 to B-9618 are 247 Jews from the ghetto in Lodz, who have been detained as so-called “ready reserves” in the transit camp in Birkenau.“

The reason for these revisions may easily be seen. Already in 1988 – one year before the publication of the second German edition of Chronicle – the official history of Stutthof Concentration Camp published by the Stutthof Museum announced that on 28 August 1944 a transport with 2,800 Jews from the ghetto of Lodz had arrived in Stutthof, and a second transport with 1,750 Jewesses had arrived there on 1 September.[28] Moreover, D. Czech had meanwhile discovered that the evacuation of the ghetto of Lodz had taken place between the 9th and the 29th of September 1944[29] (according to the Enzyklopädie des Holocaust[30] from 7 to 30 August, according to A. Eisenbach from 2 to 30 August[31]). On the other hand, Szmuel Krakowski gives the number of survivors among the Lodz Jews deported to Auschwitz as 5,000 to 7,000, while Arnold Mostowicz speaks of 12,000 to 15,000 survivors.[29]

In view of these circumstances, it is impossible for all unregistered deportees to have been gassed, and it is also impossible for the deportations to Auschwitz to have continued after 30 August 1944. But this did not prevent D. Czech from reporting the arrival of a transport with 2,500 Jews from Lodz on 18 September 1944, that is, 19 days after the end of the deportations! Her source is an – obviously incorrect – report of the resistance movement in the camp,[32] which reads as follows:[33]

“At present [obecnie], from the camp [z obozu] Birkenau 2,500 of the Jews deported from the ghetto of Lodz have been gassed, of whom 80% were between 13 and 16 years old.”

In view of the fact that the deportations had begun in August – the first transport arrived in Auschwitz on 15 August – it is clear that the transports from Lodz that had taken place between 10 and 14 August were destined not for Auschwitz, but for other camps. Since the distance between Lodz and Auschwitz is quite small – a little over 200 km – the journey will not have taken longer than one day under any circumstances.

It is no less clear that the last transport to arrive in Auschwitz was that of 30 August 1944, which is why all subsequent registrations that appear on the “List of transports of Jews” are simply the registration of previously unregistered detainees from previously arrived transports. The number of transports effectively carried out thus amounts to nine, the first nine on the list mentioned. Czech’s alleged transport of 23 August as well as the alleged transport from 18 September certainly correspond to two of these nine transports.

Before we can determine how many Jews from the ghetto of Lodz were received into the transit camp without registration, we have to solve another problem: how many Jews in all were sent from the Lodz Ghetto to Auschwitz?

It should be emphasized above all that the state archive of Lodz,[34] which possesses an immense amount of documents about the ghetto, including many hundreds of population statistics and transport lists, oddly enough seems not to have a single statistic about those of August 1944 (the last known statistic is the aforementioned from 1 March 1944), but especially not a single manifest of any transport in August 1944 (the last of such lists are those already discussed from the period from 23 June to 14 July). Not one document on the deportations of August 1944 is to be found.

On 1 March 1944, 77,679 people lived in the ghetto. Until the final evacuation, 2,778 deaths were recorded.[35] In January 1944, there were 267 deaths and 35 births.[36] In February, there were about 250 deaths.[37] For the period from March to August, a maximum number of (35 × 6 =) 210 births may be estimated. Thus, the net deaths were about 2,500.

As already seen, 1,600 Jews were transferred from the ghetto on 4 and 16 March, and a 7,170 more between 23 June and 14 July. Finally, “in two collection camps, 1200 Jews were left behind.”[38]

Accordingly, at the beginning of the evacuation, at most (77,679 -2,500 -1,600 -7,170 =) 66,409 Jews may have lived in the ghetto. In addition to the aforementioned Jews transferred “to work,” one must also add 90 transferred on 4 May,[39] 50 deported on 17 May,[40] 30 relocated on 27 May,[41] and 60 on 30 May,[42] for a total of 230 people. We do not know whether there were any other renditions of small groups of Jews. The irresistible conclusion is that the number of Jews deported from the Lodz Ghetto cannot have exceeded 65,000.

On 15 August 1944, the head of Department DIV (Concentration-Camp Administration) of the SS Central Business Office, SS Sturmbannführer Burger, sent a letter to the head of Group B, SS Gruppenführer Lörner, on the subjects of “prisoner census” and “prisoners’ clothing.” It states that on 1 August the strength of the concentration camps was 379,167 male as well as 145,119 female prisoners, to whom 60,000 detainees “in Lodz (Police Prison and Ghetto)” should be added as “announced new admissions,” among others. The list of all expected “new admissions” – 612,000 prisoners! – closed with the following sentence:[43]

“A large proportion of the prisoners are already underway and will be delivered to the concentration camps in the next few days.”

Burger stated that there was not enough clothing for the 612,000 expected new admissions, and therefore demanded “special allocations of textiles.” In fact, Office DIV/4 had cognizance over clothing. This indicates that the SS Central Business Office had already reckoned with the arrival of these prisoners in the concentration camps, including the 60,000 Jews from the ghetto of Lodz, whose evacuation to the concentration camps on 15 August had already been in full swing for several days.

Gerald Reitlinger commented on the above document as follows:[44]

“It is obvious that nowhere near any such a number of people came to Germany, but estimates by survivors of the mass gassing of Lodz Jews should be assessed with the usual caution.”

Reitlinger adds that “Many thousands of Lodz Jews met their end in the final tragedy in Belsen,”[44] and speaks of deportations “to Auschwitz and other camps”.[44]

In his address of 7 August 1944, Hans Biebow, administrator of the Lodz Ghetto, explained, among other things:[45]

“Now in the war, where Germany is struggling for its existence, it is necessary to shift the labor force because, by reason of the decree of Himmler, thousands of Germans are sent from the factories to the front; these have to be replaced. […] At Siemens A.G. Union, Schuchert Works, wherever ammunition is made, you need workers. In Częstochowa, where the workers work in the munitions factories,[46] they are very satisfied, and the Gestapo is also very much pleased with their achievements. […] It is assured that food is brought into the cars; the journey will take about 10-16 hours. Take up to 20 Kilograms of luggage with you. If you come with your family, bring pots, drinking vessels and silverware; we do not have these in Germany, because they are given away to those who lost theirs in bombing attacks.”

There is no reason to doubt the truth of this speech, even more so when the first transports from the ghetto – up to 14 August 1944 – were certainly destined for the Old Reich, but it cannot be ruled out that transports at the same time may have gone to Auschwitz. For this reason, the comments on the “List of transports of Jews” cannot be regarded as cumulative registrations of several transports, such as those concerning the Hungarian Jews, but rather refer to individual transports.

Therefore, if one accepts that each transport included 2,500 persons,[47] the ghetto was evacuated in 26 transports, of which only nine (= 22,500 persons) went to Auschwitz.

The German translation of the official history of Concentration Camp Stutthof confirms that on 28 August 1944 2,800 Jews arrived from Auschwitz, who had previously lived in the Ghetto of Lodz; another 1,750 arrived there on 10 September.[48] Indeed, in an article published in 1990, Danuta Drywa, a historian at the Stutthof Museum, wrote that the camp had taken in 11,464 Jews from the Lodz Ghetto.[49] The transports that arrived from Auschwitz on the 3rd and the 27th of September 1944 (the first with 2,405, the second with 4,501 female prisoners), were for the most part made up of Polish Jewesses,[50] so that the number mentioned by Danuta Drywa is entirely plausible, at least as to its order of magnitude.

Furthermore, among the deportees in the transport of 3 September 1944,[51] there were also some Jews from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, who had been deported from the Ghetto of Theresienstadt at the end of 1941 to Lodz,[52] including the following:

Also in the transport of 27 September 1944,[53] there were several dozen Jews from the protectorate who had come from Lodz,[54] among them:

The number of about 11,500 Jews from the ghetto of Lodz, deported first to Auschwitz and from there to Stutthof, fits very well with the above-postulated total of about 22,500 sent from Lodz to Auschwitz; it corresponds to about 51% of the deported. Thus, about (22,500 – 11,500 =) 11,000 male Jews were sent from Lodz to Auschwitz, of whom about 3,100 were registered there. What became of the remaining 7,900?

4. The Children in Auschwitz: “Selection for the Gas Chamber?”

In the transport of 3 September 1944, there were around 40 children between 6 months and 14 years, who, according to exterminationist logic, were consigned to death in the “gas chambers,” but in reality were sent to Stutthof with their mothers and were routinely registered there. See the table below.

All these children were Polish Jews, except for the two brothers Salomowicz, who, together with their mother Dora Salomowicz (born on 28 August 1904, Number 1652 of the transport list, registered in Stutthof with Number 83619), had been sent to the Lodz Ghetto from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia on 3 November 1941. All three survived the war.[55] Michael and Josef were thus, at the time of their deportation to Lodz, 8 and 3 years old, and yet survived both the “selections” to “eradicate” in Chelmno as well as those for “extermination” in Auschwitz! There is no doubt that the other Polish-Jewish children also came from Lodz. The transfer of these children proves that the Jews who came from the Lodz Ghetto were not decimated by “selections for the gas chamber,” or these children would certainly not have been left alive!

According to Helena Kubica, a researcher at the Auschwitz Museum, the documents show that about 19,000 children and minors were registered in the camp.[56] For an “extermination camp,” in which children and minors were supposedly killed immediately after their arrival, this is an enormous number, and since the documentation preserved is incomplete, the real figure may have been much higher.

In 1944, around 1,000 children under 14 years of age were held in Birkenau, and several hundred were invalids. Their presence has been duly recorded in the relevant standard forms; these include the headings “Invalids” (“and over 60 years old” was added with a typewriter) as well as “Youngsters under 14 years” or “Boys up to 14 years.” On 31 January 1944, there were in the men’s camp of Birkenau 278 invalids and old people, as well as 2,249 children up to 14 years, including the Gypsy children and the Jewish children from Theresienstadt.[57]

On 15 May 1944, one counted in the men’s camp of Birkenau 50 invalids and 210 children up to 14 years old.[58] In the women’s camp, the number of invalids (as well as those over 60 years old) amounted to 222, and that of children to 945.[59] From this, it may be seen that there were 272 invalids and old people as well as 1,155 children in Birkenau alone. In addition, there were 425 Jewish children from Theresienstadt (210 boys and 215 girls). On 30 June 1944, 233 invalids and old people as well as 985 children were held in the women’s camp, to which 432 “young people from Theresienstadt” had to be added.[60]

From 17 to 21 August 1944, the number of boys up to 14 years old in the men’s camp rose from 459[61] to 726.[62]

It is clear from the surviving, fragmentary documents that the following Dutch-Jewish children were registered on 6 June 1944:[63]

The total number of children registered at that time was 17, of whom the youngest were two years old.[64]

According to a list published by Helena Kubica, at least 106 Jewish twins between 2 and 14 years old were “Liberated in Concentration Camp Auschwitz 1/27/1945.”[65] In fact, despite the mass evacuations that took place shortly before the Germans withdrew, the Soviets still found 180 mostly Jewish children in Birkenau[66] who were of the following age groups:[67]

The registration of the twins apparently had a particular meaning that was not applicable to the other children.[68] What is important, however, is the fact that they not only survived the “experiments” of Dr. Josef Mengele, but were also left alive – in a supposed extermination camp!

It hardly needs noting that all of this is in no way consistent with the supposed policy of eradicating people unfit for work, especially children, in Auschwitz. Anyone who proceeds from the assumption of such a policy defies the fact that there is not a single piece of evidence that even one child was gassed in Auschwitz, while every child who survived the camp is a refutation of this claim.

Abbreviations

AGK: Archiwum Głównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej (Archive of the Main Commission on the Investigation of Crimes against the Polish People, Institute of National Remembrance), Warsaw.

APL: Archiwum Państwowe w Lodzi (Lodz State Archive)

AMS: Archiwum Museum Stutthof (archive of the Stutthof Museum)

APMO: Archiwum Muzeum Oświęcim-Brzezinka (Archive of the State Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum)

GARF: Gosudarstvenni Archiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow)

Notes

Translated to German from the Italian by Jürgen Graf. Translated to English from the German by N. Joseph Potts. First published as “Das Ghetto von Lodz in der Holocaust Propaganda,” Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2003, pp. 31-37.