Wave of Deportation from Kutno, Ghetto, Poland to Chelmno, Extermination Camp, Poland on 03/1942

The area surrounding Kutno city was occupied by the German army around mid-September 1939. On October 26, it was annexed to the so-called Wartheland, and administrated as part of the Landkreis (county) of Kutno. The county numbered approximately 110,000 people; some 10 percent of them were Jews. In Kutno city, the Jews’ relative proportion was even higher; estimates speak of roughly 7,000 Jews or more out of a population of some 27,500 people. By June 1940, between 1,700 to 1,800 Jews in the city of Kutno were refugees who had been brought from other regions in Poland. A deportation had taken place on February 1, 1940, with an unknown number of refugees deported to the General Government (Generalgouvernement, the zone of Nazi-occupied central Poland not formally annexed to the Reich) at the order of the German authorities in Kutno. The persecution of Jews in Kutno city began, as in other places in Kutno county, immediately with the occupation; the Germans mistreated the Jews, confiscated their property, and used them for hard labor. The largest ghetto in Kutno County was formed in the city of Kutno on June 15–16. According to some historians, the living conditions in the very crowded and isolated Kutno ghetto (also named “Konstancja,” after the destroyed sugar factory which was part of the ghetto) were among the worst of all of the ghettos in the Wartheland. By July 1941, the impoverished population had shrunk to 6,015, the result of a typhus epidemic, starvation, and killings conducted by the Germans. In 1941, an unknown number of Jews were deported to forced labor camps in the vicinity of Poznań (Posen). After Hans Burkhardt, Hohensalza-Regierungspräsident, ordered a tighter curfew on the ghetto on June 16, 1941 (possibly in connection with the spread of typhus), it was considered a Lager (concentration camp). In the fall of that year, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler was involved in cancelling the Hohensalza-Regierungsbezirk leadership’s plans to deport those Jews who were able to work from the Kutno ghetto to Łódź. ...