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(birds cawing and chirping)
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(Szymon speaking in foreign language)
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(Szymon continues speaking in foreign language)
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Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor,
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Majdanek, Belzec, Auschwitz.
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The concentration camps of the Holocaust and occupied Poland
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were all located in or near forests.
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Forests were not only sites of genocide,
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but in the case of Chelmno, living evidence.
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The village of Chelmno nad Nerem
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and nearby Rzuchowski Forest in Warthegau,
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present-day Western Poland,
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was the site of the first Nazi German extermination camp.
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Its objective, to cleanse the region of Jews
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who were concentrated 50 kilometres away in Lodz,
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then containing one of the largest Jewish ghettos of Europe.
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Murder at an industrial scale
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was for the first time experimented here.
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Between 1941 and 1944,
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approximately 300,000 men, women, and children,
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including Jews, Romani, Poles,
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and Soviet prisoners of war, were exterminated.
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Knowledge about the secret camp was first established
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in an investigation led by Wladyslaw Bednarz,
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investigating judge from District Court in Lodz
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for the main commission for the prosecution
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of German crimes in Poland,
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and in particular for trials
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against Chelmno extermination camp personnel.
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Chelmno camp
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was a conspiratorial Nazi programme.
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Before escaping, they completely destroyed the campsite
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to hide any evidence.
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Moreover, only a few people managed to escape from the camp
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to provide testimony.
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The process of setting up a secret death camp
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began in November, 1941.
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The village of Chelmno in Kolo district
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was chosen for its location
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as it was sparsely populated forested area,
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yet with large Jewish populations in nearby cities.
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The village of Chelmno nad Nerem
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mainly consisted of a church and the small palace
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surrounded by a small park.
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The two-floored palace was chosen as the main site
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for the camp's operations.
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The park was surrounded by a high fence,
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so nobody could see what was happening inside.
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The camp started its operations on December 8th, 1941.
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From 1941 to 1943,
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in the first phase of the camp's operation
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under the command of SS-Fuhrer Herbert Lange,
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unsuspecting victims were brought to the palace
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and later killed in gas vans
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with exhaust fumes directed into cargo compartments.
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A caravan of bodies was transported
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to the heavily-guarded and fenced forest camp
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four kilometres away in Rzuchowski Forest
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and buried there in mass graves.
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Based on survivor and Polish camp worker testimonies,
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Judge Bednarz provides a vivid account
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of the attempts to hide the evidence of genocide,
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where forest ecology played a part.
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In the summer of 1942,
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accumulated bodies started fermenting,
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causing a typhus epidemic and creating a terrible smell
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that started reaching nearby settlements.
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Because of this situation,
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camp operations had to stop.
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To solve this problem,
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camp staff were made to exhume bodies
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and burn the remains in specially constructed
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wood-fire furnaces,
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Ashes from the furnaces were dumped into excavated graves
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and covered with topsoil.
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With the help of forester May,
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the area of buried remains was reforested with pines
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and birches to hide any evidence of the genocide
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as a part of a secret programme.
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Bones that weren't completely burned
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were turned into dust with a bone mill,
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industrial machine for processing animal bones,
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and scattered in the reforestation areas.
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In 1986,
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40 years after Judge Bednarz's investigation,
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the District Museum in Konin,
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located 40 kilometres northwest of Chelmno,
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finally initiated an official archaeological survey
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of the Chelmno extermination camp.
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The survey and excavations,
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carried out intermittently between 1986 and 2004,
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were based on this aerial photograph
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taken by the Polish Air Force in 1958.
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Krzysztof Gorczyca was one of the main archaeologists
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working on the Chelmno site beginning in the 1980s.
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(Krzysztof speaking in foreign language)
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Based on the photo interpretation
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of the 1958 aerial image,
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the archaeological survey identified
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two forested areas within the camp,
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both dating as from 1942.
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Building on the archaeological works
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and location of existing structures,
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we undertook a field examination
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of above-ground evidence in Rzuchowski Forest
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using airborne light detection and ranging, or LiDAR,
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which is the first survey of this kind
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carried out at the Chelmno forest camp Holocaust site.
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The survey generated a precise
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point cloud-based photogrammetry
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of tree cover of the area
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containing the 1942 reforestation areas.
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If the bones of an unknown number of victims
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help the forest grow,
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then today they are living evidence
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of the crimes perpetrated here.
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High-resolution LiDAR survey can remove vegetation
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in a non-invasive manner
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to reveal parts of ground-level terrain.
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Although it was not possible to penetrate
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the tree canopy in some areas,
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our digital terrain model shows the microtopography
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of the bare earth of the reforestation areas
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of the Chelmno forest camp for the first time.
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Many features appear that would require
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on-the-ground verification.
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We report two of such features,
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a depression at the southern edge of site 1,
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near the location of an existing mass grave,
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and several depressions in the central area of site 2,
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as particular landscape characterizations
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of the Chelmno forest camp.