Henryk Mania - part of the Sonderkommando at Chełmno death camp. Part one - surviving the war..

In September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. As a result of this conquest, it annexed a large chunk of land in that country and renamed the region the Warthegau – after the river Warthe which flows through it. The policy of the National Socialist regime was to Germanise this territory and to do that they needed to get rid of the Polish and Jewish population. Initially this was done by deporting these people further east, later, as far as the Jewish population was concerned, it was by mass murder. Some 380,000 Jews lived in the Warthegau in 1939. Very approximately around one half of them were murdered in this village, Chełmno nad Nerem, renamed Kulmhof by the occupiers. The machinery of death required very few people and the Nazis came to Chełmno with the experience they had gained from killing the mentally and physically sick in Germany and in occupied Poland. However, the procedure of mass killing required some assistance for tasks such as digging the graves and searching the bodies for valuables – these tasks were given to what was called Sonderkommandos. The Sonderkommandos were prisoners, although the status of the non Jewish Sonderkommando at Chełmno nad Nerem was very unusual in as much as they were at liberty to leave the camp and visit people in neighbouring villages. Some members of the Sonderkommando at Chełmno nad Nerem became part of the Nazi apparatus of death, one of those people was Henryk Mania.
Henryk Mania was the first Pole convicted by a Polish court for committing National Socialist era crimes. This is the story of how a youth ended up being part of the Sonderkommando in a National Socialist death camp and then spent a significant portion of his life attempting to justify what he did there. In this video I shall describe the crimes of the National Socialist regime that effected the life of Henryk Mania and show you what these places look like today.
Henryk Mania, was born on 17 January 1923 in Rakoniewice which was then very close to the German border with Poland. He did basic schooling then became a roofers assistant. In 1939 he was apprenticed to a baker. Living close to the border, his village was occupied at the beginning of the invasion. In the second week of September 1939, a patrol appeared in his village. It came to him and demanded some coffee to drink. When he made it for them, they accused him of trying to poison them. Maybe it tasted a bit odd or maybe this was just an excuse but he was arrested. Perhaps because of his age – he was only 16 – they chose not to kill him, although of course the Nazis did not shrink from murdering children as well. The fate of Henryk Mania was to be arrested and sent to a camp at Wolsztyn, some 5km to the west of Rakoniewice. Here he had to carry out repairs to roads and railway infrastructure. After a while, alongside a group of prisoners from Wolsztyn, he was sent to Fort 7 in Poznań.
Fort VII was originally part of the 19th century Prussian fortification system that surrounded the city of Poznań. It was secured by a deep ditch and high rampart, which was also reinforced by an iron fence and wire barriers so it made a suitable prison.
As a concentration camp, it was set up on 10 October 1939, initially under the command of SS-Untersturmführer Herbert Lange who was later to be the commandant at the death camp at Chełmno nad Nerem.
Fort VII was primarily intended as a transit camp for the thousands of people who were being arrested in the newly annexed territory. However, Fort VII was also an execution site where probably between 10,000 to 15,000 people perished in Fort VII although only 479 victims are known by name.
Sometime in mid-October 1939, “test gassings” were carried out in Fort VII on an unknown number of people in a makeshift gas chamber whose iron door, at least initially, had no seal. August Beckerfrom the Security Police's Forensic Institute was probably present, he was to supervise the test gassings at the Nazi killing center in Brandenburg in January 1940. The Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, attended a gassing murder as an observer on 12 or 13 December 1939. The murders were carried out using carbon monoxide (CO) gas discharged from steel cylinders from IG Farben 's Ludwigshafen plant . It is estimated that up to 400 mentally ill people were gassed with carbon monoxide at Fort VII in Poznań.
When Henryk Mania was sent to Fort VII, he was assigned to the Sonderkommando, whose task was to bring prisoners to the location where they were gassed, loading the victims' bodies onto trucks and then digging mass graves and burying the dead in the surrounding forests. He would have done the same for those prisoners murdered by other means also.

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