Poniatowa concentration camp

Two years into the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, in October 1942 Hauptsturmführer Amon Göth – soon to become the commandant of Kraków-Płaszów – visited Poniatowa with a blueprint for redevelopment. The construction of a brand new forced labor camp was assigned to Erwin Lambert. The camp was meant to supply workers for the Walter Többens factory relocated from the vanishing Warsaw Ghetto, where at least 254,000 Jews were sent to Treblinka extermination camp in two months of summer 1942. Obersturmführer Gottlieb Hering was appointed the camp commandant. He was promoted to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer by Himmler in March 1943. The Jews of Poland were augmented by around 3,000 Slovakian and Austrian Jews (the camp elite) housed separately from the rest. ==Aktion Reinhard==

After the closure of the nearby Belzec death factory in June 1943, head of the Operation Reinhard, Obergruppenführer Odilo Globocnik inspected the Poniatowa facility in August 1943. Gottlieb Hering, the camp commandant, At the beginning of secretive Operation Harvest Festival (Aktion Erntefest) the inmates were ordered to dig anti-tank trenches at Poniatowa, Trawniki, as well as at the Majdanek concentration camps, unaware of their true purpose. At Poniatowa, the inmates were compelled to undress and enter the self-prepared trenches naked, where they were shot one-by-one over the bodies of others. The uprising On the first day of killings, in one of the barracks at Poniatowa Jews staged a revolt. To stamp it out the SS surrounded the building by a tight cordon, and set it on fire. The smoke triggered the arrival at the gate of a fire brigade from the village because gendarmes were not informed. According to witness, more than one structure was burning at the camp. The firemen were ordered by the screaming SS to leave immediately, but inadvertently noticed that a Jew running from the flames was bludgeoned with rifle butts, and thrown back into the burning building. The area was covered with bodies of women. The next morning (4 November 1943), mass killings at Poniatowa went on as planned and continued for the rest of the day. In total, on 3–4 November 1943 some 43,000 male and female prisoners were shot over a long line of fake anti-tank trenches. The camps were closed. Commandant Gottlieb Hering then joined fellow SS-men from the Operation Reinhard staff at Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste, Italy. ==Commemoration==

The first two monuments in memory of the victims of Nazism at Poniatowa were erected in communist Poland at the city centre in 1958 and at the PZT factory in 1959. A different monument, commemorating only the Jewish victims of the Holocaust was unveiled in Poniatowa on 4 November 2008, for the 65 anniversary of their deaths. The inscription in both Polish and English mentions the 14,000 victims of the Aktion Erntefest in Poniatowa from across Poland, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia (without the remaining locations). The monument was unveiled in the presence of the ambassador of Israel to Poland David Peleg, the ambassador of Austria Alfred Langle; Andreas Meitner, minister from the German embassy; Jan Tomaszek, minister from the Czech embassy; Henryka Strojnowska, voivode of Lublin; the town mayor Lilla Stefanek, and many other officials, including Warsaw rabbi and priests. ==Notes==