The Chelmno Trials

[bombsaway]

I had forgotten to go over this. In a link provided by Archie I ran across some testimony about Chelmno, just as expected. That testimony however, was anything but what was expected.

I will link one here;

https://www.zapisyterroru.pl/dlibra/pub ... aCA2ejs2bg

On 10 February 1940 I was taken with my parents to Russia, Komi ASSR, Priluzsky District. The reason for our deportation was the arrest of my father on 25 January 1940.

The main description of deaths in the testimony;

...there was a lot of antagonism between us. In summer we had to work from 8.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m., and in winter from 7.00 a.m. to 7.00 p.m., because it was a seasonal work. In summer we had to float what we had felled in winter down the river. In summer, while the men were guiding and floating the timber, the river claimed many lives...

Now, one of the most interesting things about this testimony is how independent it is from the narrative as it is presented today. I personally feel this is representative of what one finds when going back to examine the primary sources.

The 'holocaust' as we have come to know it is the result of a 'choose your own adventure' style of collecting and presenting the various testimonies, generally in snippets, that can be shown together and make sense, so that a kind of narrative tapestry can be created from them.

It is hard to articulate and post this apparent process, and hopefully I've done a decent job as describing it as I see it.

A link to the provided query on the presented webpage;

https://www.zapisyterroru.pl/dlibra/res ... r=_all&p=0

Note the amount of locked content.

What does this testimony have to do with the Holocaust?

[Stubble]

I had forgotten to go over this. In a link provided by Archie I ran across some testimony about Chelmno, just as expected. That testimony however, was anything but what was expected.

I will link one here;

https://www.zapisyterroru.pl/dlibra/pub ... aCA2ejs2bg

On 10 February 1940 I was taken with my parents to Russia, Komi ASSR, Priluzsky District. The reason for our deportation was the arrest of my father on 25 January 1940.

The main description of deaths in the testimony;

...there was a lot of antagonism between us. In summer we had to work from 8.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m., and in winter from 7.00 a.m. to 7.00 p.m., because it was a seasonal work. In summer we had to float what we had felled in winter down the river. In summer, while the men were guiding and floating the timber, the river claimed many lives...

Now, one of the most interesting things about this testimony is how independent it is from the narrative as it is presented today. I personally feel this is representative of what one finds when going back to examine the primary sources.

The 'holocaust' as we have come to know it is the result of a 'choose your own adventure' style of collecting and presenting the various testimonies, generally in snippets, that can be shown together and make sense, so that a kind of narrative tapestry can be created from them.

It is hard to articulate and post this apparent process, and hopefully I've done a decent job as describing it as I see it.

A link to the provided query on the presented webpage;

https://www.zapisyterroru.pl/dlibra/res ... r=_all&p=0

Note the amount of locked content.

What does this testimony have to do with the Holocaust?

This thread is about Chelmno.

[bombsaway]

This thread is about Chelmno.

Well the Chelmno trials, which is Holocaust related.

[Stubble]

This thread is about Chelmno.

Well the Chelmno trials, which is Holocaust related.

My apologies Bombsaway, thank you for the attention to detail with regard to this testimony. I had made an assumption it was related to the Chelmno trial, but, on closer inspection it is not. Thank you. I will go press my face back to the stone.

This individual in the testimony was arrested by the Soviet and put in to the labor camp system there, not into a German labor camp, specifically Chelmno.

[bombsaway]

This thread is about Chelmno.

Well the Chelmno trials, which is Holocaust related.

My apologies Bombsaway, thank you for the attention to detail with regard to this testimony. I had made an assumption it was related to the Chelmno trial, but, on closer inspection it is not. Thank you. I will go press my face back to the stone.

This individual in the testimony was arrested by the Soviet and put in to the labor camp system there, not into a German labor camp, specifically Chelmno.

There's still some things that are interesting about it. You checked out a random testimony essentially (looking at someone from Chelmno) and got an example of actual resettlement - the mention of children being deported and housed - as well as a testimony critical of the NKVD and Soviets. This doesn't square w revisionist interpretations of the information control capabilities the Soviets have.

[Stubble]

It also exists in isolation currently and I am unfamiliar with any serious historical inquiry into this area.

I do apologize for attributing this to 'the nazi war crime' at Chelmno. For some reason when skimming I missed the part where she described a Soviet prison camp atrocity and assumed, being in a concentration camp and her being from Poland, she had been in the nazi one. That was a bias on my part. I didn't even consider the idea she could have been in a Russian one.

Her and her family were apparently sent to Vorkuta Corrective Labor Camp

https://allthatsinteresting.com/vorkuta-gulag

I should have been more thorough in my reading.

My apologies.

Still, you raise a valid point about this testimony and its seeming oddity, regarding preconceptions about the event as a whole.

[bombsaway]

My apologies.

You don't need to apologize to me Stubble, I like history and get value out of reading testimonies like the above. Perhaps you should thank me though...

[Stubble]

My apologies.

You don't need to apologize to me Stubble, I like history and get value out of reading testimonies like the above. Perhaps you should thank me though...

I did, check the bottom of the quoted paragraph

My apologies Bombsaway, thank you for the attention to detail with regard to this testimony. I had made an assumption it was related to the Chelmno trial, but, on closer inspection it is not. Thank you. I will go press my face back to the stone.

[Hans]

Stubble, the "Chełmno" (German Kulm) mentioned in the cited testimony is an entirely different place than "Chełmno nad Nerem" (German Kulmhof) where the Nazi extermination camp was located. These places are more than 150 km apart. It's like if you think two different Madisons in the US are the same.

[SanityCheck]

interestingly, contrary to an assertion made by SanityCheck in another thread about the availability of information in the digital super age, these items appear to all be inaccessible on the internet.

I never claimed everything was available, but rather that an ever growing amount is available.

Considering that scanners were almost unknown even twenty years ago in archives, the growth in digitisation and what is also open access has been exponential.

The best one stop location for acquiring digitised materials which are not simply put online for this topic is unsurprisingly USHMM. Their archive center is now just outside the Beltway, but is a public archive. One can go there as with any other archive and not be turned away (David Irving used the old library/archive in the museum some years ago). The archive center will even give you free memory sticks so you can copy off digitised files from the server. You need only sign some forms if these are copies from certain archives, just as you had to sign the same forms if you were printing off or scanning microfilms 10-15 years ago. So the German Federal Archives want you to sign a form, which does not then mean they call back a day later to veto your access.

Basically all I have been able to turn up on this on my own was a paper by SanityCheck.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10 ... 18.1524632

I wrote that article in 2017 after returning from a month's research at USHMM, or rather a month's downloading. Some of the collections used had been put online by the Polish archives, the Polish Main Commission investigation (the Bednarz investigation) and the West German investigations of Chelmno and the Lodz Gestapo were all digitised but not online. They were harvested as part of a much bigger haul of material. One could locate and copy them in a tiny, tiny fraction of a day once one is oriented to the system.

All West and East German NS-trial judgements are now online open access, which was done about three years ago. One can consult the overviews and then look up the case number and volume number - for Chelmno, Lfd Nr 594 in vol XXI. Because the judgements are transcribed onto web pages, they are autotranslatable in web browsers like Google Chrome
https://junsv.nl/junsv-01/junsv/inhvzbrdddr.htm
https://junsv.nl/westdeutsche-gerichtsentscheidungen

Once you have located the judgement that interests you, a pop-up window will appear, but the page numbers at the bottom can be 'opened in new tab' to get a direct link, here for example is the page where the Bonn court cited the famous Just memo on gas vans:
https://junsv.nl/seiten?tx_junsv_pi2%5B ... c68fc00118

Hans went to the state archives in Germany to consult the original files. That is the ideal, but one can also generally find most but not all of these cases copied in the records of the Zentrale Stelle at Ludwigsburg, with USHMM possessing a full set of those.

State archives in Germany have started digitising the NS-trials, beginning with the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial before the pandemic. The transcripts of the tape recordings of the court hearings, and indeed the recordings, are on a separate website. Other trials in Hesse have also begun to be added
https://www.auschwitz-prozess.de/
https://arcinsys.hessen.de/arcinsys/start.action

So far the states of Hesse, Baden-Wuerttemberg, and Berlin have uploaded selected trials, so for example the Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trial. Hamburg will send you download links for their NS-trials which are substantially digitised. Rheinland-Pfalz has teased with just a few files, while Nordrhein-Westfalen, Bavaria and other states have not yet begun the process at all. The inconsistencies may have something to do with specific state privacy law interpretations, budgets, or other reasons entirely. The German Federal Archive is extremely rigid in not allowing internet access to legal files and a range of personnel records, including the casualty lists from WWII. Other European states are often similar in hewing to a very conservative interpretation of the right to privacy. The standard rule for citing the name of an individual in a German archive file if this is 'personenbezogene' is 110 years after someone's birth. That gives an indication of why it might not be so easy to get open access on the internet to files concerning WWII or from the 1960s/1970s.

The Polish archives at provincial level (state archive of Lodz, etc) are different to the IPN (Institute of National Memory), while Chronicles of Terror is run by an entirely different outfit, the Pilecki Institute. The Polish state archives are making respectable progress with WWII-era materials, alongside early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and other historic eras of national significance. CoT progresses as one would expect, except fewer are being translated these days.
October 2022: 12,368 testimonies in Polish, 4,463 testimonies translated into English
July 2025: 17,781 testimonies in Polish, 4,781 testimonies translated into English
The proportion which are restricted from open access viewing may have grown a bit, but one cannot discern any rhyme or reason as to why that is. It certainly doesn't appear to be done to foil revisionists, since testimonies from key cases like the Treblinka investigation and Auschwitz SS Staff Trial were quite clearly prioritised for translation, and hardly ever seem to be 'only viewable on site'.
The various Polish investigations and trials are digitised at USHMM, of course.

One can also find investigations at Yad Vashem, the catch being these are overwhelmingly in Russian, Polish, German when copied from the relevant commissions. They have generally respected the privacy law concerns of Germany and Austria (but again: remember USHMM for a physical visit to make off with oodles of scans). Yad Vashem's Untold Stories site, however, has a growing amount translated on 1,200 killing sites in the Soviet Union; since it went live there are many entries which were expanded as well as new towns included, so what appears there is still ongoing and not necessarily complete.

There are also various trial judgements and indictments to be found on various websites in Germany, on jewishgen.org and on the archive of the Holocaust History Project. Those tend to be single pages so easier to read/browse than Justiz und NS-Verbrechen. For example:
https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-his ... teil.shtml
https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-his ... teil.shtml

One can find over 90 different repositories or major collections - counting the Bundesarchiv as only a few of the repositories, not going below RG level for NARA - for primary and secondary sources relevant to this topic. Twenty years ago there were a handful - Nizkor, THHP, the Yale Avalon Project, and even 15 years ago most of the repositories had not yet begun or had not hit their stride. This isn't the only historical topic of widespread interest, but is likely better digitised than many other eras of modern history. Some of the repositories I count in the 90-odd places would cover all eras - since academia.edu, dissertation archives and so on are general platforms. (Note I just counted all individual university open access elibraries as one for the purposes of this count.)

It's helpful to remember that one reason for published document editions was to make them more widely available so historians, students and authors did not have to visit the archives every time they wanted to look up a document. The secondary purpose is to translate some of the documents whether from the medieval era or the 20th Century so people without Latin or German can read them.

While published sources typically remain in libraries or as ebooks for universities, a good number are also open access for this topic, especially the VEJ series of 16 volumes, with the PMJ translations following after a three year lag from their publication. VEJ is now entirely open access, and the PDFs are copiable so one can translate anything in them, thus 5000 documents are available, including some in VEJ 10 on Chelmno.

Hans published at HC a document on Chelmno he copied from the Bundesarchiv in 2019 which appeared in VEJ 10 within 1-2 years, and now in 2025 one can download the volume and read it for free there, too. He anonymised the names out of privacy law caution but they can be read in the VEJ 10 published version.
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... .html#more
https://pmj-documents.org/free-download/

I am currently dissertation coordinator for my department, meaning several hundred students researching projects from the early medieval period to the 21st Century. We have crowdsourced resources for different eras, we have briefings on the subscribed resources (commercial digital archives like ProQuest) and library holdings, and advise on how to do research in physical archives and specialist libraries in the UK. Naturally many students really, really want to study a topic which is not yet well digitised, or where the sources are in Japanese or a language they cannot read, and have to find something else to study. But the majority are overwhelmed with what they can access, they cannot read all of it in a year or write it up in the assigned length.

One soon learns that different governments, national and local, have different priorities; the British National Archives sells its holdings more often to commercial platforms than the US National Archives has, but in both cases they prioritise genealogists and name lists/censuses, and not necessarily the kinds of records historians want to use. The US puts in more effort to the Presidential Library records and other high profile matters, so one can drown in JFK assassination investigation files from different committees even before the 'JFK Files' were released. Germany is vastly more active in digitisation than France or Italy, is my impression; Poland is better than most East European states, while Ukraine has really put in more effort precisely because they are under attack and some archives were hit in the early stages of the Russian invasion. Israel has been very active with Yad Vashem, and there is more on there now than there was a year ago, but other Israeli archives have been slower, although Ghetto Fighters' House was early to digitise. The Swiss have resolved to digitise *everything* and seem to be giving it a go, so one finds a lot for the WWII era on their federal archive site, but this doesn't mean other archives in Switzerland have the money to follow suit.

[Stubble]

Thank you Mr Check. Much appreciated.



I will get cracking. I had been going through interrogations and OT stuff. I still don't have a complete picture of the east, who's who, where's where etc, but, I am brushing the cobwebs off this stuff. I'll get there.