Che mno and the Holocaust: The History of Hitler's First Death Camp, Patrick Montague (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), xv + 291 pp., hardcover $75.00, e-book available

Abstract

Monographs on facilities established exclusively to annihilate the European Jews are, not surprisingly, rare. Auschwitz-Birkenau has received due attention: its concentration camp function permitted thousands to survive, precluded total destruction of documentation, and still draws worrisome if ineffective outbursts of Holocaust denial.1 Little exists on the Operation Reinhard camps (Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec) and Chełmno.2 Lublin-Majdanek recently has attracted outstanding scholarship, which, despite the titles, casts doubt on its characterization as a killing center.3 As is the case with the Reinhard camps, the dearth of survivors and the destruction of documents as well as both human and material remains, have kept source material on Chełmno thin.4 Seven “work-Jews” escaped Chełmno; six survived the war. Three were in Chełmno for only six weeks, and four others witnessed killing for less than a month in June–July 1944. None were questioned extensively after the war. Neglected, too, were the statements of two members of the Polish forced labor squad that worked Chełmno during both periods of its operation (1941–1943, 1944), and the unpublished memoir of German chief forest marshal Heinz May, whose jurisdiction included the Chełmno burial pits. Most remarkable among the surviving sources was the statement of Szlama Winer, who escaped Chełmno and reached Warsaw in January 1942, only to die in Bełżec later that year.