Executions in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto (1943–1944) – mass executions of Polish Political prisoners and people of Jewish descent carried out secretly by German occupiers in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The Germans shot prisoners brought from outside the ghetto in the "Jewish residential district in Warsaw" in the summer of 1942, but such executions became massive only in mid-May 1943, after the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto had been suppressed and the district had begun to be systematically demolished. The genocide in the ruins of the ghetto was carried out continuously until the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944. SS and German police officers shot several thousand people there – Polish hostages (mainly prisoners of Pawiak prison and ordinary residents of the city detained during mass round-ups), as well as Jews captured on the "Aryan side".
Origins Warsaw was considered by the Germans to be the centre of Polish resistance against the Nazi "New Order". Although in the occupied General Government the former capital of Poland was degraded to the role of a provincial city, Warsaw still remained the centre of Polish political, intellectual and cultural life. It was also the seat of the authorities of the Polish Underground State and a place of functioning of particularly strong and well-organized structures of the resistance movement. Governor General Hans Frank wrote in his diary on December 14, 1943: "If we had not had Warsaw in the General Government, we would not have four-fifths of the difficulties we had to face. Warsaw is and will remain a focus of turmoil, the point from which unrest spreads in that country".Władysław Bartoszewski: Warszawski pierścień śmierci 1939–1944. Warszawa: Interpress, 1970, p. 442.
From the first days of the occupation, Germans imposed brutal terror on the people of Warsaw, directed primarily at the representatives of the Polish political and intellectual Elites, the Jewish community and people who were in any way connected with the activities of the resistance movement. Warsaw's Prisons and detention centres – Pawiak, the investigator's arrest at Daniłowiczowska Street, the Mokotów Prison, and the basements of Sipo's headquarters in Szucha Avenue – were filled with arrested people. Street round-ups, deportations to concentration camps and mass murders became daily occurrences. Executions of Political prisoners from Warsaw were usually carried out in secret in areas inaccessible to bystanders. The places of massacres were, among others: the Sejm gardens at Wiejska Street; Kabaty Forest; Swedish Mountains in Bemowo; Sękocin Forest near Magdalenka; Chojnów Forests near Stefanów; Laski, Wydmy Łuże and Wólka Węglowa on the outskirts of Kampinos; and above all – infamous Palmiry.
From the executioner's point of view, however, executions carried out in the Forests near Warsaw entailed certain risks and logistic problems. The discreet transport of convicts from Warsaw's prisons to places of execution located several kilometers from the city was a complicated and time-consuming operation. The protection of execution sites from unauthorized witnesses and escape of convicts also posed serious problems. The Germans had no guarantee that the inhabitants of the surrounding villages would not be able to find mass graves by accident or intention.„Terror nie ustaje” – 75. rocznica masowych egzekucji w ruinach getta warszawskiego, 29 May 2018, dzieje.pl
First executions in the ruins of the ghetto
Starting from June 1942, there were several cases when small groups of Poles, ranging from a few to several dozen, were murdered by the Germans in the Warsaw Ghetto, which at that time was completely isolated from the rest of the city. The bodies of the murdered were usually abandoned directly in the streets of the "Jewish residential district", where they were then taken care of by Jewish working groups, whose duties included cleaning the streets from the bodies of the dead inhabitants of the ghetto. They usually buried the corpses in the Jewish cemetery or in the "Skra" football field. Such executions took place on a larger scale during the great displacement operation in the ghetto (summer 1942), because in the conditions of general chaos, it was easy for Germans to hide the fact of the murder and to get rid of the victims' bodies unnoticeably.Władysław Bartoszewski: Warszawski pierścień śmierci... op.cit., p. 194 i 196.Regina Domańska: Pawiak – więzienie Gestapo. Kronika lat 1939–1944. Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza, 1978, p. 236, 244, 246. In the spring of 1943, the Germans finally shut down the Warsaw Ghetto by brutally suppressing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which had been started by the Jewish resistance movement. Areas of the former "Jewish residential district" were transformed by the occupying forces into a "stone-brick desert". The management of the Warsaw Gestapo came to a conclusion that the ruins of the ghetto might turn out to be a convenient place to carry out secret executions of Poles – this time on a massive scale. SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop, the then SS and Police Commander (SS- und Polizeiführer) for the Warsaw district, claimed that the author of this idea was Dr Ludwig Hahn, Commander of the German security police and security service in Warsaw. While in Mokotów Prison waiting for the trial, Stroop reported on talks with Hahn to his co-prisoner from the cell, Kazimierz Moczarski.
“Doctor Hahn said something like this: "Let's use Grossaktion to finish Poles as well. Many Jews died in the ghetto and will continue to do so. There are corpses everywhere, so if a few thousand more dead Poles arrive, nobody will be able to verify anything anyway" – reported by Jürgen Stroop.Kazimierz Moczarski: Rozmowy z katem. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1978, p. 294.
From the point of view of the occupants, a number of factors spoke in favor of using the ruins of the ghetto as a place of mass executions. The district was directly adjacent to the Pawiak prison, where the vast majority of Polish political prisoners were detained. The ghetto walls and numerous German posts completely isolated the "stone and brick desert" from the rest of the city.Władysław Bartoszewski: Warszawski pierścień śmierci... op.cit., p. 256 Police patrols constantly hunted Jews hiding in the ruins, which explained the sound of shots coming from behind the walls. It was easy to bury or burn the bodies of the murdered in the ruins. Finally, in the summer of 1943, a German concentration camp – the so-called Konzentrationslager Warschau – began to operate in the area of the former ghetto (near Gęsia Street). Its premises and crew were used for carrying out executions, as well as its equipment (crematorium).
The first execution of Pawiak's prisoners, carried out in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, took place on May 7, 1943, i.e. before the end of the Ghetto Uprising.The destruction of the Great Warsaw Synagogue by the Germans, which is considered the official end of the uprising, took place on May 16, 1943. At that time, 94 people were murdered in the gate of a tenement house at 21 Dzielna Street.Regina Domańska: Pawiak... op.cit., p. 319. From the end of May 1943, executions in the former "Jewish residential district" took place almost every day.Regina Domańska: Pawiak... op.cit., p. 27. Since then, the Germans had almost completely abandoned execution of convicts in forests near Warsaw and have significantly limited the deportations of Pawiak prisoners (and of other Warsaw prisons and jails) to concentration camps. Instead, Polish political prisoners were hastily and massively murdered in the ruins of the ghetto, often after only a few or several days of investigation or even without any investigation at all.Władysław Bartoszewski: Warszawski pierścień śmierci... op.cit., p. 441. Almost every day executions of several or a dozen Jews captured by the Germans on the "Aryan side", as well as Poles who hid them, took place there.Władysław Bartoszewski: Warszawski pierścień śmierci... op.cit., p. 269 i 363. The names of these victims were in most cases never established, as the captured Jews were not entered in the Pawiak's records at all. Instead, after a few hours, or at most a few days of their stay on the death row, they were executed in the ghetto. It was not uncommon for whole families, including women and children, to be murdered in the ruins.Regina Domańska: Pawiak... op.cit., p. 13-14.
Germans carried out the executions at various places in the former ghetto, but most often on the grounds of the property at 25 and 27 Dzielna Street, in the garden of the house at 29 Nowolipki Street and in the courtyard of the house at 19 Zamenhofa Street.Władysław Bartoszewski: Warszawski pierścień śmierci... op.cit., p. 256.Regina Domańska: Pawiak... op.cit., p. 28. Pawiak prisoners or other people brought from the city were also shot on the grounds of the Warsaw concentration camp (KL Warschau).Regina Domańska: Pawiak... op.cit., p. 333. The corpses of the murdered were burnedIt is probable that at the very beginning the bodies of the victims of some executions were buried by the Germans in the ground or buried in the cellars of demolished houses. – most often on the grounds of the property at 45 Gęsia and 27 Pawia Streets or within the KL Warschau camp (on piles made of wooden parts of demolished houses or in the local crematorium). The corpses were burned by labor units composed of Jews - prisoners of the camp.Bogusław Kopka: Konzentrationslager Warschau... op.cit, p. 62.
The information on German crimes provided to the outside by the members of the AK conspiracy employed as the Pawiak custodian staff was inevitably fragmented, so it is impossible to determine the exact dates and course of all the murders carried out in the ghetto ruins in the spring and summer of 1943. However, it is known that in the executions that were carried out almost every day a few to a dozen people died. There have been cases in which dozens or even hundreds of Poles and Jews have been murdered in individual executions. On May 29, 1943, a great massacre of Pawiak prisoners took place in the former ghetto, during which about 530 people were killed.Regina Domańska: Pawiak... op.cit., p. 326. The execution echoed widely in occupied Warsaw – it was then that the inscriptions "Pawiak pomścimy" (We'll avenge Pawiak) began to appear on a large scale on the walls of the city.Władysław Bartoszewski: Warszawski pierścień śmierci... op.cit., p. 268. On June 24, 1943, about 200 people died in the next big execution in the ghetto.Władysław Bartoszewski: Warszawski pierścień śmierci... op.cit., p. 447. On July 15, 1943, from 260 to 300Regina Domańska: Pawiak... op.cit.,. 337. people were shot there – Poles and Jews arrested as a result of the so-called scandal of the Polish Hotel. The next day, 132 more prisoners of Pawiak were executed in the camp at Gęsia Street.
Executions during Kutschera's rule