© Yad Vashem 40 • Frank Grelka

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Rural Hubs of Early Destruction: The Waterworks’ Camps in the Lublin District, 1940-1942, in: Yad Vashem Studies, 45 (2) 2017, pp. 39-67.

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Frank Grelka

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Introduction rom the summer of 1940, Polish Jews from Warsaw and deportees from Central Europe died en masse as forced-laborers in non-industrial labor camps on the periphery of occupied Poland. Roughly 15 to 30 kilometers from Sobibór, these camps wereF established within the marshes around three inflows to the Bug River, and, a year and a half after their erection, they became connected to the setting up of the extermination camp. Since the late Robert Kuwałek, in 2004, pointed to the lack of study about the Chełm-area labor camps, little research has been conducted on this subject. By examining the waterworks’ camps in Chełm county run by the Water Management Inspection (Wasserwirtschaftsinspektion) in the Lublin District,2 this article focuses on the non-industrial forced-labor camps for Jews as one aspect of the Generalgouvernement’s persecution agenda through the use of space in occupied Poland.3

1 I had the good fortune of being able to carry out intensive archival research at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem thanks to a fellowship from the International Institute for Holocaust Research. I also wish to thank Giles Bennett, Mark Keck-Szajbel and Jonathan Singerton for assistance in the final editing of this text. 2 These include Czerniejów, Dorohusk, Kamień, Krychów, Iłowa, Luta, Nowosiółki, Osowa, Ruda Opalin, Sawin, Siedliszcze, Staw-Sajczyce, Tomaszówka, Ujazdów, Włodawa and Żmudź; Józef Marszałek, Obozy pracy w Generalnym Guberna- torstwie w latach 1939–1945 (Lublin: Państwowe Muzeum na Majdanku, 1998), p. 41. 3 Report by the Generalgouvernement on the situation of the Jewish population, July 1940, in Tatiana Berenstein, Artur Eisenbach, and Adam Rutkowski, eds., Ekster- minacja Żydów na ziemiach polskich w okresie okupacji hitlerowskiej; zbior doku- mentów (Warsaw: Jewish Historical Institute, 1957), pp. 86–88. 39 © Yad Vashem 40 • Frank Grelka

On July 26, 1940, Dr. Ernst Gschliesser, deputy head of the Ar- beitsamt (Labor Office) of the Generalgouvernement, issued a decree implementing Jewish forced labor for the first time for all Jews.4 In the context of the planned resettlement of 67,000 Jews from Kraków,5 that order considerably escalated the effects of decrees that had been issued in December 1939, which had targeted only Jewish men.6 Dr. Gschliesser’s decree called on all the labor offices in the Kreis (county) administration to employ Jewish women, children, and the elderly as well. Jewish labor had to be utilized and was to be regarded by Jews as a means to safeguard their families. Three weeks earlier the Labor Office of the Generalgouvernement had ordered that Jewish agencies be responsible for maintaining labor camps.7 According to the decree, state-supplied housing and food in the camps were to be limited, as the local Jewish Councils were to provide most of the housing and food for the workers and their families. Upon the arrival of 2,000 Krakowian Jews for labor deployment in Chełm, the local county head reported to Kraków that it would be impossible to provide them even with the most primitive housing.8 Camp inmates forced to work in a peat mine of the Staw water-drainage camps in Chełm county testified: The Staw camp was just like hell. Slow dying: unsanitary conditions, hunger and illnesses. Here, I was together with my two brothers, one of whom was nine years old. We had to work in the

4 Ernst Gschliesser, Abteilung Arbeit an Leiter der Abteilungen Arbeit, July 26, 1940, Yad Vashem Archives (YVA), O.21/14. 5 Hans Frank wanted his capital, Kraków, to be the most Judenrein site in the Gen eralgouvernement by November 1, 1940. However, until November 1940, about 60,000 Jews still remained in Krakow. Andrea Löw and Markus Roth, Juden in Krakau unter deutscher Besatzung, 1939–1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011), p. 33. 6 Klaus-Peter Friedrich, ed., Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945, Band 4, Polen: September 1939 — Juli 1941 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011), Document 115, pp. 287–288. On the punitive character of the October and December 1939 decrees ordering Jew- ish labor, see Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie En- dowment for International Peace, 1944), pp. 75–76. 7 Abteilung Arbeit, July 5, 1940, on the labor employment of the Jewish population, in Karol Marian Pospieszalski, Hitlerowskie prawo okupacyjne w Polsce, vol. II (Poznań: Instytut Zachodni, 1958), pp. 570–571. 8 Der Kreishauptmann des Kreises Cholm an die Regierung des GG, December 7, 1940, YVA, 1.2.7.7 (document 82177266) /ITS Digital Archives.

open air, walking long distances, return by foot and singing songs. No matter whether it was raining or snowing, we had to work without clothes and shoes, and they located us in an old mill. And we didn’t have even one piece of soap to wash ourselves.9 This study integrates multiple stages of the ghettoization policy in the Generalgouvernment in terms of space10 and addresses the consequences of Gschliesser’s decree on the daily life of Jewish families ex- pelled from urban Jewish residential areas and rounded-up in remote labor camps. It compares the official reading of the July 26 decree with the experience of the victims and the perception of the witnesses and raises the following questions: From where in the German occupation apparatus did the utilization of the Jewish labor force arise? To where were workers relocated? Where did they work? What impact did their deployment have on the inmates’ life expectancy either in the camps or after their return home? Finally, when could Jewish agencies safeguard camp inmates’ elementary needs, and when could they not? Christopher Browning was the first historian to have intensively researched the early phase of Jewish forced labor in Poland. However, he focuses on industrial slave labor, and his results are not applicable for all forms of labor camps in the Generalgouvernement. Likewise, based mainly on German documentation, Wolf Gruner discusses forced utilization of Jews outside the concentration camps systemati- cally and comparatively for various German-occupied territories. He suggests necessary distinctions between organizational forms of Jew- ish forced labor in Poland, including the structure examined in this article.11 Though Tatiana Berenstein mentioned the Chełm waterworks camps in her comprehensive 1959 study about forced-labor camps

9 Testimony by Hela Weiss Fellenbaum from Lublin, Ghetto Fighters’ House (GFH), Archives, collections, 2377. 10 This research was greatly inspired by recent scholarship on various spaces of per secution of Jews: Frank Golczewski, “A Jewish Space in an Extreme Context? Ger- man Ghettoes for Jews in Eastern Europe during World War II,” in Alina Gro- mova, Felix Heinert, and Sebastian Voigt, eds., Jewish and Non-Jewish Spaces in the Urban Context (Berlin: Neofelis, 2015), pp. 105–107; Tim Cole, Holocaust Land- scapes (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, eds., Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). 11 Wolf Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938–1944 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 274.

© Yad Vashem 42 • Frank Grelka in the Lublin District,12 the current state of research regarding non- industrial Jewish forced labor in the Generalgouvernement is patchy.13 As Stephan Lehnstaedt has shown, the German Labor Admin- istration in the Generalgouvernement of Poland established a system of registration, placement, and remuneration of the Jews. The labor offices favored “voluntary” employment, which specifically took ad- vantage of the desperate situation in which the persecuted Jews found themselves. For this reason the majority of the laboring Jewish population worked voluntarily and for little remuneration (in cash or food- stuffs) from 1940 to mid-1942.14 This study sheds light on the remaining 15–20 percent of forced- laborers from the perspectives of Jewish survivor testimony, Polish witness accounts, German government records, and perpetrators’ personal narration. In addition it provides evidence that Jewish labor po- tential in an agricultural context on the Bug River was not a productive part of the Reich’s war economy, but rather an early setting for Hans Frank’s ghettoization agenda aiming at the Jewish urban population in his sphere of influence.

Instead of Madagascar: Governor General Frank’s Provisional Concept of Jewish Labor Frequently historians analyze the economic function of forced labor by Jews chronologically.15 Few have emphazised the profound mean- ing of spatial practices for the Holocaust, despite the fact that German

12 Tatiana Berenstein, “Obozy pracy przymusowej dla Żydów w dystrykcie lubels kim,” Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, vol. 24 (1957), pp. 3–20. 13 Robert Kuwałek, “Getta tranzytowe w dystrykcie lubelskim,” in Dariusz Libionka, ed., Akcja Reinhardt. Zagłada Żydów w Generalnym Gubernatorstwie (Warsaw: In- stytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2004), p. 140, footnote 3. 14 Stephan Lehnstaedt, “Die deutsche Arbeitsverwaltung im Generalgouvernement und die Juden,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 60, no. 3 (2012), p. 439. 15 Bogdan Musial, Deutsche Zivilverwaltung und Judenverfolgung im Generalgou vernement: Eine Fallstudie zum Distrikt Lublin 1939–1944 (Wiesbaden: Harras- sowitz, 1999), pp. 164–70; Dieter Pohl, “Die großen Zwangsarbeitslager der SS- und Polizeiführer für Juden im Generalgouvernement 1942–1945,” in Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth and Christoph Dieckmann, eds., Die nationalsozialistischen Konzen- trationslager, Entwicklung und Struktur, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1998), pp. 415–421; for a recent study about Jewish labor for the Wehrmacht in the Krakow District, see Mario Wenzel, “Die Arbeitslager für Juden im Distrikt Krakau des Generalgouvernements 1940–1941,” in Dieter Pohl and Tanja Sebta, eds., Zwang-

© Yad Vashem Rural Hubs of Early Destruction • 43 authorities in Poland deliberately created a variety of new places where Jews were temporarily concentrated. This was in preparation for racially pure non-Jewish spaces during the ghettoization phase. In the interim Hans Frank constantly required new responses about where to deport Jews after the continual failure of the Reich’s geographic and demographic engineering plans,16 and as Warsaw became increasingly overcrowded with refugees. Tens of thousands of deportees — including 50,000 Jews from the Warthegau region now annexed to the Reich — had found refuge in the city.17 Frank had learned that Jewish labor would heavily burden the Generalgouverne- ment’s budget and refused to allot any funds for concentration camps or labor projects of unknown benefit for the domestic economy.18 Two conferences with his staff, in March and April 1940, led him to con- clude that Jewish labor was economically useless, and his administration should rather aim to literally remove Jewish labor from the supply chain of the Generalgouvernement.19 Thus, one of Frank’s temporary responses to the failure of the overall deportation policy in Poland was the relocation of unemployed Jewish people from the Jewish population concentrations to special water-regulation projects in the Lublin District. Furthermore, his staff elaborated working drafts aimed at the exclusion of Jews from both the nutritional and financial responsibility of the German administration.20

sarbeit in Hitlers Europa. Besatzung, Arbeit und Folgen (Berlin: Metropol, 2013), p. 193. 16 Christian Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 2016), pp. 59–63. 17 Lea Prais, Displaced Persons at Home: Refugees in the Fabric of Jewish Life in War saw, September 1939 — July 1942 (Yad Vashem: Jerusalem, 2015), p. 117. 18 Werner Präg and Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, eds., Das Diensttagebuch des deutschen Generalgouverneurs in Polen, 1939–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1975), entry for January 15, 1940, pp. 87–98. 19 Ibid., March 3, 1940, pp. 139–143; April 24, 1940, pp. 186–188; July 6, 1940, p. 238. 20 The Department of Economy in the Generalgouvernement explained, in June 1940, to Governor Frank that the regulation of prices in the Generalgouvernement de- pended on the significant reduction of public expenses, and recommended a pos- sibly rapid and radical solution of the Jewish problem as “urgently required”; Amt des Generalgouverneur für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete, Abteilung Preisbil- dung (Dr. Schulte Wissermann): Die Preisbildung im Generalgouvernment, June 14, 1940, Bundesarchiv Berlin (BA Berlin), R 52 VI/5d; for the nexus between nu- trional expectation and a desired ghettoization or Jewish forced labor, see also Amt des Generalgouverneur für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete, Abteilung Preisbil-

The Generalgouvernement labor administration perceived the labor camps as an operational option in order to alleviate the demographic problem in Warsaw. Orders now called for the relocation of complete Jewish families from the urban centers to sites near building projects that need a larger work force.21 One reason that the Frank administration favored waterworks may have been the fact that there were already twenty-eight water-drainage departments with detainment camps, a relic from the previous Polish administration. This network also in- cluded 350 Polish engineers and 1,200 Polish foremen supervised by just thirty-five German officials from the Division of Nutrition and Ag- riculture in the department of the head of the Lublin District Office.22 Bruno Streckenbach, the Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei-und SD (BdS) of the Generalgouvernement, criticized Frank’s labor program for Jews one month later. The BdS in Krakow evaluated the government’s Jewish labor deployment as being “without a plan,” noting that Frank did not even attempt to exploit Jewish water-drainage labor with any economic sense. The administration would starve Jews to death, whereas Streckenbach tried to persuade Frank to put the Jews under the supervision of the SS. Frank’s reply to Streckenbach on the “National Socialist task in the East” was astonishingly straightforward: “The deployment of the Jews must be settled determinately.”23 Starting in August 1940, the German labor administration took segments of the Jewish population out of their urban residences and relocated them to the Lublin District labor camps on a regular basis for “staatspolitisch besonders bedeutsame Aufgaben im Generalgou- vernement” (“tasks in the Generalgouvernement of particular political

dung (Dr. Schulte Wissermann): Allgemeiner Versorgungsplan 1940/41, May 28, 1940, BA Berlin, R 52 VI/5d. 21 See Longerich’s interpretation about the consequences of concentration of Jews in areas that “…lacked adequate living conditions and to cause…death…through undernourishment, epidemics, low birth rates…”; Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 423. 22 Georg Claus, Leiter der Abteilung Ernährung und Landwirtschaft beim Chef des Distrikts Lublin, Die Ernährungswirtschaft und Landwirtschaft im Distrikt Lublin: Stand und Entwicklung der Abteilung Ernährung ung Landwirtschaft beim Chef des Distrikts Lublin bis 30 Juni 1940 (Lublin: Adam Szczuka, 1940), p. 65; Präg and Ja- cobmeyer, eds., Diensttagebuch, April 24, 1940, pp. 189–191; Das Generalgouverne- ment, year 1, no. 5 (February 1941), p. 27. 23 Präg and Jacobmeyer, eds., Diensttagebuch, May 30, 1940, pp. 216–218.

© Yad Vashem Rural Hubs of Early Destruction • 45 importance to the state”).24 Put in remote work camps, Jews were declared “ineligible for supplies.”25 Simultaneously subsidies were with- drawn from local Judenräte,26 and the administration of labor was given over to Jewish institutions.27 As early as July 1940, the Depart- ment of Nutrition and Agriculture in the Lublin District already deployed 10,000 Jewish workers in their water-drainage camps. The department’s chief contentedly noted in his report that the drainage of agricultural land in the district would be a task for “years to come,” and the connection of the deployment of Jews with water-drainage labor would therefore stand as an “obvious choice.”28 Three months after the ghetto in Warsaw was formally established, the head of the Department for Resettlement in Warsaw, Wal- demar Schön, announced an economic agenda for financing the Jew- ish population, which he overestimated as 590,000 people by January 1941. Since the ghetto was overcrowded, Schön envisioned the Trans- ferstelle, which he had created in December 1940 as the economic intermediary between the ghetto and the outside world, as an import/ export business with the sole purpose to have the Jewish labor force deployed in and outside the ghetto and paid by German employers. This would refinance the expenses for supplying the ghetto population. Among the Jewish ghetto population Schön identified 200,000 laborers; he considered 115,000 of them as unskilled and unemployed Jews who were to be deployed in labor platoons for road construction and water-drainage work. The intention of Schön’s quasi-economic program can be derived from the last sentence of the paper he gave in the presence of Frank: labor in and outside the Warsaw ghetto was a pro- visionary solution, a preliminary stage (“Vorstufe”) of the “utilization of the Jewish work force in Madagascar” envisioned by the Führer.29

24 Abteilung Arbeit an den Generalgouverneur: Tätigkeitsbericht für den Monat Au gust 1940, September 3, 1940, BA Berlin, R 52 III/18. 25 Präg and Jacobmeyer, eds., Diensttagebuch, July 6, 1940, p. 238. 26 For the subsidies of the Generalgouvernement to the Jewish Council in Lublin for 1941, see Witold Medykowski, Between Slavery, Extermination and Survival: Forced Labor of Jews in the General Government during the Years 1939–1943 (Ph.D. dissertation, Hebrew University, 2012), pp. 117–119. 27 Minutes of the meeting of the Jewish Council in Lublin, May 4, 1940, YVA, 1.2.7.7 (document 82179726-28) /ITS Digital Archive, Yad Vashem. 28 Georg Claus, Die Ernährungswirtschaft, p. 63. 29 Referat des Leiters der Abteilung Umsiedlung im Distrikt Warschau über die Bildung des Jüdischen Wohnbezirks, January 20, 1941, BA Berlin, R 102 I/2.

In the following sections their true ideas regarding Jewish labor are discussed.

Relocating Jews from the Urban Centers to Remote Labor Camps On the operational level, an informal agreement existed between the SS and the Generalgouvernement on the running of Jewish labor camps as a form of indirect physical destruction in the Lublin Dis- trict.30 In the framework of an overall consensus about the provisional character of the persecution measures, organizational disagreements and power struggles between the civil administration and the SS over the purpose of Jewish labor31 are not to be mistaken for an inability to collaborate on the personal level or disagreements of principle on Nazi antisemitism. The following example shall illustrate the highly pragmatic relationship between the Waterworks Inspection and the SS in the Lublin District. In a letter dated July 10, 1940, for example, Regierungsbaurat Dr. Georg Haller, Water Management Engineer, Water Works Office, Lublin (Ingenieur für Wasserbau beim Amt für Wasserwirtschaft in Lublin), asked the representative of the district SSPF, Dr. Hofbauer, to provide 3,660 additional Jewish workers for the waterworks’ labor camps. Two issues are relevant in the note to Hofbauer as the Juden- referent for the district (whose main task was to coordinate the deployment of Jewish workers)32. First, Haller knowingly ignored new regulations from a July 1940 agreement between Frank and the SS that applications for Jewish labor had to be made to local labor offices, and went straight to the SS in asking for new Jews.33 Second, one month after the first water-drainage camps came into existence, Haller, in the

30 This is a parallel case to Alberti, who gives evidence that the mass destruction of Jews in regional labor camps of the Warthegau started much earlier than the gas- sing of the Jews in Chełmno from December 1941; Michael Alberti, Die Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Juden im Reichsgau Wartheland, 1939–1945 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006), p. 301. 31 David Silberklang, Gates of Tears: The Holocaust in the Lublin District (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2013), pp. 131–137. 32 Musial, Deutsche Zivilverwaltung, p. 116. 33 Regierung des GG, Abteilung Arbeit an u.a. den Kommmandeur der Sicher heitspolizei und SD, August 20, 1940, Archiwum Państwowe w Lublinie (APL), Amt des Distrikts Lublin, 498/745.

© Yad Vashem Rural Hubs of Early Destruction • 47 same letter to Hofbauer, described the need to replace 1,410 slave laborers already unable to work.34 Two weeks later the Lublin administration reported that another seven waterworks’ camps with provision for 1,100 workers had been established in Chełm county with the help of Jewish workers from the ghetto in Bełżyce under SS command.35 In the meantime the SS rounded up another 7,296 Jews for forced labor during police raids throughout the Lublin District.36 Within that context, on August 23, 1940, the waterworks inspection reported to Krakow that the SS had delivered 3,628 Jewish forced-laborers of the 3,660 Haller had asked for earlier in July. However, the waterworks department sought another 2,800 workers for their camps, and Haller informed Krakow that he had agreed with the SS on the supply of Jews from deportation trains for agricultural camps in the Lublin District.37 Finally, the police took 1,300 Jewish forced-laborers from Warsaw and Radom deportation trains to Lublin without following the proper administrative procedure.38 From there the employment offices of the Judenrat in Lublin sent them on to the labor camps in Chełm county.39 An interrogation of Haller by a West German prosecutor, in the 1960s, sheds further light on the practice of “recruitment” of additional workers. Haller described the transport of around 100 Jews to Włodawa water-drainage camps after the liquidation of the Bełżec forced-labor camp for Jews in October 1940. Waterworks engineers from Chełm bribed SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Dolp with alcohol

34 Chef Distrikt Lublin, Abteilung Ernährung und Landwirtschaft, Gruppe V Was serwirtschaft an den SS- und Polizeiführer Dr. Hofbauer, July 10, 1940, APL, Amt des Distrikts Lublin, 498/746. 35 Abt. Innere Verwaltung, Vermerk, Lublin, July 23, 1940, GFH, archives, 1345. 36 “Aufstellung über die bisherige Verteilung der jüdischen Zwangsarbeiten,” un dated, APL, Amt des Distrikts Lublin, 498/749; the document dates the aforemen- tioned raid to August 14, 1940, and confirms the number of Jews rounded up for forced labor in the Bełżec labor camp by the SS: Thomas Blatt, Nur die Schatten bleiben. Der Aufstand im Vernichtungslager Sobibor (Berlin: Aufbau-Taschenbuch- Verlag, 2000), p. 30. 37 Chef Distrikt Lublin, Abteilung Ernährung und Landwirtschaft, Gruppe V Was serwirtschaft an GG, Abteilung Arbeit, August 28, 1940, APL, Amt des Distrikts Lublin, 498/746. 38 GG, Abteilung Arbeit, August 28, 1940, APL, Amt des Distrikts Lublin, 498/746. 39 Chef des Distrikts Lublin an das Amt des GG, Lagebericht für den Monat Dezem ber 1940, January 8, 1941; YVA, 1.2.7.7 (document 82177455) ITS Digital Archives, Yad Vashem.

© Yad Vashem 48 • Frank Grelka and money. In addition, they threatened to file a complaint against Globocnik on account of the unlawful deportation of “their Jews” from Włodawa by the SS.40 What Haller concealed was that they themselves were previously bribed by the Chełm Judenrat to relocate Jews from the labor camps at Bełźec to the waterworks’ camp in Włodawa, as a Jewish survivor later testified.41 In order to discover the spatial pattern of this racially and economically motivated oppression, we need to properly quantify this topography of ghettoization. In February 1941, the Water Management Inspection in Lublin ordered a further 22,000 Jews from Warsaw for their waterworks’ camps. Robert Kuwałek estimates that, during the entire year, 25,000 inmates were in all Lublin waterworks’ camps taken together.42 As to some exact numbers of Jewish workers in the camps,43 in May 1943, when most of the Lublin water-drainage camps were liquidated in the course of “Aktion Reinhard,” Lublin Water Management Engineer Haller produced an account about workers’ performance in his camps. According to Haller, a maximum of 35,807 forced-laborers were dispatched, over the years 1940–1942, to all sixty-seven water- drainage camps in the district; fifty-six of them were forced-labor camps for Jews.44

40 Witness account by Georg Haller, staff of German Water Management Group, BA Ludwigsburg, B 162/3742; see also Innere Verwaltung and Regierung des GG: Ihre Anfrage wegen Auflösung des Judenlagers in Belzec und vorhandene Mißstände, October 21, 1940, GFH, Archives, collections no. 1345; on Hermann Dolp and the forced-labor camp in Belzec, see David Silberklang, “Willful Murder in the Lublin District,” in Michael L. Morgan and Benjamin Pollock, eds., The Philosopher as Witness: Fackenheim and Responses to the Holocaust (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008), pp. 185–205. 41 Testimony of Zelda Metz from Siedliszcze given to the Jewish Historical Commis sion in Poland on May 11, 1945; YVA, M. 49/458. 42 Chef des Distrikts Lublin an das Amt des GG, Lagebericht für den Monat Februar 1941, March 6, 1941, YVA, 1.2.7.7 (document 82177458) ITS Digital Archives, Yad Vashem; Robert Kuwałek, Obóz Zagłady w Bełżcu (Lublin: Państwowe Muzeum na Majdanku, 2010), p. 24. 43 Earlier Raul Hilberg discussed forty-five waterworks’ camps with 10,000 Jewish workers; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, third edition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), vol. 1, p. 256; Marszałek estimates 40,000 inmates for all water-drainage camps based on Polish judicial records, Marszałek, Obozy pracy, p. 56. 44 Zusammenstellung der Leistungen der Baujahre 1940, 1941 und 1942 in den 5 Dis trikten, übergeben von Haller, Georg, Krakau, May 1943, BA Berlin, R 52-VI/25.

More research needs to be conducted on the qualitative connection between resettlement from in and outside the Generalgouverne- ment to the Lublin District and the Jewish workers in the camps. Recently historian David Silberklang has importantly turned our at- tention to at least 37,000 Jews who were deported to the district between October 1940 and June 1941,45 an unknown number of which obviously ended up in the water-drainage camps. In the following two sections, this study seeks to reveal how two waterworks’ camps in the Chełm area, Luta and Krychów, became another landscape of the Nazi ghettoization policy.

The Luta Waterworks Camp— Lethal Conditions in an Agricultural Environment Until 1939, the county of Chełm had roughly equal numbers of Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, which was characteristic of many of the eastern areas of the Second Polish Republic. In prosecuting former perpetrators the postwar regional Lublin public prosecutor’s office had to con- tend with the very different circumstances of eradicated local com- munities in the German-occupied territories. For this purpose Polish prosecutors had to recreate the neighborhoods in which these crimes had been committed.46 These sources include a wide range of reports about the inmates’ lives and deaths in the Chełm labor-camp system, as well as detailed geographic descriptions of the Holocaust in such neighborhoods. For some reason, however, these have been rarely used by historians. Poles and Ukrainians who had previously lived in these areas also remained there during the war and postwar periods, and had an inti- mate knowledge about social relations.47 Even if one critically assumes that most of these residents kept silent about their own roles in the crimes of the labor camps, they were not simply uninvolved witnesses. Ethnic Polish and Ukrainian residents were in fact a fundamental ele-

45 Silberklang, Gates of Tears, pp. 162, 170–171. 46 For an overview, see Alina Ewa Gałan, Okręgowa Komisja Badania Zbrodni przeci wko Narodowi Polskiemu w Lublinie, 1944–1999 (Lublin: Paprykastudio, 2010). 47 On survivor testimonies as a “spatial trajectory,” see Dan Stone, “Holocaust Spac es,” in Paolo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca, eds., Hitler’s Geographies: The Spatiality of the Third Reich (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), pp. 52–55.

© Yad Vashem 50 • Frank Grelka ment in the geographic, economic, and criminal structure of the labor camps. Non-Jewish residents were highly aware of demographic changes in their villages, and, as such, were an integral part of what historian Omer Bartov calls a community of genocide.48 In the case of the Chełm waterworks’ camps, the community of genocide had two dimensions. First, they witnessed the destruction of a very recogniz- able Jewish population in their villages; and, second, non-Jewish witnesses would not have forgotten the smell and bellows of smoke from the industrial process of Sobibór, the extermination camp erected in their neighborhood. The water-drainage camp in Luta existed between July 1940 and late 1943, and encompassed an area ranging from 3,600 square me- ters up to 1.5 hectares. Accounts describe a barbed-wire fence about as high as that used for fencing in cattle on the former land of a Polish farmer. Jewish laborers and their families lived in barracks made of two barns and one cattle-shed, as was also frequently the case in the fifteen surrounding waterworks’ camps.49 For three years the camp became the center of Luta, a village that, prior to the arrival of the outside Jews, numbered no more than 400 Polish and Ukrainian residents. In July 1940, the water-management inspector, Haller, informed the SSPF of Lublin of his requirement of one guard per six workers.50 In fact, no more than two ethnic Germans from the Sonderdienst, the “only reliable force available to local civilian offices,”51 were in charge of the waterworks’ camps. Usually the commander of Luta was also in charge of the water- drainage camp in the village of Osowa, a 6-kilometer walk from Luta.

48 Omer Bartov, “Communal Genocide: Personal Accounts of the Destruction of Buczacz, Eastern Galicia, 1941–1944,” in Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz, eds., Shat- terzone of Empire. Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), p. 404. 49 Edward Dziadosz and Józef Marszałek, “Więzenia i obozy w dystrykcie lubelskim w latach 1939–1944,” Zeszyty Majdanka, III (1969), pp. 70–71; according to a Ger- man official report, the first water-drainage camps to which Jews were brought, in the summer of 1940, were established in former Polish detainment camps, school buildings, barns, and private houses; Claus, Die Ernährungswirtschaft, pp. 63–64. 50 Chef Distrikt Lublin, Abteilung Ernährung und Landwirtschaft, Gruppe V Was serwirtschaft an den SS- und Polizeiführer Dr. Hofbauer, July 10, 1940, APL, Amt des Distrikts Lublin, 498/746. 51 Peter Black, “Indigenous Collaboration in the Government General: The Case of the Sonderdienst,” in Pieter M. Judson and Marsha M. Rozenblit eds., Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2005), p. 256.

A detailed account by a Ukrainian resident states that the SS had liquidated the Luta camp for the first time in October 1941. Then there were mainly Jewish male workers from the Warsaw ghetto; 150 Jews were executed, and the remainder were relocated to the Krychów labor camp. The waterworks management enlarged the Luta camp in November 1941, and added four wooden guard towers by using the labor of the Jewish workers and the local village population. Starting in March 1942, Luta functioned as a transit camp to Sobibór. From this point until October 1943, local witnesses recalled an average of 1,000 deportees at any given moment, aged two to fifty years old, to Luta from Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands.52 What labor did the Jews perform there? The waterworks management forced slave laborers to work on drying the marshes along the Krzywianki River. Both Jewish and non-Jewish accounts confirm that most Jewish workers had to dig in the marshes without footwear for entire days, and epidemics broke out due to a lack of sanitary facilities and drinking water.53 The rarely received food rations from relatives were insufficient for survival over these long periods. Jewish survivors reported that the food supply was sometimes particularly poor in the Chelm water-drainage works’ camps at different times, where the daily supply of bread ranged from 100 to 500 grams.54 Witnesses reported about inmates dying from starvation, exposure to the elements, the sheer volume of labor, and disease. These were the reasons for the extremely high mortality rate in the Luta camp. In the summer of 1941, the German administration of the War- saw ghetto criticized the extraordinary harsh working conditions in the waterworks’ camps. The draining of marshes exhausts the human organism so much that, even for Polish workers before the war, when nutritional conditions were quite normal, the work duration could not ex- ceed three weeks, after which point there had to be a break or a replacement worker. It is therefore obvious that the work done by Jews, already malnourished and exhausted after twenty months of war, could frequently be unproductive and this had to result in

52 Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (IPN) Lublin Archives, IPN Lu 284/446. 53 Report by an envoy of the Jewish Council in Warsaw to camps in Sawin, Krychow, Sajczyce and Osowa, 1941, YVA, M.10/AR.1/385 (Ring I/385/5-6). 54 Testimony by Zygmunt Krawczak, YVA, O.33/425.

downright catastrophic consequences for the health and even for the life of the camp prisoners. 55 In his nine-year investigation into the Luta labor camp, the Polish prosecutor documented the inhuman conditions at the camp: inmates slept on bare planks without heating, medical care, or medicine.56 From the spring of 1942, executions of sick workers became a daily occurrence, with corpses buried either in the camp or in a nearby forest. Witness- es date the second and final liquidation of the Luta camp to October 1943, when the SS camp commandant ordered the transport of 200 slave laborers to Sobibór and another 150 inmates to waterworks in the Osowa camp. Six hundred former Jewish inmates of the Luta camp were executed in the nearby Kutuszej forest.57 Local residents near the camp at Sawin reported burying exhausted Jewish laborers in their water-drainage trenches dug during the drainage of the swamps.58 At that point most of the water-drainage camp inmates were liquidated, save for a small group of workers left behind until November 1943, in the biggest camp of the waterworks’ network in Chełm county — Krychów.

A Multifunctional Gate to Sobibór: The Krychów Waterworks Camp Waterworks’ camps in the Lublin District are a very complex example of what Christian Gerlach calls the interrelationship of economics and ideology.59 Beyond the various concepts and ideas of German decision- makers, this becomes especially evident if we place the actual spaces of Jewish forced labor into topographical perspective, as the following focus on the Krychów camp demonstrates. In July 1940, the Polish local administration in the village of Hańsk received an order from the Lublin District to arrange the camp

55 Kommissar für den jüdischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau an die Abteilung Bevölkerungswesen und Fürsorge beim GG in Krakau, June 30, 1941, YVA, 1.2.7.7(82182097) /ITS Digital Archives, Yad Vashem. 56 Final Report by Prosecutor B.W., February 26, 1976, on his investigation since Oc tober 26, 1967, Archives of Polish Prosecutor Office at Lublin, OKL, Ds 49/67. 57 IPN Lublin Archives, IPN Lu 284/446. 58 Witness account by F. C., Archives of Polish Prosecutor Office at Lublin, OKL, Ds 252/67. 59 Gerlach, Extermination, p. 184.

© Yad Vashem Rural Hubs of Early Destruction • 53 in nearby Krychów for a transport of 600 Sinti and Roma.60 On May 20, 1940, the transport from Hamburg via Bełżec with Sinti and Roma forced-laborers who survived the SS “Otto-Project” (border excava- tions between Germany and the Soviet Union) arrived.61 According to witnesses, the deportees could not speak Polish, exchanged their clothes for food, and begged for money. Jewish accounts report that many Roma died of starvation.62 The first group of Jewish workers came to Krychów from War- saw in August 1940. Starting in the summer of 1940, the Department for the Supply of Labor Camps (part of the Judenrat in Warsaw) organized continuous transports of Jewish workers between the Warsaw ghetto and the Chełm waterworks. Polish postwar investigations confirm that at least 11,000 Jewish inmates from other persecution sites passed through the water-drainage camp in Krychów, which fulfilled multiple functions between 1940 and 1943.63 When the swamps froze in the winter of 1940/1941, it became a kind of “winter camp” for Jew- ish workers from all the surrounding Chełm labor camps. Krychów had two large bricked barracks from the pre-war era, when it had served as a detention camp for Polish criminals. In Sep- tember 1941, Krychów stopped functioning temporarily. All those who were still able to work, as well as three men from the Jewish Police remained in the labor camp.64 By the end of 1941, the Krychów camp became spatially inter- connected with another important site of Holocaust topography. Until March 1942, laborers from Krychów constructed the wooden barracks of Sobibór,65 and, during the first phase of “Operation Reinhardt,”

60 For a detailed description of conditions in the Krychów labor camp, see testimo ny by Zbigniew Sierpiński, Karny obóz pracy Krychów, August 1970, Archiwum Państwowego Muzeum na Majdanku, VII/0-80. 61 Kuwałek, Obóz Zagłady w Bełżcu, pp. 38–39. 62 Testimony of the witness Cander, Trial Documentation Collected in Israel for Tri als of War Criminals, Tel Aviv, December 11, 1962, Intermediary Report no. 1, 12–13, YVA, O.4/338. 63 Minutes of the Police in Dubeczno, November 27, 1967, Archives of Polish Pros ecutor’s Office at Lublin, OKL, Ds 49/67. 64 Report of the Jewish Policeman Szmul Siwka to the German Ghetto Administration in Warsaw, September 9, 1941, in Klaus-Peter Friedrich, ed., Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945, Band 9, Polen: Generalgouvernement August 1941–1945 (Munich: Old- enbourg, 2014), Document 6, pp. 74–75. 65 Testimony by Zygmunt Krawczak, YVA, O.33/425; on Sobibór being constructed

© Yad Vashem 54 • Frank Grelka between March and July 1942, Krychów was mainly a transit camp to Sobibór for deportees from Slovakia and Theresienstadt, as well as from Jewish ghettos in the area.66 When exterminations temporarily halted in July 1942, the Nazis forced Jewish prisoners from Krychów to work on the modernization of Sobibór. From October 1942, Krychów became both a transit camp and a concentration camp for reserve workers and prisoner functionaries who made up the Sonderkommando for extermination in Sobibór.67 This was the first time since the inception of the waterworks’ camps in the area that the Germans attempted to exploit non-industrial Jewish labor in the economic sense. A surviving Czech Jew remem- bered that, following a selection of a transport from Theresienstadt with 1,000 prisoners, the SS transferred 500 Jews from Sobibór to the waterworks’ camp in Sawin.68 A Jewish survivor from Slovakia, who escaped the Lublin District in 1943, reported that, after their arrival at Sobibór, the German staff separated Jewish mechanics, locksmiths, and watchmakers, and relocated them to the Krychów labor camp. As Krychów became a part of the extermination process at Sobibór, Jew- ish survivors testify that the food supply at Krychów improved considerably from late 1942: After December 9, 1942, we got a bread ration of 400 to 500 grams per day and a thick potato soup at noon. They gave us good iron

by Jews, see Shimon Kanc, ed., Memorial Book for Wlodawa and the Sobibor Area (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Włodawa Immigrants’ Association in Israel, 1974), pp. 667– 668. Already in 1944, Krawczak reported to a Swiss newspaper about the existence of the mass-extermination camp, indicating that Sobibór was erected by 120 Jews from the Krychów waterworks’ camp; Zygmunt Krawczak, “Das Todeslager von Sobibor,” in Berner Tagwacht, August 9, 1944. 66 Martin Dean and Geoffrey Megargee, eds., The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, vol. 2, Part A (Blooming- ton and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2012), p. 624. 67 Figures on the number of Jews employed for the maintenance of the extermination camp have been estimated as high as 1,000; Marek Bem, Sobibór. Obóz zagłady (Warsaw: Rytm, 2014), p. 207. A Jewish testimony mentioned 600 people doing all manner of works; Kanc, Memorial Book for Wlodawa, p. 48. Krawczak confirms the number of 1,000 functional prisoners transferred from Sobibór to the waterworks’ camps Krychów, Sawin, and Osowa, for the maintenance of the extermination process; Krawczak, “Das Todeslager von Sobibor.” 68 Mirosław Marek Dederko, Żydowska Gmina Wyznaniowa w Sawinie (Sawin: Czułczyce 2002), p. 81.

bedsteads, and washing accommodations. With the improvement of sanitary conditions, the state of health much improved and only three of the 110 people who had originally remained died since then, as a result of the prevailing conditions…69 An interaction between Jews, non-Jews, and the SS captures one unknown spatial aspect of the Chełm water-drainage camps: local Pol- ish witness accounts testify to the use of local farmers’ carriages in transporting Jewish children to Sobibór upon arrival. A Polish resident of Hańsk, the village nearby Krychów, estimates the number of Jews transported between Sobibór and Krychów at 5,000. Poles who convoyed their carriages to Sobibór with Jews who were not able to walk consistently testify that they usually were given an order that the village leader (Sołtys) received from the Germans.70 In June 1943, the waterworks management at Lublin shut down the remaining camps of the Wasserwirtschaft in Osowa, Nowosiółki, Sawin, and Sajczyce, and relocated surviving prisoners to Krychów. According to Polish local residents, the last transfer of about 700–1,000 inmates to Sobibór took place in August 1943, on a 1-km.-long trek of marchers and carriages.71 The remaining thirty-six functional prisoners were probably shot one month after Sobibór was liquidated.72

The Economic Significance of Drainage Labor: German Plans and Jewish Practices Until the winter of 1939, the initial goal of the German occupiers was to perform “land-improving construction work in order to secure the nutrition of the Reich.”73 Within the framework of a territorially defined

69 Testimony of a Slovak Jew who returned from Poland, dated August 17, 1943, GFH, Archives of the He-Halutz movement in Slovakia, collections no. 29757; see also Megargee and Dean, eds., Encyclopedia, vol. 2, Part A, pp. 624, 705. 70 Account by P.M., May 20, 1966, Archives of Polish Prosecutor’s Office at Lublin, OKL, Ds 49/67; Account by H. Sz., November 10, 1967, Archives of Polish Prosecu- tor’s Office at Lublin, OKL Ds 49/67. 71 Account of J.K., December 11, 1967, Archives of Polish Prosecutor’s Office at Lub lin, Lublin, OKL, Ds 49/67. 72 Account of P.M., May 20, 1966, Archives of Polish Prosecutor’s Office at Lublin, Lublin, OKL, Ds 49/67. 73 Kreishauptmann des Kreises Chelm an den Chef des Distrikts Lublin, September 18, 1941, APL, Amt des Distrikts Lublin, 498/746.

“civilizing” living space project in the area around Lublin, Himmler and the SS had the long-term goal to dry out rivers, meadows, and marshes in order to gain large agricultural areas for future German cultivation. However, when the concrete preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union got underway, the authorities in Berlin gave up on the plans for agricultural expansion in the Lublin District in early 1940. Generally, water-infrastructure projects in the Lublin District were designated for the draining of farmland only, to be completed within ten to twenty years after the war, as testified to in reports by German water-management engineers who were in charge.74 In fact, the correspondence between Berlin ministries and the Generalgou- vernement administration shows that among infrastructural water- management projects for an interim improvement of hydroelectricity generation, the artificial regulation of the Vistula River was prioritized over agricultural draining of marshes along the Bug River.75 Contem- porary German statistics show that the productivity of Jewish forced- laborers in the Lublin water-drainage camps was significantly lower than that of similar camps on the Vistula River in the districts of War- saw and Radom.76 But what about the economic significance of water-drainage labor camps from the perspective of Jewish agencies in the Generalgou- vernement? The employment of thousands of dislocated Jews from the ghettos and from Central Europe in the Chełm camps would not have been possible without the cooperation of local Jewish Councils in the forced-labor initiative.77 Since the Gschliesser decree, the Jewish Councils were commissioned to administrate the camps along the Bug

74 Handakten des Oberregierungsrates Rudolf Krause von der Wasserwirtschaftsver waltung im GG, 1940–1943, BA Berlin, R 52-VI/24. 75 Bericht Dr. Kadgien, Oberregierungsrat beim Beauftragten für den Vierjah resplan über die Reise nach Krakau, January 31, 1940, Rossiiskii Gosudarstvenni Voennyi Arkhiv, Moscow, f. 700, op. 1, d. 27; Vereinbarung zwischen dem Re- ichsverkehrsminister und dem Generalgouverneur, August 19, 1940, BA Berlin R 4604/529; Der Generalgouverneur: Erlass über Massnahmen zum Aufbau der Energieversorgung im Generalgouvernement, October 17, 1940, BA Berlin R 4604/529. 76 Zusammenstellung der Leistungen der Baujahre 1940, 1941 und 1942 in den 5 Dis trikten, übergeben von Georg Haller, Krakau, May 1943, BA Berlin, R 52-VI/25. 77 From the outset Jewish Councils were responsible for the deployment of Jewish labor; “Judenwesen” department of the Generalgouvernement, July 1, 1940, in Friedrich, ed., Verfolgung und Ermordung der Europäischen Juden, Band 4, Docu- ment 130, pp. 314–316.

River.78 While in the Warthegau or other occupied territories it was usually the German labor administration or the police that controlled the Jewish labor force, in the Generalgouvernement Jewish institutions had to maintain non-industrial labor camps for ghetto inhabitants or otherwise displaced Jewish persons from the outset. Thus, the recruitment of workers from the ghettos,79 the welfare and supply of food and housing for the families, the payment of SS staff and Jewish Po- licemen, and, theoretically, the paying out of wages to Jewish camp inmates were made the sole responsibility of the Jewish Councils.80 In Warsaw, the Jewish Council and the Jewish Self-Help (JSS) cooperated closely on the labor-camp issue. On August 20, 1940, the head of the Warsaw Judenrat, Adam Czerniaków, reported the weekly recruitment of 1,000 Jews for labor deployment. Three days later, Holtzheimer, the head of the Wasserwirtschaft in Chełm, forced Czerniaków to provide 500 forced-laborers in the waterworks’ camp in Jozefów in the Lublin District with supplies.81 In February 1941, the Warsaw Judenrat appointed a Commit- tee for the Affairs of Forced-labor Camps (Komitet do Spraw Obozów Pracy). Gustav Wielikowski, a member of the board of the JSS, was appointed head of the committee. The main function of this new committee was the recruitment of workers according to a quota set by the Arbeitsamt in Warsaw of Jewish workers for the waterworks’ camps.82

78 In a way the Jewish Councils were de facto the employer of the Chelm forced-labor camps; in this context, see the initiative for water-drainage camps in the Warsaw District to employ a Jewish subcontractor who would be more or less autonomous with regard to the command of the camps; Correspondence German Warsaw Ghetto administration, Warsaw, July 10, 1941 YVA, ITS, Ref. Code 9031100. 79 Zygmunt Klukowski, Zamojszczyzna, vol. 1 (Warsaw: Karta, 2008), pp. 175–176; Friedrich, ed., Verfolgung und Ermordung der Europäischen Juden, Band 4, Docu- ment 115, pp. 287–288; for the practice of recruitment of Jews for forced labor, see also ibid., Documents 53 and 69, pp. 170–171, 197. 80 Tatiana Berenstein, “Żydzi warszawscy w obozach pracy przymusowej,” Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytut Historycznego, vol. 67 (1968) pp. 60–61; on the payment issue in the internal discussion of the Generalgouvernement administration, see Friedrich, ed., Verfolgung und Ermordung der Europäischen Juden, Band 4, Docu- ment 154, pp. 353–354. 81 Adam Czerniaków, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow: Prelude to Doom, ed ited by Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz (New York: Stein & Day, 1979), pp. 188–189. 82 Gustaw Wielikowski to JSS Krakau, April 24, 1941, ŻIH, 211/27. The collaboration between the Jewish Council and the Water Economy Administration in the Gen- eralgouvernement is confirmed by a German source: Bericht über die Arbeiten der

Over the course of nineteen deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to the Lublin District in the spring of 1941, 2,200 new laborers were di- rected to the camps in Krychów, Sajczyce, Osowa, and Sawin. Accord- ing to a recent edition of documents from the Ringelblum archives on the topic of forced-labor camps, 11,425 Jews were transported from the ghetto to various non-industrial camps throughout the General- gouvernement between January and November 1941.83 The JSS head office in Krakow was well aware of the living conditions of the Jews in the Chełm camps, and reported to the German authorities that employment in waterworks’ camps posed a risk to health as well as to life.84 From the beginning of July 1940, the Lublin Judenrat accepted compensation payments from Jewish workers who tried to avoid forced labor in the Chełm camps.85 The Lublin Judenrat used such compensation payments for Jewish hospitals in Lublin.86 Howev- er, by the end of July 1940, the Judenrat declared financial bankruptcy and its inability to pay wages to the German Arbeitsamt for the Jewish workers in the camps. In the same memorandum the Lublin Judenrat unsuccessfully tried to persuade the latter to exempt it from paying the wages to the workers in the camps and offered to recruit 250 Jewish workers on a daily basis for the SS and the German Arbeitsamt in return.87 By end of the year, the Judenrat decided to introduce a monthly fee to be paid by all Jews in the district toward financing the forced- labor camps from January 1, 1941, onward.88

Wasserwirtschaftsverwaltung des GG f.d. Baujahr 1941 von Oberbaurat Baumgär- tel, übergeben von Georg Haller, 1941, BA Berlin, R 52-VI/25. 83 Warszawa-getto. N.N., Raport, Transporty robotników do obozów pracy w 1941 r., Marta Janczewska, ed., Archiwum Ringelbluma. Konspiracjyne Archiwum Getta Warszawy, vol. 24: Obozy pracy przymusowej (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwer- sytetu Watszawskiego, 2015), pp. 8–12. 84 “JSS an die Abteilung Bevölkerungswesen und Fürsorge im GG,” May 5, 1941, YVA, O.21/14. 85 For an early example of the compensative payments made to the department of la bor of the Jewish Council in Kalisz, see ŻIH Ring I/783, report to the Ringelblum archives quoted from Friedrich, ed., Verfolgung und Ermordung der Europäischen Juden, Band 4, Document 47, p. 158; as well as the Commission of Polish Jewry in Jerusalem to the U.S. Department of State, May 1941, ibid., document 291, pp. 646–647. 86 Lublin Jewish Council Minutes, July 13, 1940, APL, Rada Żydowska w Lublinie, 891/4. 87 Judenrat Lublin an den Herrn SS- und Polizeiführer im Gouvernement Lublin, July 29, 1940, APL, Rada Żydowska w Lublinie, 891/26. 88 Lublin Judenrat Minutes, December 28, 1940, APL, Rada Żydowska w Lublinie, 891/4.

At the same time, survivor accounts consistently document how corruption pervaded all aspects of the process of starvation in the waterworks’ camps. A Jewish envoy to the Warsaw Judenrat reported for July 1941, that inmates of the Krychów camp would offer their wages to the Jewish Order Policemen in exchange for food because of the severe hunger, and sick Jews would usually bribe camp police in order to see the labor-camp doctor in Krychów.89 Obviously, from an economic viewpoint, inefficient water-drainage projects financially burdened Jewish institutions more than any other organized form of Jewish labor. Nevertheless, the mere existence of Jewish labor camps was an important spatial factor that legitimized the existence of Jewish agencies. Particularly in dealing with the Germans, Jewish agencies often tried to stretch the narrow limits of their official roles. That became increasingly obvious after the dissolution of the JSS during Aktion Re- inhardt at the end of July 1942, and the establishment of the Jüdische Unterstützungsstelle (JUS) on August 19, 1942, in its place. Its primary statutory task was to “…maintain Jewish labor camps due to order and needs.” 90 Desperately striving for institutional legitimacy and personal survival, the JSS seems to have pursued some kind of a supply agenda for various types of labor camps.91 It is obvious from the JSS papers that the support of non-industrial labor camps was not a high prior- ity to the leaders of the JSS. For example, in June 1942, at the peak of Aktion Reinhard, the chair of the JSS edited a self-critical evaluation of the usefulness of Jewish labor in general and for the German war effort in particular. The internal report discussed “successful Jewish labor” and concluded that drying out marshes was incomparably lower in productivity than Jewish labor in road construction.92 Researchers have yet to identify any systematic transfer of assistance from the JSS on behalf of the Jews in the agricultural camps of the Chełm region. To

89 Report to the Warsaw Judenrat, July 26, 1941, YVA, M.10/ARI/385 (Ring I/385/5-6); see also Sierpiński, Karny obóz, p. 9. 90 YVA, O.21/16. 91 For an example of this from the Krakow District, from a correspondence between the Jewish community in Chlewiska and the JSS in Kraków in January 1941, see Friedrich, ed., Verfolgung und Ermordung der Europäischen Juden, Band 4, Docu- ment 228. 92 “Tätigkeitsbericht des Präsidiums der JSS für die Monate April und Mai 1942,” June 18, 1942, YVA, O.21/19.

© Yad Vashem 60 • Frank Grelka give but one example, the local Judenrat in Włodawa repeatedly asked the JSS for help for 800 needy people in January and March 1941: If our present request would have to remain without [an] answer, then the Judenrat in Wlodawa…regarding helping the needy… would not be able to take upon themselves the moral and ma- terial responsibility for every future request for help and provision…We cannot describe the horror of the situation. We, with our conditions, are incapable of addressing this huge need, where immediate help is required.93 In short, as the Nazi genocidal program unfolded, Jewish institutions extended some aid, but this was not equally available to all laborers, and especially not to Jews in the waterworks’ camps in the Warsaw and Lublin Districts. It is in that context that Emanuel Ringelblum critically commented on the role of the Warsaw Judenrat, in connection to a general criticism of the Councils, “…as they did not do much to help their victims in the camps and even less to preserve the lives of those returning from the camps. The Warsaw Judenrat had the worst relationship with the camp inmates.”94 In March 1942, the waterworks’ head Holtzheimer officially con- ceded that, from an economic point of view, the labor in his camps did not serve any purpose. At that point the Chełm drainage camps became part of the industrial killing operations in the Sobibór extermination camp. Holtzheimer declared his willingness to deploy Jews from the Warsaw ghetto for essential war objectives, as he said to Auerswald, who had overseen the considerable development of the economic activity of the Transferstelle since he became commissar of the Warsaw ghetto in May 1941.95 Accordingly, one month before the

93 Judenrat in Włodawa to the Presidium of Jewish Self-Help, January 20, 1941, and March 20, 1941, in Kanc, ed., Memorial Book for Wlodawa, p. 679. 94 Marta Janczewska, “Obozy pracy przymusowej dla Żydów na terenie dystryktu warszawskiego,” in Barbara Engelking, Jacek Leociak, and Dariusz Libionka, eds., Prowincja noc. Życie i zagłada Żydów w dystrykcie warszawskim (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN, 2007), p. 302. 95 Jewish accounts are quite clear about Holtzheimer’s responsibility, although he was interrogated only as a witness by the West German judicial authorities. “[He is] chiefly responsible for the whole course of events in this region: Engineer Holzheimer[sic],” testimony of a Slovak Jew who returned from Poland, dated Au- gust 17, 1943, GFH, Archives of the He-Halutz movement in Slovakia, collections no. 29757.

© Yad Vashem Rural Hubs of Early Destruction • 61 extermination started in Sobibór, Holtzheimer suggested to Auerswald to utilize the capacity of his camps as a transit-camp system to neigh- boring Sobibór, and declared at that very meeting that his department still ran seventeen camps that could be “again filled with Jews.”96 As we learn from the 1943 report of the chief of the German waterworks management in the Lublin District, the waterworks’ camps were actually replenished with 17,364 workers in 1942, which was by far the highest number of forced-laborers for any year in the period between 1940 and 1942.97 The reported high fluctuation of camp workers is a substantial hint in estimating that there was a high mortality rate in these camps, which is also obvious from survivors’ testimonies.98 From Haller’s report we can gather that, in early 1942, there were 17,364 inmates in the Lublin water-drainage camps, while, in April 1942, only 9,004 remained.99 Since Haller stated an exact number of workers, it stands to reason that the difference reflects inmates who had either stopped working or had been transported to other persecution sites. Giving the extremely severe conditions, it is likely that, in 1942, the majority of the missing 8,360 workers did not survive the camps. Simi- larily, between 25 and 50 percent of Jewish workers detained in agricultural and road-construction camps in the Krakow and Lublin Dis- tricts returned to the ghettos in either sick or crippled condition. This is confirmed by a JSS report from the spring of 1941.100 By January 1942, before Sobibór began operations, the JSS in Chełm took over the administration of the waterworks’ camps from the Jewish Councils of the Chełm region.101 However, the JSS did not implement an agenda of aiding Jews in the Chełm camps, although the

96 Konferenz beim Kommissar für den jüdischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau, March 20, 1942,YVA, O.6/198. 97 Zusammenstellung der Leistungen der Baujahre 1940, 1941 und 1942 in den 5 Distrikten, i.A. Georg Haller, Krakau, May 1943, BA Berlin, R 52-VI/25. 98 According to German records, the capacity of the waterworks’ camps alternated between 150 and 1,000 inmates per camp; Bericht der Wasserwirtschaftsinspek- tion an das Amt des GG, April 2, 1941, YVA, 1.2.7.7 (document 82178918) ITS Digital Archives. 99 Zusammenstellung der Leistungen der Baujahre 1940, 1941 und 1942 in den 5 Distrikten, i.A. Haller, Krakau, May 1943, BA Berlin, R 52-VI/25. 100 JSS an die Abteilung Bevölkerungswesen und Fürsorge im GG, March 20, 1941, YVA, O. 21/14; see also “JSS an die Abteilung Bevölkerungswesen und Fürsorge im GG,” May 5, 1941, YVA, O. 21/14. 101 Protokoll der Konferenz der Vertretung der JSS im Bezirk Chełm, January 25–26, 1942, YVA, O.6/493.

© Yad Vashem 62 • Frank Grelka local Councils desperately asked for supplies for the Jewish workers in these camps.102 It was not coincidental, therefore, that the JSS Chełm branch did not even address point six on the agenda of their last documented meeting in late January 1942: “Aid for deportees and workers.” Symbolic acts, such as the JSS announcing a “‘Cleanliness Week’ in accordance with the authorities,”103 reflect the tragic absurdity of the situation of the Chełm branch of the JSS.104 Against the background of other sites of industrial and non-industrial camps in need of support, the JSS economic agenda for drainage workers was a strategy of particularly selective neglect in the struggle for survival of the majority of Jewish laborers during the Holocaust.105

Conclusions On March 12, 1940, Hitler described the “Jewish question” as a spatial question, although he still did not have a positive solution in his mind at that time.106 Against the background of the overall failure of the deportation policy envisioned by the decision-makers in Berlin, from the summer of 1940, the waterworks’ camps became the General Gover- nor’s instrument of implementing the process of ghettoization temporarily, parallel to the ghettoization of the Jewish population of Warsaw and in the forced-labor camps in the Lublin District. In the conglom- eration of the many spaces of a highly provisional policy toward parts of the Jewish population on Polish territory, personal accounts testifiy to the interrelationship of various geographically concentrated sites of persecution. This study of witness accounts by survivors reveals sixteen waterworks’ camps administered by the German Generalgouverne- ment as an early venue for the lethal mistreatment of deported Jews

102 See two letters by the JSS, Delegation in Włodawa an das Präsidium der JSS in Krakau, April 7, and October 2, 1942, in Kanc, ed., Memorial Book for Wlodawa, pp. 683–686. 103 Regarding another “Cleanliness Week” in the Chełm area, in March 1942, with German officials supervising Jews throughout theKreis in cleaning their belong- ings, see Megargee and Dean, Encyclopedia, vol. 2, Part A, p. 624. 104 Protokoll der Konferenz der Vertretung der JSS im Bezirk Chełm, January 25–26, 1942, YVA, O.6/ 493. 105 Christopher R. Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), pp. 296–297. 106 As cited in Christopher R. Browning, “Nazi Resettlement Policy and the Search for a Solution to the Jewish Question,” German Studies Review, 9 (1986), p. 509.

© Yad Vashem Rural Hubs of Early Destruction • 63 from Polish cities, as well as from other Central European countries, to the Lublin District on a massive scale.107 Topographically, similar to open ghettos in the streets of small towns,108 the waterworks’ camps were a new space for Frank’s demographic agenda, aiming at a spürbare Entlastung (“significant relief”) by “thinning out” the Jewish population of Warsaw.109 In October 1941, the Jewish Judenrat in Warsaw reported to the German Arbeitsamt in Warsaw about “exceedingly bad conditions” in the Lublin water-drainage camps,110 and, in December 1941, a Weh- rmacht report on the labor issue emphazised Frank’s approving accep- tance of typhus caused by hunger in the Warsaw ghetto. As this study shows, Frank did not launch a forced-labor program for Jews, “…in order to assure a minimum income to Jewish families who were otherwise dependent on public welfare.”111 Quite the contrary: as far as labor in the camps of the Wasserwirtschaft is concerned, from the summer of 1940, official economic decrees were only an effort to conceal the spatial priorities of the Generalgouvernement’s concept of Jewish labor. In the case of rural deployment in the Lublin District, the labor factor was not an obstacle to the mass murder of the Jews, since cutting peat in the Lublin marshes was of no significance to the actual German war economy.112

107 For a confirmation of the genocidal character of waterworks’ camps in the War saw District, see Janczewska, “Na terenie dystryktu warszawskiego,” pp. 300, 305–306. 108 Sara Bender, “The Jews of Staszów, 1939–1943. History Through a Diarist’s Eyes. A Comparative Discussion,” Yad Vashem Studies, 43:1 (2015), pp. 143–144. 109 Der Chef des Distrikts Warschau an die Regierung des GG: Bericht des Chefs des Distriks Warschau vom an die Regierung des GG für den Monat Februar 1941, March 10, 1941, BA Berlin, R 52 III/18. 110 Monatsbericht der jüdischen Nebenstelle an den Kommissar für den jüdischen Wohnbezirk von Warschau, October 1941, YVA, 1.2.7.7. (document 8218237501) /ITS Digital Archives, Yad Vashem; Bericht über die wirtschaftliche Lage des GG, ohne Datum, Rüstungsinspektion im GG vom 31.12.1941 betr. Arbeitsein- satzlage, December 31, 1941; YVA, 1.2.7.7 (document 82177216) /ITS Digital Ar- chives, Yad Vashem. See also Christian Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord. Deutsche Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Hamburg: Hamburger Edi- tion, 1998), pp. 156–159. 111 Gruner, Forced Labor, p. xiv. 112 Thus, functionalist approaches about a productive use of Jewish labor forces in the civil administration do not apply in the case of water-drainage camps in the Lublin District; see, for example, Musial, Deutsche Zivilverwaltung, pp. 119–120; Wolf Gruner, “Forced Labor in Nazi anti-Jewish policy, 1938–45,” in Jonathan

Contrary to work deployment in the urban ghettos, labor in the water-drainage camps was no guarantee for survival. The total number of all Jews in these camps was higher than the maximum number of Jewish workers in the ghettos of Warsaw and Łódź.113 For the ap- proximate 120,000–140,000 Jewish forced-laborers in all the waterworks’ camps of the Generalgouvernement, labor was the leitmotif of a story of persecution being enacted continuously at various places, such as “residential areas,” urban ghettos, deportation trains, remote labor camps, rural neighborhoods, rivers, swamps, and wooden cattle sheds.114 Accordingly, until the spring of 1942, the camps discussed in this study operated as a hub for forced dislocation, which advanced the ghettoization of East and Central European Jews in German-occupied Poland. Thus, from a process-driven focus, one may suggest that an in- tegration of empirical studies about rural forced-labor camps for Jews is vital to the understanding of the spatial connection between ghettoization and labor deployment, and could prospectively enhance research efforts on social interdependencies between ghettos and camps in the early phase of the Holocaust in Poland.115

C. Friedman, ed., The Routledge History of the Holocaust (London & New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 172. 113 According to Christopher R. Browing, “Nazi Ghettoization Policy in Poland,” Central European History, 19 (1986), p. 356, and Gruner, Forced Labor, p. 192, approximately 80,000 Jews were officially working in different labor branches in the Łódź ghetto, and approximately 70,000 in Warsaw. 114 According to Zusammenstellung der Leistungen der Baujahre 1940, 1941 und 1942 in den 5 Distrikten, übergeben von Georg Haller, Krakau, May 1943, BA Berlin, R 52-VI/25. 115 Dan Michman, The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos during the Holocaust (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 124.

Jewish forced laborers draining part of the Huczwa River, a tributary of the Bug River, Tyszowce Water Works Camp, Lublin District, ca. 1941 Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (IPN), Lublin Archives, IPN Lu 500/44

Numbers of Jewish forced-laborers in Waterworks camps in the Lublin District, April 18, 1942, prepared by the Lublin District German Water Management Inspection. Archives of the Majdanek Museum, IX-II-V_21, Distrikt Lublin, Wasserwirtschaft

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