Janowska- A Brief History
1936 Lviv Streetcar map showing a stop at end of the 3 line where the Janowska camp will be located.
In early August 1941, SS-Untersturmführer Wolfgang Mohwinkel and SS-Obersturmführer Friedrich Gebauer arrived in the newly occupied Lviv to establish a branch of the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke or German Equipment Works (DAW). The DAW were a series of camps and factories which used concentration camp slave labor to produce a variety of produces which were sold by the SS. Wolfgang Mohwinkel was already the adjutant of the DAW camp at 7 Lipowa Street in Lublin (and would later become commandant) so he had some expertise in this.
The Nazi-appointed Ukrainian mayor had recommended the site which was an factory area previously owned by a Jewish business but abandoned during the Soviet occupation. Gebauer filled this camp with Jews from the nearby Lviv ghetto who at first were
marched back and forth to the camp. On October 31, 1941, the camp was sealed at they became the first prisoners of the DAW-Lemberg. The guard force was made up of SS men as well as the so-called Trawniki men—Soviet volunteers recruited from POW camps and trained at the Trawniki camp to be camp guards.
During this period, the second-in-command of the camp was an SS officer named Gustav Willhaus. In the spring of 1942, the SS and Police Leader for Distrikt Galizien, Friedrich Katzmann, seeking to increase his control over Jewish labor in the city, carried to build a separate forced labor camp or Zwangsarbeitslager (ZAL) directly adjacent to the DAW. He chose Willhaus as its commandant. By May 1942, the ZAL-L was operational. Thus, what became known as the Janowska camp was actually two camps located next to each other; however, very often survivors use Janowska to mean the ZAL-L.
Gustav Willhaus with wife Liesel and daughter in the camp. (Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg)
The ZAL-L (Zwangsarbeitslager-Lemberg) or Forced Labor camp- Lviv was not officially a concentration camp until 1944 when it became a subcamp of the Majdanek camp in Lublin. Until then, it operated relatively independently with the oversight of Katzmann and its commandant Willhaus. It was a place of unspeakable cruelty. It was also what we might call a hybrid camp. It fulfilled a number of roles simultaneously: Prison camp, slave labor camp, transit camp, and dedicated killing site.
Jews caught in hiding as well as a smaller number of non-Jews were imprisoned in the camp. Non-Jewish prisoners mainly served fixed term sentences while Jews captured in hiding or accused of various “crimes” by the Nazis did not. Many of those caught outside the ghetto were held in the “bunker” standing cells built into the camp’s main gate.
Janowska prisoners destroying the Jewish cemetery for building materials for a German contractor. (Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg)
The camp also supplied labor to a dizzying array of businesses throughout the city from breweries and the Reichsbahn to the local city parks department. Some of this labor was also employed in building the camp itself. With its location next to the Kleparov freight train station, one of the most important functions of the camp was a transit camp. Jews from Lviv and the surrounding district; trains to the Bełżec extermination center were often organized here. Thus, it played a pivotal role in the murder of ca. 434,000 Jews. The camp also served as a dissemination point for Jewish labor, redirecting prisoners across the region. It
also served as a collection point for Jewish property from Bełżec. Finally, it was not only Jews that passed through the camp. The camp SS often left Janowska to take over smaller camps and ghettos in the region before returning to the camp after their liquidation.
Finally, the camp itself was a dedicated killing site for Jews and other Nazi victims from its inception. From 1941-1944, the Nazis murdered as many as 80,000 people, the overwhelming majority Jews, in the sandy hills directly behind the camp. This took the form of both regular killings of smaller numbers of prisoners and also mass killings such as the final liquidation of the Lviv ghetto in June 1943. Victims were not only Jews but also Ukrainians, Poles, mentally and physically handicapped from Lviv’s hospitals, and Italian POWs. When the Bełżec extermination camp ceased operation in December 1942, much of the killing in the region was carried out in Janowska.
Janowska is of importance in other histories of the Holocaust as well. By 1942, the Nazis had become concerned about the mounting evidence of their crimes and began looking for ways to dispose of the bodies of those murdered. The former Einsatzgruppen commander Paul Blobel was placed in charge a of a Sonderkommando (Special Operation) 1005 to determine the best way to destroy bodies and then to carry this out throughout the East, beginning with the extermination centers. In May/June 1943, Blobel arrived in Lviv to establish a subunit of SK1005 and a school to train SS officers to carry out this task. This took place in the Lyczakow Forest not far from the Janowska camp and the prisoners tasked with this gruesome task—the so-called Death Brigade—came from Janowska. SS men would spend 10 days learning from the Death
Three survivors of the Death Brigade who rose up against the SS posing with the bone grinder machine used to destroy corpses. (Lewinter Family Collection)
Brigade how to destroy corpses before leaving to do this throughout Nazi-occupied eastern Europe.
Despite the horror of day-to-day existence in Janowska, the camp also saw numerous acts of resistance both large and small. By the fall of 1943, it became clear to both the prisoners in the camp and the prisoners in the Death Brigade that their days were numbered as the Nazis continued liquidating local ghettos and camps. On November 19th, prisoners in both places simultaneously rose up against the SS and guards killing a number of them and staging a mass escape.
After the November uprising, the camp limped on, imprisoning mainly Jews caught hiding in Lviv. By July, it became clear that Lviv would soon fall to the advancing Red Army. On July 19, 1944, the second commandant of the Janowska camp (ZAL-L), Friedrich Warzok, assembled the remaining fifty or so Janowska prisoners and marched them to the train station. Warzok would form this group into a fictitious “Baustab Venus” (Construction group Venus) and use it to protect him and the remaining Janowska SS from being conscripted into actual battle. As they moved west across Poland, the group eventually disintegrated with some prisoners ending up in the Plaszów camp. The Soviets liberated Lviv (and the Janowska camp) on 27 July 1944.
Defendants in the dock during the Lviv Trial, 1966. From left: Paul Fox, Karl Ulmer, Ernst Heinisch, Ernst Inquart, and Adolf Kolonko. (Süddeutsche Zeitung)
However, the story of the camp and its importance to our understanding of the Holocaust did not stop with its liberation in 1944. The crimes in Janowska were much of the focus for the second largest Nazi trial in German history after the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. Beginning on October 25, 1966, the so-called Stuttgart Lemberg Prozess (Lviv Trial) focused on Nazi crimes in the city and featured 8 SS men from Janowska. The trial lasted two years and generated over 10,000 pages of testimony. 250 Holocaust survivors from nine different countries would testify as well. Five of the eight were found guilty, though the sentences left much to be desired in terms of severity. Other trials targeted surviving SS men into the 1970s.
Janowska has remained a prison since 1941 when Fritz Gebauer turned it into one. In 1944, the Red Army promptly turned the site into its own prison and then the KGB used it before the Soviets turned it into Lviv Transit Prison No. 25. When Ukraine became independent in 1999, they continued the use of the prison. The killing valleys around the camp were used as a pig farm and training area for police dogs. Today, the DAW site is a mixture of residential and commercial buildings while most of the ZAL-L remains part of Ukrainian Penal Colony 30 where prisoners are making furniture much as the first prisoners of Gebauer’s DAW-L did. Most of the buildings from the camp appear to be gone.
A view of the Janowska camp area from the hills behind, 2017 (Waitman Wade Beorn)
To learn more about the Janowska camp and the Holocaust in Lviv, please check out my book, Between The Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv and the other resources listed here.