25 and 27 September 1939) occupied
Chełm but withdrew two weeks later in accordance with the Soviet - German
agreement. As early as October 7 to 9 1939 the city of Khelm was occupied by
Germans forces. On Friday, the 1st of December, 1939, at 8 o'clock, the local
defenseless Jews were driven at dawn to the market-square (“Okrąglak” or
"Rinek") surrounded by the fell German SS formations and local
indigenous officials. They were forced on to a death march to Hrubieszów. As
from 1940, the nationalsocialistic German Reich established 16 forced to
death-labor camps in the Lublin district and in 1942, the Bełżec camp became
operational for mass murder, and the Sobibór extermination camp was built near
the forced labor camps by a Sonderkommando. Workers employed for forced labour
were also local people from neighboring villages and towns of Chełm (also Khelm
or Kulm in German), which was then connected to the main railroad line through
a 40 km (25 mi) railroad branch line to further industrialised mass
murder. Almost all of the Jewish population was killed in the Sobibór
extermination camp during the Shoah. Some managed to find shelter in the Chełm
Chalk Tunnels.
Following Operation Barbarossa the Germans
established a POW camp in Chełm, called Stalag 319 for the Red Army soldiers
captured in eastern Poland and modern Ukraine or Belarus, on top of prisoners
brought in from the West (mostly France) for the total of some 200,000 until
July 1944. In three years, some 90,000 prisoners lost their lives there. The
monument commemorating the victims of Stalag 319 was unveiled in Chełm in May
2009 in the presence of foreign diplomats.
Also during World War II, from 1942 through
to 1945 the city area was one of numerous locations of the Volhynian massacres
by multiple domestic parties. The city and its environs were subject
