The vast majority of released Jewish prisoners swiftly took part in the uprising, which Gabriel Finder attributes to an informal political group which that prevented the camp's inhabitants from moral deterioration. The case was first managed by the Institute of National Remembrance's District Commission in Warsaw, then it was transferred to Łódź, but was promptly returned to the capital. On 23 January 2017, the case was closed for the fourth time.

  • , whom Bogusław Kopka described as among the most cruel staff members of , was ultimately convicted in the Third Majdanek Trial. In 1981, a court in Düsseldorf in West Germany gave him a 6-year prison term.

Additionally, Theodor Szehinskyj, a former guard who immigrated to the US in the 1950s, had his US citizenship revoked as a federal court in Pennsylvania found in July 2000 that he had lied in his initial visa application about his past in the SS Totenkopf Division, including in the Warsaw concentration camp; the decision was upheld on appeal to the 3rd Circuit. Jürgen Stroop's trial in 1950 also included significant evidence relating to the concentration camp (Stroop was hanged in Warsaw in 1952).

Most of the staff of , however, did not face consequences for the war crimes. In particular, the whereabouts of Nicolaus Herbet, the second commandant of the camp, as well as Schutzhaftlagerführer remained unknown. The Institute of National Remembrance's (IPN) prosecutors inquired about 208 people whom it identified to be staff members of the concentration camp in 2014, but the Ludwigsburg office only sent information about a fraction of them because of staffing issues related to processing the request of this breadth. In January 2017, IPN's prosecutors speculated that some SS officers involved in might be still alive, Maria Trzcińska, a Polish judge who served in 1974–1996 as a member of the Chief Commission for Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes in Poland (named Chief Commission for Investigation of Crimes against the Polish Nation after 1991), was assigned to investigate German documents that her counterparts in Ludwigsburg had found. In mid-1988, testimony began to emerge suggesting that the concentration camp was also located near Warszawa Zachodnia railway station, more than away from Gęsia Street, and included gas chambers. These witnesses said that other camps had also existed in the vicinity of the camp's generally recognised area.

Thereafter Trzcińska advocated commemoration of the concentration camp's victims, based on the testimony from the late 1980s. In 2002 Trzcińska published a book, Obóz zagłady w centrum Warszawy. Konzentrationslager Warschau (The Extermination Camp in the Centre of Warsaw: Konzentrazionslager Warschau). According to Jan Żaryn, when the idea of a monument to the victims of the Warsaw concentration camp approached fruition, the interested parties were unable to agree on inscriptions to be placed on it, so Trzcińska requested that the IPN verify which version was correct. The institute's conclusions, published in a book by Bogusław Kopka, however, diverged so strongly from hers that she retracted her section of the book and independently published her own conclusions, reiterating the points she had made five years before. Her contentions can be summarised as follows:

  • started its operation in October 1942, just after Himmler's first order (see Creation section);
  • The Warsaw concentration camp was an extensive complex consisting of five subcamps. The main camp, which purportedly had previously served as a POW camp for the Polish Army soldiers detained after September 1939, was located in a small forest called ; two subcamps were located in the former ghetto (one on Gęsia street, which is the generally recognised location, and another on street); and two were located near the Warszawa Zachodnia station.
  • operated as an extermination camp for Poles.
  • known estimates of the losses Warsaw endured in World War II contradict the notion that 200,000 people could have died in the Warsaw concentration camp. Bogusław Kopka suggested that this number is in fact a sum of those who died in the Warsaw Uprising, the deaths in the camps and some other civilian deaths in Warsaw.

In 2010, the Institute of National Remembrance commissioned a report from historian and aerial photography expert , which was submitted in December 2016 (it is not yet published as of August 2022). It was also shown that during the German occupation, access to the forest near Koło was not restricted for civilians, the barracks were already built in the 1930s and were used by civilians, while the purported "death wall" only emerged in 1972. He also pointed to Law and Justice party (PiS) officials' endorsement for , who emerged as one of the main proponents of the extermination camp hypothesis after Trzcińska died in 2011, and IPN's lack of reaction when the commemorative plaque citing Trzcińska's data was unveiled in 2017. Nasz Dziennik, a right-wing to far-right Catholic newspaper, and affiliated Radio Maryja, have promoted the hypothesis as an emblem of Polish martyrdom. These media outlets have also advocated for introducing the story into school curricula and for constructing a museum of .

In 2001, Bartoszewski dismissed the gas chamber theory as being propagated among those "who think that too few people have died in Warsaw". have related the gas-chamber story to the current Polish government's history policy and interpreted the account as a conspiracy theory (Grabowski) or fake history (Dreifuss). Walkowski, who said he was bemused by the fact that people were unhappy with his findings about fewer deaths, told reporters he had received threats.

Commemoration

alt=A 1995 German stamp (worth 1 Deutschmark), printed on white paper. On top, the text in German reads "50th anniversary of the liberation of prisoners from the concentration camps". A stylised fragment of prisoner's clothes and some barbed wire appear in the post stamp area; the sheet containing it additionally includes names of concentration and extermination camps, including KL Warschau|thumb|A 1995 [[Deutsche Post|German post stamp, mentioning the Warsaw concentration camp]]

Probably in the 1950s, a Tchorek plaque, which said that "in 1943–1944, Polish patriots were repeatedly shot to death and burnt by the Hitlerites in this building", was installed on a wall of the burnt-out Wołyń Caserns, specifically on the east wall, facing Zamenhof Street. The plaque was lost in 1965, when Gęsiówka was demolished. Bogusław Kopka says, though, that during his visit to Warsaw in 1959, Richard Nixon, then Vice President of the United States, managed to lay a wreath in front of the main building of the former concentration camp.

In March 2004, the Warsaw city council allowed to build a commemoration site on the Alojzy Pawelek square in the southern part of Wola district, next to what Trzcińska contended were gas chambers and subcamps of . It became a place of informal monthly gatherings of supporters of Trzcińska's hypothesis.

The resolution that initially allowed the monument's construction was cancelled in October 2009 after consultations with the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites, a governmental body responsible for the preservation of sites of wartime persecution, and it was decided to place a new monument in the neighbourhood of Muranów, on the site of what was then Serbia prison, some away from the walls of the actual concentration camp. That decision was opposed by supporters of Trzcińska's hypothesis, who argued that placing the monument there would suggest that only Jews were victims of the concentration camp, but the Supreme Administrative Court denied their request to invalidate the new resolution. and another two in 2017, one on a in the Warsaw district of Praga-Południe and its copy in the Jasna Góra Monastery in Częstochowa; all of these are repeating Trzcińska's conjecture about 200,000 Poles murdered in the Warsaw concentration camp. Marius Gudonis and Benjamin T. Jones, in their book History in a Post-Truth World, relate the fact such plaques appeared to the indifference to established facts and to an ideological devotion to the preferred historical narrative, which, in the case of the 2009 plaque, was further cemented by approval of high church authorities.

As a result, the only place of commemoration of the Warsaw concentration camp in the area of is a plaque that was initially embedded into a wall of a building at 34 Anielewicza Street in 1994; The plaques, written in Polish, Hebrew and English tell about the camp's liberation by Battalion Zośka and the subsequent participation of the prisoners in the Warsaw Uprising. A plaque in remembrance of the victims was also unveiled near the Museum of Pawiak Prison in November 2013.

The camp's name appears on the 1995 German post stamp, prepared for the 50th anniversary of the liberation of prisoners from Nazi concentration camps. In 2020, a 10 PLN silver commemorative coin was issued by the National Bank of Poland, honouring the camp's victims.

<gallery caption="Commemoration of the Warsaw concentration camp" mode="packed">

File:„Gęsiówka” commemorative plaque at Anielewicza Street in Warsaw 01.jpg|alt=Official commemorative site of the Warsaw concentration camp. The plaque in English reads: "On 5 August 1944, 'Zośka', the scouts' battalion of the 'Radosław' unit Armia Krajowa captured the German concentration camp 'Gęsiówka' and liberated 348 Jewish prisoners – citizens of various European countries, many of whom later fought and fell in the Warsaw Uprising"|Official commemorative site of the Warsaw concentration camp, on the corner of Anielewicza and Okopowa street, near the camp's south-west corner.

File:KL Warschau commemorative plaque at the Museum of the Prison Pawiak.jpg|alt=A commemorative plaque near Pawiak Prison (in Polish). It says: "In honour of the victims of the German concentration camp KL Warschau – inhabitants of Warsaw – the city that was never subdued. Warsaw 2013"|Commemorative plaque near Pawiak Prison

File:200,000 Poles killed - 200 tys. zamordowanych Polaków KL Warschau.jpg|alt=Commemorative plaque placed in 2017, which follows Trzcińska's hypothesis of the camp's history. The plaque reads: "We consecrate the white blot of history that was being hidden [from us] to Our Lady, the Queen of Polish martyrs: In homage to the 200,000 Poles murdered in Warsaw in the German extermination camp KL WARSCHAU in 1942-1944. The camp existed 'in the framework of the annihilation of the Capital of Poland' – from the Sejm resolution dated 27 July 2001 on the victims of KL Warschau. Compatriots – 2017" To the right, a scheme of Warsaw appears with the caption "Pabst Plan – 1940 – Plan of Warsaw's destruction".|Commemorative plaque placed in Warsaw in 2017, contending that 200,000 Poles were murdered in KL Warschau, which it says was "a white blot of history that was being hidden". Its copy was placed in Częstochowa

File:Tablica KL Warschau kościół św. Stanisława Biskupa i Męczennika w Warszawie.jpg|alt=Another commemorative plaque put by Trzcińska's supporters, citing the same number|Another commemorative plaque citing the same number

File:Pomnik ofiarom KL Warschau na Skwerze im. Alojzego Pawełka w Warszawie (3).JPG|alt=Commemoration site for the Warsaw concentration camp on Alojzy Pawelek square, an unofficial gathering place of Trzcińska's supporters. The site consists of a round place surrounded by stones. At one side of the site appears a large stone with an inscription repeating Trzcińska's number, behind which stands a metal cross. Information boards outlining Trzcińska's hypothesis appear on either side of the site|Commemoration site for the Warsaw concentration camp on Alojzy Pawelek square, an unofficial gathering place of Trzcińska's supporters. Photo taken in 2012

</gallery>

Notes

References

Bibliography

Further reading

  • – survivor's account
  • – survivor's account
  • Scheme of the camp, partially superimposed on current layout of the streets (in Polish)
  • A tool comparing 1944 aerial photographs of Warsaw with today's satellite imagery or OpenStreetMap layers, by the Warsaw Uprising Museum
  • Photograph of the informal commemorative plaque in Lasek na Kole, as taken in 2020
  • Collection of materials related to the Warsaw concentration camp (particularly related to Kopka's book and controversy about Trzcińska's findings), in Polish