The Zamość Rotunda

Rotunda Zamojska

Zamość lies in south-eastern Poland, close to the Ukrainian border. Between June 1940 and July 1944, the Zamość Rotunda - originally built in the 19th century as part of the Zamość Fortress - served as a security police transit camp and execution site. Today, the complex commemorates both those who were murdered in the Rotunda and victims from the wider region.

History

In September 1939, the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland and the General Government (»Generalgouvernement«) was established in the central part of occupied Poland. The occupying forces set up a number of camps and prisons in Zamość, a town of 20,000: There was a forced labour camp and a ghetto for Jews, a camp for people awaiting expulsion, prisons for Polish civilians and a camp complex for Soviet prisoners of war. The first executions were carried out in the Rotunda already prior to the Gestapo taking hold of the building in the first half of 1940. At first, the Gestapo used the Rotunda as a transit prison: In the course of the »Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktion« (English: »Extraordinary Operation of Pacification«), an operation with the aim of murdering Polish intellectuals and the upper classes in the General Government, about 400 Poles from the Zamość region were deported by security police to the Rotunda in June 1940. Most of them were transferred after a few days, first to the Lublin Gestapo prison, then to the Dachau concentration camp via Sachsenhausen. On July 8, 1940, however, 40 residents of Zamość and vicinity were murdered in the Rotunda.
The German leadership planned to »Germanise« the region by expelling the local population and replacing it with German nationals from Eastern Europe. During »Aktion Zamosc«, between November 1942 and March 1943, the population of Zamość was forcibly resettled. Many residents were murdered at the Rotunda. Throughout 1943, entire villages were looted in the area of Zamość, and many locals murdered on-site or in the Rotunda. In autumn 1943, the SS had mass graves around the Rotunda opened so that the bodies could be burned. Later, from May 1944 on, mass graves in the area were dug up and corpses burned mostly by mobile SS Sonderkommando 1005a, a labour detail comprising mainly Jewish forced labourers. Before retreating in 1944, the German forces murdered the 150 inmates of the Zamość prison in the Rotunda on July 20/21.

Zamość, undated, Historical postcard, beginning of the 20th century, Muzeum Zamojskie

Victims

About 110,000 Poles, including 30,000 children, from 297 villages were incarcerated, drafted for forced labour or murdered from November 1942 on in the area of Zamość as part of »Aktion Zamosc«. About 4,500 children were selected according to racial criteria and sent to Germany in order to be forcibly Germanised. Many of those arrested during »Aktion Zamosc« were killed in mass shootings in the Rotunda, as were many victims in 1943, when nearby villages were destroyed. In total, between 6,000 and 8,000 people were murdered in the Rotunda under German occupation.

The Second World War began in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland and the occupation of the west of the country by German troops and the east of the country by the Red Army. Persecution and terror directly followed the invasion in both parts of the country. German units massacred members of the intelligentsia, Jewish and non-Jewish civilians as well as hospital patients. At the end of 1939 the German administration established ghettos where the Jewish population was forced to live in cramped and horrendous conditions. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, eastern Poland also fell under German control. SS Einsatzgruppen started to systematically murder Jewish men, later also women and children. In autumn 1941, local German authorities in the former west of the country began to prepare for the mass murder of Jewish ghetto prisoners using poison gas. By 1945, some three million Polish Jews had been murdered in the extermination camps at Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek or Auschwitz, starved to death in the ghettos or shot dead. In 1943 the Jews living in the Warsaw ghetto staged an uprising, which was brutally crushed by the SS. Polish soldiers fought with the Allies on all fronts during the Second World War. Polish partisan groups, including the patriotic »Armia Krajowa« (Home Army), formed the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe. August 1, 1944 saw the start of the Warsaw Uprising, the most extensive civilian campaign against the Germans in occupied Europe. It failed also because the Red Army, already standing on the opposite side of the Vistula River, chose not to intervene. It is estimated that up to 250,000 people lost their lives in the uprising. A total of around three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death during the German occupation. Once the Red Army had arrived on (East) Polish soil in January 1944, the troops of the Armia Krajowa were stripped of their weapons by the Soviet secret service and the officers were either shot or deported. The millions of deaths during the occupation, the permanent Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, the incorporation of former eastern German territories and the ensuing population transfers all left a traumatic political and social legacy in Poland. Remembrance of the murder of European Jews in German extermination camps was initially marginalised in the Polish culture of memory. Although Auschwitz soon became an international symbol of the Holocaust, in Poland it was viewed for decades above all as a »site of Polish martyrdom«. However, the start of the 21st century brought about changes in this respect, due in part to the fierce debates over the Jedwabne massacre in eastern Poland. The massacre of around 340 Jews on July 10, 1941 was originally attributed to the »Gestapo and Hitler police« but had in fact been carried out by Polish »neighbours« without orders from the Germans. Debates in Poland and abroad on Polish perpetration resulted in the Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski (*1954) issuing an apology to the victims in 2001. There were increasing calls from experts, such as those from Poland’s Institute for National Remembrance, for the country to confront the most difficult chapters in its history, which also include the anti-Jewish pogroms in 1946-47 and state anti-semitism in communist Poland during the post-war period. The Polish invests extensively in memorial culture, including grand projects with international ambition. The Warsaw Rising Museum was opened already in 2004. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened in 2013 on the territory of the former Warsaw Ghetto, a new museum dedicated specifically to the Warsaw Ghetto will follow suit in 2024. Since 2017, there is a major Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. Since the turn of the millennium, the sites of the former German extermination camps have also been converted into modern memorial sites. An ever-growing preoccupation with Poland’s Jewish and multicultural heritage can be observed in the field of culture as well.

Remembrance

After the German forces had retreated, the premises of the Rotunda were examined by forensic doctors. Some of the exhumed bodies could be identified. A committee advocating the establishment of a memorial, founded in August 1944, collected proof about the crimes committed in the Rotunda. The Rotunda and the cemetery next to it have been a memorial site since 1947. Buried in collective graves are victims murdered in the Rotunda, Polish soldiers killed in action in autumn 1939, Soviet prisoners of war as well as 450 murdered Jews. Inscribed on the outer walls are the names of local residents who perished in German prisons and camps. The Rotunda's 19 cells display information tablets and small exhibitions.
The Rotunda also serves as a memorial site to the victims of Soviet terror: A cross in the courtyard bearing the word »Katyń« honours the victims of the Soviet massacre of Polish officers in the autumn of 1940. It was set up by victims' relatives in the mid-1990s. In 1990, 20 victims of the Soviet occupation, previously buried in a forest near Zamość, were laid to rest on the Rotunda's cemetery.

Zamość, 1944, Burial of exhumed victims at the Rotunda, Muzeum Zamojskie

Zamość, 2007, Monument at the site on which corpses were burned in the Rotunda's courtyard, Muzeum Zamojskie

Possibilities

Exhibition

Open

April to November 2: 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
November 3 to March: 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Contact

https://www.muzeum-zamojskie.pl/o-muzeum/rotunda-zamojska/

biuro@muzeum-zamojskie.pl

+48 (0)84 638 64 94

Droga Męczenników Rotundy
22-400 Zamość

Zamość, 2021, Execution site in the Rotunda, Stiftung Denkmal

Zamość, 2007, Cemetery outside the Rotunda, Muzeum Zamojskie

Zamość, 2021, One of many memorial rooms in the Rotunda, Stiftung Denkmal

Zamość, 2021, Inner view of the Rotunda, Stiftung Denkmal

Zamość, 2021, Names of murdered Poles on the outer wall, Stiftung Denkmal

Zamość, 2021, Cemetery outside the Rotunda, Stiftung Denkmal

Zamość, 2006, The Rotunda, Muzeum Zamojskie

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