[6] The Polish official estimates, in the early postwar period, have suggested much higher numbers, up to a total of 340,000 men, women, and children.

[12] In October 1941, Lange toured the area looking for a suitable site for an extermination centre, and chose Chełmno on the Ner, because of the estate, with a large manor house similar to Sonnenstein, which could be used for mass admissions of prisoners with only minor modifications.

[13] Staff for the facility was selected personally by Ernst Damzog, Commander of Security Police and SD from headquarters in occupied Poznań (Posen).

[16] Two months later, on January 20, 1942, Heydrich, who had already confirmed the effectiveness of industrial-scale murder by exhaust fumes, called a secret meeting of German officials to undertake the European-wide Final Solution to the Jewish Question under the pretext of "resettlement".

[2] The use of the killing centre at Chełmno for the mass murder of rapidly growing number of Jews deported to the Łódź Ghetto ("Special Handling", the Sonderbehandlung) was initiated by Arthur Greiser,[17] the Governor of Reichsgau Wartheland.

In a letter to Himmler dated May 30, 1942, Greiser referred to an authorization he had received from him and Reinhard Heydrich,[18] stating that the clandestine program of murdering 100,000 Polish Jews, about one-third of the total Jewish population of Wartheland, was expected to be carried out soon.

The camp consisted of separate zones: an administration section with nearby barracks and storage for plundered goods; and the more distant burial and cremation site to which victims were delivered in hermetically proofed superstructures.

The vehicles had been converted to mobile gas-chambers by the Gaubschat company (de) in Berlin which, by June 1942, produced twenty of them in accordance with the SS purchase order.

The sealed compartments (also called superstructures) installed on the chassis had floor openings – about 60 mm (2.4 in) in diameter – with metal pipes welded below, into which the engine exhaust was directed.

[16] Victims generally suffocated to death, with their "bodies thrown out blue, wet with sweat and urine, the legs covered with excrement and menstrual blood".

[25] The SS had first used pure carbon monoxide from steel cylinders to murder mental patients in extermination hospitals of Action T4, and therefore had considerable knowledge of its efficacy.

By employing just three vans on the Eastern Front (the Opel-Blitz and the larger Saurerwagen), without any faults occurring in the vehicles, the Einsatzgruppen were able to murder 97,000 captives in less than six months between December 1941 and June 1942.

[27] The first people transported to the camp were the Jewish and Romani populations of Koło, Dąbie, Sompolno, Kłodawa, Babiak, Izbica Kujawska, Bugaj, Nowiny Brdowskie and Kowale Pańskie.

— SS-Scharführer Walter Burmeister, The Good Old Days [29]In late February 1942, the secretary of the local Polish council in Chełmno, Stanisław Kaszyński (b.

[3] On reaching their final destination before "transport" to Germany and Austria, the Jews disembarked in the courtyard of the Schlosslager manor where the SS men wearing white coats and pretending to be medics waited for them with a translator released earlier from the Gestapo prison in Poznań.

[33] Wearing just underwear, with the women allowed to keep slips on,[28] the victims were taken to the cellar and across the ramp into the back of a gas van holding from 50–70 people each (Opel Blitz) and up to 150 (Magirus).

[39] Beginning in late July 1942, the victims were brought to the camp directly from Powiercie after the regular railway line linking Koło with Dąbie was restored; and the bridge over the Rgilewka River had been repaired.

The large trenches were quickly filled, but the smell of decomposing bodies began to permeate the surrounding countryside including nearby villages.

[5] The early killing process carried out by the SS from December 8, 1941, until mid-January 1942, was intended to murder Jews from all nearby towns and villages, which were slated for German colonization (Lebensraum).

There is evidence that some red powder and a fluid were delivered from Germany by Maks Sado freight company, in order to murder the victims more quickly.

[44] After having annihilated almost all Jews of Wartheland District, in March 1943 the Germans closed the Chełmno killing centre, while Operation Reinhard was still underway elsewhere.

To hide the evidence of the SS-committed war crimes, from 1943 onward, the Germans ordered the exhumation of all remains and burning of bodies in open-air cremation pits by a unit of Sonderkommando 1005.

[2] The Special Detachment "Bothmann" returned to the forest and resumed murdering victims at a smaller camp, consisting of brand new wooden barracks along with new crematory pyres.

[48] In September 1944, the SS brought in a new Commando 1005 of Jewish prisoners from outside the Wartheland District to exhume and cremate remaining corpses and to remove evidence of the mass murder operations.

The remaining Jewish workers were executed just before the German retreat from the Chełmno killing center on January 18, 1945, as the Soviet army approached (it reached the camp two days later).

[3] Note: a 1946–47 report by the Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland [pl] placed the number closer to 340,000 based on a statistical approach, as the camp authorities had destroyed all waybills in an effort to hide their actions.

The first judicial trial of three former members of the SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof, including camp's deputy commandant Oberscharführer Walter Piller, took place in 1945 at the District Court in Łódź.

Five escaped during the winter of 1942, including Mordechaï Podchlebnik, Milnak Meyer, Abraham Tauber, Abram Roj and Szlama Ber Winer (Szlamek Bajler) whose identity was recognized also as Yakov or Jacob Grojanowski.

[53] The French director Claude Lanzmann included interviews with Srebnik and Podchlebnik in his documentary Shoah, referring to them as the only two Jewish survivors of Chełmno, but this was mistaken.

[58] Widawski spoke with Rabbi Lau as well as some members of the prewar Communal Council before he left the ghetto, robbing them of their peace of mind with earth-shattering facts about the extermination process.