Comment: A Nazi action of displacement of Poles and settlement of Germans in area of Lublin district was officially announced by a commander of SS and the police in the district Odilo Globnick on the 15th of June 1941 during a NSDAP meeting in Zamosc. Town of Zamosc, offered by SS and the police officers to Heinrich Himmlet and named Himmlerstadt, was to be a center of a German settlement area. A displacement action was begun with a test resettlement of inhabitants of seven villages near Zamosc to a county of Hrubieszow on the 6th of November 1941. In the emptied villages a few hundred Volksdeutsch families from Radom area. In 1942 German displacement plans were concretized. Their formal expression was a decree of Himmler issued on the 12th of November 1942 regarding establishment of the first German settlement area in the General Governorship in Zamosc land. On the 27th of November 1942 planned actions of displacement of Poles from counties of Bilgoraj, Hrubieszow, Tomaszow Lubelski and Zamosc were begun, suspended in autumn of 1943. In result of the German pacification-displacement action in Zamosc land 297 villages were displaced - which meant about 110 thousand people, including over 30 thousand children. In abandoned farms over 10 thousand Germans, mostly from Bessarabia and Bukowina, were settled. In Hrubieszow 63 villages were colonized by about 7 thousand Ukrainians - according to German plans of creating a protective zone around the German area and stirring animosity between Poles and Ukrainians.

In Zamosc and Zwierzyniec Germans established transit camps for the displaced, where "selection" was made which defined their further fate - transport to concentration camps, forced labour in Germany, resettlement to different counties, and in case of children because of their "race fitness" - germanization. Some children were saved by Poles who bailed them out of transport in Warsaw and its vicinity, and then located them in Polish substitute families and orphanages. Help delivered by Polski Komitet Opiekunczy (Polish Care Committee) could bring only a little relief for prisoners of the transit camps who lived in tragic conditions. Large percentage of the victims were children. In July 1943 Jan Zamoyski submitted a memorial to governor Hans Frank regarding releasing from the Zwierzyniec camp children under 7. He also had a talk with Globnick about the matter. In result of these efforts in July and August 1943 over 400 children, exhausted and ill, from a few months to 13 years old, were took out from the Zwierzyniec camp. The Zamosc Estate Hospital was filled with little patients, 44 of which failed to be saved. Some of the survived children were taken care of by Zamosc Orphanage, about 170 came back to their parents or relatives.
(Lucyna Wyszynska)

External description: Original, typescript with hand-written notes, in Polish, paper, sized 230 x 305 mm, p.1-36; photography, original, sized 85 x 130 mm.
Location: State Archive in Zamosc, Rada Glowna Opiekuncza Polski Komitet Opiekunczy w Zamosciu, cat. no. 103.