Transport I from Wielun, Ghetto, Poland to Lodz, Ghetto, Poland on 16/08/1942

The Jewish community of the town of Wieluń (Welungen), capital of Wieluń County, some 90 kilometers southwest of the city of Łódź, was amongst the Warthegau communities that absorbed Polish Jews who had been deported from Germany in October 1938 (the so-called Polenaktion).^[1] On September 1, 1939, Wieluń became one of the first Polish towns to be attacked by German army units. At the time of the German invasion, it was home to 4,200 Jews. ^[2] Daily antisemitism, violence, plunder, slave labor, and murder soon followed.^[3] A central Gestapo branch was erected in Wieluń; due to its proximity to the General Government (Generalgouvernement, the zone of Nazi-occupied central Poland not formally annexed to the Reich), it is also sometimes referred to as Grenzpolizeikommissariat (the German border police).^[4]

In March 1941, the German civil administration of the town of Wieluń ordered the establishment of a Jewish ghetto around the town’s marketplace, which was fenced off a short while later.^[5] Jews were subjected to slave labor, either in Wieluń or in Poznań (Posen) and the German Reich area, to which they were continuously deported.^[6]

On January 9 or 10, 1942, ten Jews were publicly hanged in Wieluń, by the local German police. The head of the Wieluń NSDAP and of the Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps (NSKK, the National Socialist Motor Corps), Leonhard Pfitzner, known as Kommissar Fitzner, took a leading role in the murder.^[7] Public executions were a common practice on the part of the Germans in the Warthegau in early 1942; they preceded the dissolution of the local ghettos and the deportation of their entire Jewish populations.^[8] Around Pesach 1942, some 1,500 Jews—primarily the elderly and sick—were deported from Wieluń in a transport whose purpose was obscured as being for “work,” but whose destination, according to our research as well as previous analyses, was the Chełmno death camp (Kulmhof).^[9]...