judge who served for 22 years as a member of the Chief Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation. The theory, refuted by mainstream historians, contends that KL Warschau was an extermination camp operating a giant gas chamber inside a tunnel near Warszawa Zachodnia railroad station and that 200,000 mainly non-Jewish Poles were gassed there. Name During the first nine months, the Warsaw concentration camp functioned in its own right. At this time it carried the official name of Waffen-SS Konzentrationslager Warschau (often referred to as KL Warschau for short in Nazi documents and in Polish scholarship, or, in most contemporary German-language works, KZ Warschau). In May 1944, the KL Warschau became a branch of Majdanek concentration camp, so the camp's name changed to Waffen-SS Konzentrationslager Lublin – Arbeitslager Warschau (Waffen-SS Concentration Camp Lublin - Labour Camp Warsaw). It was also sometimes referred to in German sources as Arbeitslager Warschau. In Polish sources, the name Gęsiówka (IPA: ) often appears as a name for the camp. This was due to the fact that the camp occupied the complex of (now non-existent), which were relatively well preserved after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The caserns, at the corner of then-existing Gęsia and Zamenhof streets, were a military prison before World War II, and afterwards accommodated the central prison for the Jewish district, the , as well as the Judenrat. The prison complex came to be colloquially known as "Gęsiówka" (named for Gęsia street), which nickname transferred to KL Warschau as well. Supporters of the Trzcińska's theory tend to prefer the German name, which Aleksandra Ubertowska says has to do with the name being perceived as more serious. After World War II, the camp, although with changed purposes, was still run by Communist authorities under other names (see the relevant section for details). Creation According to Bogusław Kopka, the first person behind the idea of creating a new concentration camp in Warsaw was Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel (SS), who mentioned it in a letter dated 9 October 1942. The letter informed the local posts of SS and Wehrmacht in the General Government that all Jewish craftsmen who so far had managed to avoid deportation to the extermination camps were to be "assembled by SS-Obergruppenführer Krüger and SS-Obergruppenführer Pohl on the spot, i.e. in the concentration camps in Warsaw and Lublin", of which the Lublin camp was already functioning.