Treblinka () was an
extermination camp
Nazi Germany used six extermination camps (german: Vernichtungslager), also called death camps (), or killing centers (), in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million peoplemostly Jewsin the Holocaust. The v ...
, built and operated by
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
in
occupied Poland
' (Norwegian: ') is a Norwegian political thriller TV series that premiered on TV2 on 5 October 2015. Based on an original idea by Jo Nesbø, the series is co-created with Karianne Lund and Erik Skjoldbjærg. Season 2 premiered on 10 October 2 ...
during
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
. It was in a forest north-east of
Warsaw
Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is officia ...
, south of the
village of Treblinka in what is now the
Masovian Voivodeship
The Masovian Voivodeship, also known as the Mazovia Province ( pl, województwo mazowieckie ) is a voivodeship (province) in east-central Poland, with its capital located in the city of Warsaw, which also serves as the capital of the country. The ...
. The camp operated between 23 July 1942 and 19 October 1943 as part of
Operation Reinhard
or ''Einsatz Reinhard''
, location = Occupied Poland
, date = October 1941 – November 1943
, incident_type = Mass deportations to extermination camps
, perpetrators = Odilo Globočnik, Hermann Höfle, Richard Thomalla, Erwin L ...
, the deadliest phase of the
Final Solution
The Final Solution (german: die Endlösung, ) or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question (german: Endlösung der Judenfrage, ) was a Nazi plan for the genocide of individuals they defined as Jews during World War II. The "Final Solution to th ...
. During this time, it is estimated that between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were murdered in its gas chambers,
along with 2,000
Romani people
The Romani (also spelled Romany or Rromani , ), colloquially known as the Roma, are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group, traditionally nomadic itinerants. They live in Europe and Anatolia, and have diaspora populations located worldwide, with sig ...
.
More Jews were murdered at Treblinka than at any other Nazi extermination camp apart from
Auschwitz-Birkenau
Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...
.
Managed by the German
SS with assistance from
Trawniki guards – recruited from among Soviet
POWs
A prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610.
Belligerents hold prisoners of war ...
to serve with the Germans – the camp consisted of two separate units. Treblinka I was a forced-labour camp (''
Arbeitslager
''Arbeitslager'' () is a German language word which means labor camp. Under Nazism, the German government (and its private-sector, Axis, and collaborator partners) used forced labor extensively, starting in the 1930s but most especially during ...
'') whose prisoners worked in the gravel pit or irrigation area and in the forest, where they cut wood to fuel the cremation pits. Between 1941 and 1944, more than half of its 20,000 inmates were murdered via shootings, hunger, disease and mistreatment.
The second camp, Treblinka II, was an extermination camp (''Vernichtungslager''), referred to euphemistically as the ''SS-Sonderkommando Treblinka'' by the Nazis. A small number of Jewish men who were not murdered immediately upon arrival became members of its ''
Sonderkommando
''Sonderkommandos'' (, ''special unit'') were work units made up of German Nazi death camp prisoners. They were composed of prisoners, usually Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber vict ...
'' whose jobs included being forced to bury the victims' bodies in mass graves. These bodies were exhumed in 1943 and cremated on large open-air pyres along with the bodies of new victims. Gassing operations at Treblinka II ended in October 1943 following a revolt by the prisoners in early August. Several Trawniki guards were killed and 200 prisoners escaped from the camp; almost a hundred survived the subsequent pursuit.
The camp was dismantled in late 1943. A farmhouse for a watchman was built on the site and the ground ploughed over in an attempt to hide the evidence of
genocide
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the Latin ...
.
In the postwar
Polish People's Republic
The Polish People's Republic ( pl, Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, PRL) was a country in Central Europe that existed from 1947 to 1989 as the predecessor of the modern Republic of Poland. With a population of approximately 37.9 million nea ...
, the government bought most of the land where the camp had stood, and built a large stone memorial there between 1959 and 1962. In 1964, Treblinka was declared a national monument of Jewish martyrdom in a ceremony at the site of the former gas chambers. In the same year,
the first German trials were held regarding the crimes committed at Treblinka by former
SS members. After the
end of communism in Poland in 1989, the number of visitors coming to Treblinka from abroad increased. An exhibition centre at the camp opened in 2006. It was later expanded and made into a branch of the
Siedlce
Siedlce [] ( yi, שעדליץ ) is a city in eastern Poland with 77,354 inhabitants (). Situated in the Masovian Voivodeship (since 1999), previously the city was the capital of a separate Siedlce Voivodeship (1975–1998). The city is situated b ...
Regional Museum.
Background
Following the
invasion of Poland
The invasion of Poland (1 September – 6 October 1939) was a joint attack on the Republic of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union which marked the beginning of World War II. The German invasion began on 1 September 1939, one week aft ...
in 1939, most of the 3.5 million
Polish Jews
The history of the Jews in Poland dates back at least 1,000 years. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Ashkenazi Jewish community in the world. Poland was a principal center of Jewish culture, because of the lo ...
were rounded up and
confined to newly established ghettos by the Nazis. The system was intended to isolate the Jews from the outside world in order to facilitate their exploitation and abuse.
The supply of food was inadequate, living conditions were cramped and unsanitary, and Jews had no way to earn money. Malnutrition and lack of medicine led to soaring mortality rates.
[ ''See also:'' ] In 1941, the
initial victories of the
Wehrmacht
The ''Wehrmacht'' (, ) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the ''Heer'' (army), the ''Kriegsmarine'' (navy) and the ''Luftwaffe'' (air force). The designation "''Wehrmacht''" replaced the previous ...
over the Soviet Union inspired plans for the
German colonisation of
occupied Poland
' (Norwegian: ') is a Norwegian political thriller TV series that premiered on TV2 on 5 October 2015. Based on an original idea by Jo Nesbø, the series is co-created with Karianne Lund and Erik Skjoldbjærg. Season 2 premiered on 10 October 2 ...
, including all territory within the new district of
General Government
The General Government (german: Generalgouvernement, pl, Generalne Gubernatorstwo, uk, Генеральна губернія), also referred to as the General Governorate for the Occupied Polish Region (german: Generalgouvernement für die be ...
. At the
Wannsee Conference held near Berlin on 20 January 1942, new plans were outlined for the genocide of Jews, known as the "Final Solution" to the Jewish Question. The extermination programme was codenamed
Operation Reinhard
or ''Einsatz Reinhard''
, location = Occupied Poland
, date = October 1941 – November 1943
, incident_type = Mass deportations to extermination camps
, perpetrators = Odilo Globočnik, Hermann Höfle, Richard Thomalla, Erwin L ...
. and was separate from the ''
Einsatzgruppen
(, ; also ' task forces') were (SS) paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany that were responsible for mass murder, primarily by shooting, during World War II (1939–1945) in German-occupied Europe. The had an integral role in the im ...
'' mass-murder operations in Eastern Europe, in which half a million Jews had already been murdered.
Treblinka was one of three secret extermination camps set up for Operation Reinhard; the other two were
Bełżec
Belzec (English: or , Polish: ) was a Nazi German extermination camp built by the SS for the purpose of implementing the secretive Operation Reinhard, the plan to murder all History of Jews in Poland, Polish Jews, a major part of the "Fina ...
and
Sobibór
Sobibor (, Polish: ) was an extermination camp built and operated by Nazi Germany as part of Operation Reinhard. It was located in the forest near the village of Żłobek Duży in the General Government region of German-occupied Poland.
As ...
.
All three were equipped with
gas chamber
A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or other animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. Poisonous agents used include hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide.
Histor ...
s disguised as shower rooms, for the murder of entire transports of people. The method was established following a pilot project of mobile extermination conducted at
Soldau and at
Chełmno extermination camp
, known for =
, location = Near Chełmno nad Nerem, ''Reichsgau Wartheland'' (German-occupied Poland)
, built by =
, operated by =
, commandant = Herbert Lange, Christian Wirth
, original use =
, construction =
, in operation ...
that began operating in 1941 and used
gas van
A gas van or gas wagon (russian: душегубка, ''dushegubka'', literally "soul killer"; german: Gaswagen) was a truck reequipped as a mobile gas chamber. During the World War II Holocaust, Nazi Germany developed and used gas vans on a large ...
s. Chełmno (German: ''Kulmhof'') was a testing ground for the establishment of faster methods of murdering and
incinerating
Incineration is a waste treatment process that involves the combustion of substances contained in waste materials. Industrial plants for waste incineration are commonly referred to as waste-to-energy facilities. Incineration and other high ...
bodies.
It was not a part of Reinhard, which was marked by the construction of stationary facilities for mass murder.
Treblinka was the third extermination camp of Operation Reinhard to be built, following Bełżec and Sobibór, and incorporated lessons learned from their construction.
Alongside the Reinhard camps, mass-murder facilities using
Zyklon B
Zyklon B (; translated Cyclone B) was the trade name of a cyanide-based pesticide invented in Germany in the early 1920s. It consisted of hydrogen cyanide (prussic acid), as well as a cautionary eye irritant and one of several adsorbents such ...
were developed at the
Majdanek concentration camp
Majdanek (or Lublin) was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, a ...
in March 1942,
and at
Auschwitz II-Birkenau
Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...
between March and June.
Nazi plans to murder Polish Jews from across the General Government during ''Aktion Reinhard'' were overseen in occupied Poland by
Odilo Globocnik
Odilo Lothar Ludwig Globocnik (21 April 1904 – 31 May 1945) was an Austrian Nazi and a perpetrator of the Holocaust. He was an official of the Nazi Party and later a high-ranking leader of the SS. Globocnik had a leading role in Operation Re ...
, a deputy of
Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (; 7 October 1900 – 23 May 1945) was of the (Protection Squadron; SS), and a leading member of the Nazi Party of Germany. Himmler was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and a main architect of th ...
, head of the SS, in Berlin.
The Operation Reinhard camps reported directly to Himmler. The staff of Operation Reinhard, most of whom had been involved in the
Action T4 "involuntary euthanasia" programme, used T4 as a framework for the construction of new facilities. Most of the Jews who were murdered in the Reinhard camps came from ghettos.
The Operation Reinhard camps reported directly to Himmler, and not to the
concentration camps inspector Richard Glücks
Richard Glücks (; 22 April 1889 – 10 May 1945) was a high-ranking German Nazi official in the SS. From November 1939 until the end of World War II, he was Concentration Camps Inspector (CCI), which became ''Amt D: Konzentrationslagerwesen' ...
.
Location
![WW2-Holocaust-Poland](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/WW2-Holocaust-Poland.PNG)
The two parallel camps of Treblinka were built northeast of
Warsaw
Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is officia ...
.
Before World War II, it was the location of a gravel mining enterprise for the production of concrete, connected to most of the major cities in central Poland by the
Małkinia–
Sokołów Podlaski
Sokołów Podlaski is a town in Poland, in Masovian Voivodeship, about east of Warsaw. The town lies on the Cetynia river, in the historical region of Podlachia and is the capital of Sokołów County. The first settlement was in the 6th century ...
railway junction and the
Treblinka village station. The mine was owned and operated by the Polish industrialist Marian Łopuszyński, who added the new railway track to the existing line. When the German SS took over Treblinka I, the quarry was already equipped with heavy machinery that was ready to use. Treblinka was well-connected but isolated enough, halfway between some of the largest Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe, including the
Warsaw Ghetto and the
Białystok Ghetto
The Białystok Ghetto ( pl, getto w Białymstoku) was a Nazi ghetto set up by the German SS between July 26 and early August 1941 in the newly formed District of Bialystok within occupied Poland. About 50,000 Jews from the vicinity of Białyst ...
, the capital of the newly formed
Bialystok District
Bialystok District (German: ''Bezirk Bialystok'') was an administrative unit of Nazi Germany created during the World War II invasion of the Soviet Union. It was to the south-east of East Prussia, in present-day northeastern Poland as well as in sm ...
. The Warsaw Ghetto had 500,000 Jewish inmates, and the Białystok Ghetto had about 60,000.
Treblinka was divided into two separate camps apart. Two engineering firms, the Schönbronn Company of Leipzig and the Warsaw branch of Schmidt–Münstermann, oversaw the construction of both camps. Between 1942 and 1943, the extermination centre was further redeveloped with a
crawler excavator
Excavators are heavy construction equipment consisting of a boom, dipper (or stick), bucket and cab on a rotating platform known as the "house". The house sits atop an undercarriage with tracks or wheels. They are a natural progression fro ...
. New gas chambers constructed of brick and cement mortar were freshly erected, and mass cremation
pyres were also introduced.
The perimeter was enlarged to provide a buffer zone, making it impossible to approach the camp from the outside. The number of trains caused panic among the residents of nearby settlements. They would likely have been killed if caught near the railway tracks.
Treblinka I
Opened on 1 September 1941 as a forced-labour camp (''
Arbeitslager
''Arbeitslager'' () is a German language word which means labor camp. Under Nazism, the German government (and its private-sector, Axis, and collaborator partners) used forced labor extensively, starting in the 1930s but most especially during ...
''), Treblinka I replaced an ''ad hoc'' company established in June 1941 by
Sturmbannführer Ernst Gramss. A new barracks and barbed wire fencing high were erected in late 1941. To obtain the workforce for Treblinka I, civilians were sent to the camp ''en masse'' for real or imagined offences, and sentenced to hard labour by the
Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organi ...
office in Sokołów, which was headed by Gramss. The average length of a sentence was six months, but many prisoners had their sentences extended indefinitely. Twenty thousand people passed through Treblinka I during its three-year existence. About half of them were murdered there via exhaustion, hunger and disease. Those who survived were released after serving their sentences; these were generally Poles from nearby villages.
![Treblinka I Arbeitslager 2-12-1941](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Treblinka_I_Arbeitslager_2-12-1941.jpg)
At any given time, Treblinka I had a workforce of 1,000–2,000 prisoners, most of whom worked 12- to 14-hour shifts in the large quarry and later also harvested wood from the nearby forest as fuel for the open-air crematoria in Treblinka II. There were German, Czech and French Jews among them, as well as Poles captured in ''
łapanka
''Łapanka'' () was the Polish name for a World War II practice in German-occupied Poland, whereby the German SS, Wehrmacht and Gestapo rounded up civilians on the streets of Polish cities. The civilians to be arrested were in most cases chosen ...
s'', farmers unable to deliver food requisitions, hostages trapped by chance, and people who attempted to harbour Jews outside the Jewish ghettos or who performed restricted actions without permits. Beginning in July 1942, Jews and non-Jews were separated. Women mainly worked in the sorting barracks, where they repaired and cleaned military clothing delivered by freight trains, while most of the men worked at the gravel mine. There were no work uniforms, and inmates who lost their own shoes were forced to go barefoot or scavenge them from dead prisoners. Water was rationed, and punishments were regularly delivered at roll-calls. From December 1943 the inmates were no longer carrying any specific sentences. The camp operated officially until 23 July 1944, when the imminent arrival of Soviet forces led to its abandonment.
During its entire operation, Treblinka I's commandant was ''Sturmbannführer''
Theodor van Eupen. He ran the camp with several SS men and almost 100 ''Hiwi'' guards. The quarry, spread over an area of , supplied road construction material for German military use and was part of the strategic road-building programme in the war with the Soviet Union. It was equipped with a mechanical digger for shared use by both Treblinka I and II. Eupen worked closely with the SS and German police commanders in Warsaw during the deportation of Jews in early 1943 and had prisoners brought to him from the Warsaw Ghetto for the necessary replacements. According to
Franciszek Ząbecki
Lieutenant Franciszek Ząbecki (; 8 October 1907 – 11 April 1987) was a station master at the village of Treblinka. During the German occupation of Poland in World War II, Ząbecki worked as a dispatcher for the ''Deutsche Reichsbahn''; he also ...
, the local station master, Eupen often murdered prisoners by "taking shots at them, as if they were partridges". A widely feared overseer was ''
Untersturmführer
(, ; short: ''Ustuf'') was a paramilitary rank of the German ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) first created in July 1934. The rank can trace its origins to the older SA rank of ''Sturmführer'' which had existed since the founding of the SA in 1921. ...
'' Franz Schwarz, who executed prisoners with a pickaxe or hammer.
Treblinka II
![Treblinka Memorial 05](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Treblinka_Memorial_05.jpg)
Treblinka II (officially the ''SS-Sonderkommando Treblinka'') was divided into three parts: Camp 1 was the administrative compound where the guards lived, Camp 2 was the receiving area where incoming transports of prisoners were offloaded, and Camp 3 was the location of the gas chambers. All three parts were built by two groups of German Jews recently expelled from Berlin and
Hanover
Hanover (; german: Hannover ; nds, Hannober) is the capital and largest city of the German state of Lower Saxony. Its 535,932 (2021) inhabitants make it the 13th-largest city in Germany as well as the fourth-largest city in Northern Germany ...
and imprisoned at the Warsaw Ghetto (a total of 238 men from 17 to 35 years of age). ''
Hauptsturmführer''
Richard Thomalla
Richard Thomalla (; 23 October 1903 – 12 May 1945) was a war criminal and SS commander of Nazi Germany. A civil engineer by profession, he was head of the SS Central Building Administration at Lublin reservation in occupied Poland. Thomalla wa ...
, the head of construction, brought in German Jews because they could speak German. Construction began on 10 April 1942, when Bełżec and Sobibór were already in operation. The entire death camp, which was either or in size (sources vary),
was surrounded by two rows of barbed-wire fencing high. This fence was later woven with pine tree branches to obstruct the view of the camp from outside. More Jews were brought in from surrounding settlements to work on the new railway ramp within the Camp 2 receiving area, which was ready by June 1942.
The first section of Treblinka II (Camp 1) was the ''Wohnlager'' administrative and residential compound; it had a telephone line. The main road within the camp was paved and named ''Seidel Straße'' after ''
Unterscharführer'' Kurt Seidel, the SS corporal who supervised its construction. A few side roads were lined with gravel. The main gate for road traffic was erected on the north side.
Barracks
Barracks are usually a group of long buildings built to house military personnel or laborers. The English word originates from the 17th century via French and Italian from an old Spanish word "barraca" ("soldier's tent"), but today barracks are u ...
were built with supplies delivered from Warsaw, Sokołów Podlaski, and
Kosów Lacki
Kosów Lacki is a town in Sokołów County, Masovian Voivodeship, Poland, with 2,152 inhabitants (2004).
History
*1202 - First mention of a village Kossów found in documents belonging to prince Konrad Mazowiecki.
*1723 - A permit was granted ...
. There was a kitchen, a bakery, and dining rooms; all were equipped with high-quality items taken from Jewish ghettos. The Germans and Ukrainians each had their own sleeping quarters, positioned at an angle for better control of all entrances. There were also two barracks behind an inner fence for the Jewish work commandos, known as ''
Sonderkommandos''. ''SS-Untersturmführer'' Kurt Franz set up a small
zoo
A zoo (short for zoological garden; also called an animal park or menagerie) is a facility in which animals are kept within enclosures for public exhibition and often bred for Conservation biology, conservation purposes.
The term ''zoological g ...
in the centre next to his horse stables, containing two foxes, two peacocks and a
roe deer
The roe deer (''Capreolus capreolus''), also known as the roe, western roe deer, or European roe, is a species of deer. The male of the species is sometimes referred to as a roebuck. The roe is a small deer, reddish and grey-brown, and well-adapt ...
(introduced in 1943). Smaller rooms were built as laundry,
tailor
A tailor is a person who makes or alters clothing, particularly in men's clothing. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the term to the thirteenth century.
History
Although clothing construction goes back to prehistory, there is evidence of ...
s, and
cobblers, and for woodworking and medical aid. Closest to the SS quarters were separate barracks for the Polish and Ukrainian women who served, cleaned, and worked in the kitchen.
![Treblinka II aerial photo (1944)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Treblinka_II_aerial_photo_%281944%29.jpg)
The next section of Treblinka II (Camp 2, also called the lower camp or ''Auffanglager''), was the receiving area where the railway unloading ramp extended from the Treblinka line into the camp.
There was a long and narrow platform surrounded by barbed-wire fencing. A new building, erected on the platform, was disguised as a railway station complete with a wooden clock and fake rail terminal signs. SS-''
Scharführer
''Scharführer'' (, ) was a title or rank used in early 20th Century German military terminology. In German, ''Schar'' was one term for the smallest sub-unit, equivalent to (for example) a "troop" , " squad", or "section". The word ''führer'' ...
''
Josef Hirtreiter
Josef Hirtreiter (1 February 1909 – 27 November 1978) was an SS functionary of Nazi Germany and a Holocaust perpetrator who worked at Treblinka extermination camp during the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust in Poland. Hirtreiter was a ...
, who worked on the unloading ramp was known for being especially cruel; he grabbed crying toddlers by their feet and smashed their heads against wagons. Behind a second fence, about from the track, there were two large barracks used for undressing, with a cashier's booth where money and jewelry were collected, ostensibly for safekeeping. Jews who resisted were taken away or beaten to death by the guards. The area where the women and children were shorn of their hair was on the other side of the path from the men. All buildings in the lower camp, including the barber barracks, contained the piled up clothing and belongings of the prisoners. Behind the station building, further to the right, there was a Sorting Square where all baggage was first collected by the ''Lumpenkommando''. It was flanked by a fake infirmary called "Lazaret", with the
Red Cross
The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is a Humanitarianism, humanitarian movement with approximately 97 million Volunteering, volunteers, members and staff worldwide. It was founded to protect human life and health, to ensure re ...
sign on it. It was a small barracks surrounded by barbed wire, where the sick, old, wounded and "difficult" prisoners were taken. Directly behind the "Lazaret" shack, there was an open excavation pit seven metres (23 ft) deep. These prisoners were led to the edge of the pit and shot one at a time by ''
Blockführer
''Blockführer'' (Block Leader) was a paramilitary title specific to the SS-Death's Head Units in Concentration Camp Service. An SS-Block Leader was typically in charge of a prisoner barracks ranging from two hundred to three hundred concentra ...
''
Willi Mentz, nicknamed "Frankenstein" by the inmates. Mentz single-handedly executed thousands of Jews,
aided by his supervisor,
August Miete
August Wilhelm Miete (born 1 November 1908 – 9 August 1987) was an SS functionary of Nazi Germany. He worked at the Grafeneck and Hadamar Euthanasia Centres, and then at Treblinka extermination camp. Miete was arrested in 1960 and tried in West ...
, who was called the "Angel of Death" by the prisoners. The pit was also used to burn old worn-out clothes and identity papers deposited by new arrivals at the undressing area.
The third section of Treblinka II (Camp 3, also called the upper camp) was the main killing zone, with gas chambers at its centre. It was completely screened from the railway tracks by an earth bank built with the help of a mechanical digger. This mound was elongated in shape, similar to a retaining wall, and can be seen in
a sketch produced during the 1967 trial of Treblinka II commandant
Franz Stangl. On the other sides, the zone was camouflaged from new arrivals like the rest of the camp, using tree branches woven into barbed wire fences by the ''Tarnungskommando'' (the work detail led out to collect them). From the undressing barracks, a fenced-off path led through the forested area to the gas chambers. The SS cynically called it ''die Himmelstraße'' ("the road to heaven") or ''der Schlauch'' ("the tube"). For the first eight months of the camp's operation, the excavator was used to dig burial ditches on both sides of the gas chambers; these ditches were long, wide, and deep. In early 1943, they were replaced with cremation
pyres up to long, with rails laid across the pits on concrete blocks. The 300 prisoners who operated the upper camp lived in separate barracks behind the gas chambers.
Killing process
Unlike
Nazi concentration camps
From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps, (officially) or (more commonly). The Nazi concentration camps are distinguished from other types of Nazi camps such as forced-labor camps, as well as concen ...
in which prisoners were used as forced labour,
extermination camps
Nazi Germany used six extermination camps (german: Vernichtungslager), also called death camps (), or killing centers (), in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million peoplemostly Jewsin the Holocaust. The v ...
such as Treblinka had only one function: to murder those sent there. To prevent incoming victims from realising its nature, Treblinka II was disguised as a transit camp for deportations further east, complete with unreal train schedules, a fake train-station clock with hands painted on it, names of destinations,
a fake ticket window, and the sign "Ober Majdan", a code word for Treblinka commonly used to deceive prisoners arriving from Western Europe. Majdan was a prewar landed estate away from the camp.
Polish Jews
![Umschlagplatz loading](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Umschlagplatz_loading.jpg)
The
mass deportation
Deportation is the expulsion of a person or group of people from a place or country. The term ''expulsion'' is often used as a synonym for deportation, though expulsion is more often used in the context of international law, while deportation ...
of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto began on 22 July 1942 with the first transportation of 6,000 people. The gas chambers began to be operated the following morning. For the next two months, deportations from Warsaw continued daily, via two shuttle trains (the second one, from 6 August 1942), each carrying about 4,000 to 7,000 people crying for water. No other trains were allowed to stop at the Treblinka station. The first daily trains came in the early morning, often after an overnight wait, and the second, in mid-afternoon. All new arrivals were sent immediately to the undressing area by the ''Bahnhofskommando'' squad that managed the arrival platform, and from there to the gas chambers. According to German records, including the
official report by SS-''
Brigadeführer''
Jürgen Stroop
Jürgen Stroop (born Josef Stroop, 26 September 1895 – 6 March 1952) was a German SS commander during the Nazi era, who served as SS and Police Leader in occupied Poland and Greece. He led the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 194 ...
, 265,000 Jews were transported in
freight trains from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka during the period from 22 July to 12 September 1942.
The Polish railway was very heavily used. An average of 420 German military trains were passing through every 24 hours on top of internal traffic already in 1941.
The
Holocaust trains passage to their destination was routinely delayed; some transports took many days to arrive. Hundreds of prisoners were murdered by exhaustion, suffocation and thirst while in transit to the camp in the overcrowded wagons. In extreme cases, such as the
Biała Podlaska
Biała Podlaska ( la, Alba Ducalis) is a city in eastern Poland with 56,498 inhabitants as of December 2021. It is situated in the Lublin Voivodeship (since 1999), having previously been the capital of Biała Podlaska Voivodeship (1975–1998). ...
transport of 6,000 Jews travelling only a distance, up to 90 percent of people were already dead when the sealed doors were opened. From September 1942 on, both Polish and foreign Jews were greeted with a brief verbal announcement. An earlier signboard with directions was removed because it was clearly insufficient.
The deportees were told that they had arrived at a transit point on the way to Ukraine and needed to shower and have their clothes disinfected before receiving work uniforms and new orders.
Foreign Jews and Romani people
![DR Class 52](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/DR_Class_52.80_entering_tunnel.jpg)
Treblinka received transports of almost 20,000 foreign Jews between October 1942 and March 1943, including 8,000 from the German
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia; cs, Protektorát Čechy a Morava; its territory was called by the Nazis ("the rest of Czechia"). was a partially annexed territory of Nazi Germany established on 16 March 1939 following the German oc ...
via
Theresienstadt
Theresienstadt Ghetto was established by the Schutzstaffel, SS during World War II in the fortress town of Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (German occupation of Czechoslovakia, German-occupied Czechoslovakia). Theresienstad ...
, and over 11,000 from Bulgarian-occupied
Thrace
Thrace (; el, Θράκη, Thráki; bg, Тракия, Trakiya; tr, Trakya) or Thrake is a geographical and historical region in Southeast Europe, now split among Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey, which is bounded by the Balkan Mountains to t ...
,
Macedonia, and
Pirot
Pirot ( sr-cyr, Пирот) is a city and the administrative center of the Pirot District in southeastern Serbia. According to 2011 census, the urban area of the city has a population of 38,785, while the population of the city administrative area ...
following an agreement with the Nazi-allied Bulgarian government.
They had train tickets and arrived predominantly in passenger carriages with considerable luggage, travel foods and drinks, all of which were taken by the SS to the food storage barracks. The provisions included such items as smoked mutton, speciality breads, wine, cheese, fruit, tea, coffee, and sweets. Unlike Polish Jews arriving in Holocaust trains from nearby ghettos in cities like
Warsaw
Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is officia ...
,
Radom, and those of ''
Bezirk Bialystok'', the foreign Jews received a warm welcome upon arrival from an SS man (either
Otto Stadie
Otto Stadie (10 March 1897 – 28 July 1977) was a German nurse and member of the Action T4, the Nazi forced euthanasia programme. During the Holocaust in occupied Poland he kept the register of stolen gold and diamonds at the Treblinka exterminat ...
or Willy Mätzig),
after which they were murdered like the others. Treblinka was mainly used for the murder of Polish Jews, Bełżec was used to murder Jews from Austria and the
Sudetenland
The Sudetenland ( , ; Czech and sk, Sudety) is the historical German name for the northern, southern, and western areas of former Czechoslovakia which were inhabited primarily by Sudeten Germans. These German speakers had predominated in the ...
, and Sobibór was used to murder Jews from France and the Netherlands. Auschwitz-Birkenau was used to murder Jews from almost every other country in Europe.
The frequency of arriving transports slowed down in winter.
[Lanzmann 1985.]
The decoupled locomotive went back to the Treblinka station or to the layover yard in Małkinia for the next load, while the victims were pulled from the carriages onto the platform by ''Kommando Blau'', one of the Jewish work details forced to assist the Germans at the camp. They were led through the gate amidst chaos and screaming. They were separated by gender behind the gate; women were pushed into the undressing barracks and barber on the left, and men were sent to the right. All were ordered to tie their shoes together and strip. Some kept their own towels. The Jews who resisted were taken to the "Lazaret", also called the "Red Cross infirmary", and shot behind it. Women had their hair cut off; therefore, it took longer to prepare them for the gas chambers than men.
The hair was used in the manufacture of socks for
U-boat
U-boats were naval submarines operated by Germany, particularly in the First and Second World Wars. Although at times they were efficient fleet weapons against enemy naval warships, they were most effectively used in an economic warfare role ...
crews and hair-felt footwear for the ''
Deutsche Reichsbahn''.
Most of those murdered at Treblinka were Jews, but about 2,000
Romani people
The Romani (also spelled Romany or Rromani , ), colloquially known as the Roma, are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group, traditionally nomadic itinerants. They live in Europe and Anatolia, and have diaspora populations located worldwide, with sig ...
were also murdered there. Like the Jews, the Romani were first rounded up and sent to the ghettos. At a conference on 30 January 1940 it was decided that all 30,000 Romani living in Germany proper were to be deported to former Polish territory. Most of these were sent to Jewish ghettos in the General Government, such as those in Warsaw and Łódź. As with the Jews, most Romani who went to Treblinka were murdered in the gas chambers, although some were shot. The majority of the Jews living in ghettos were sent to Bełżec, Sobibór, or Treblinka to be murdered; most of the Romani living in the ghettos were shot on the spot. There were no known Romani escapees or survivors from Treblinka.
[
]
Gas chambers
After undressing, newly arrived Jews were beaten with whips to drive them towards the gas chambers; hesitant men were treated particularly brutally. Rudolf Höss, the commandant at Auschwitz, contrasted the practice at Treblinka of deceiving the victims about the showers with his own camp's practice of telling them they had to go through a "delousing" process. According to the postwar testimony of some SS officers, men were always gassed first, while women and children waited outside the gas chambers for their turn. During this time, the women and children could hear the sounds of suffering from inside the chambers, and they became aware of what awaited them, which caused panic, distress, and even involuntary defecation.
Many survivors of the Treblinka camp testified that an officer known as 'Ivan the Terrible
Ivan IV Vasilyevich (russian: Ива́н Васи́льевич; 25 August 1530 – ), commonly known in English as Ivan the Terrible, was the grand prince of Moscow from 1533 to 1547 and the first Tsar of all Russia from 1547 to 1584.
Ivan ...
' was responsible for operating the gas chambers in 1942 and 1943. While Jews were awaiting their fate outside the gas chambers, Ivan the Terrible allegedly tortured, beat, and murdered many of them. Survivors witnessed Ivan beat victims' heads open with a pipe, cut victims with a sword or a bayonet, cut off noses and ears, and gouge out eyes. One survivor testified that Ivan murdered an infant by bashing it against a wall; another claimed that he raped a young girl before cutting her abdomen open and letting her bleed to death.
The gas chambers were completely enclosed by a high wooden fence. Originally, they consisted of three interconnected barracks long and wide, disguised as showers. They had double walls insulated by earth packed down in between. The interior walls and ceilings were lined with roofing paper. The floors were covered with tin-plated sheet metal, the same material used for the roof. Solid wooden doors were insulated with rubber and bolted from the outside by heavy cross-bars.
According to Stangl, a train transport of about 3,000 people could be "processed" in three hours. In a 14-hour workday, 12,000 to 15,000 people were murdered. After the new gas chambers were built, the duration of the killing process was reduced to an hour and a half. The victims were murdered via gas, using the exhaust fumes conducted through pipes from an engine of a Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, after ...
tank. SS-''Scharführer'' Erich Fuchs
Erich Fuchs (9 April 1902 – 25 July 1980) was an SS functionary who worked for the Action T4 mass-murder program, and for the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust.
Fuchs was charged with war crimes at the Bełżec Trial in 1963–64, for ...
was responsible for installing it. The engine was brought in by the SS at the time of the camp's construction and housed in a room with a generator that supplied the camp with electricity. The tank engine exhaust pipe ran just below the ground and opened into all three gas chambers. The fumes could be seen seeping out. After about 20 minutes the bodies were removed by dozens of ''Sonderkommandos'', placed onto carts and wheeled away. The system was imperfect and required a lot of effort; trains that arrived later in the day had to wait on layover tracks overnight at Treblinka, Małkinia, or Wólka Okrąglik.
Between August and September 1942, a large new building with a concrete foundation was built from bricks and mortar under the guidance of Action T4 euthanasia expert Erwin Lambert
Erwin Hermann Lambert (7 December 1909 – 15 October 1976) was a perpetrator of the Holocaust. In profession, he was a master mason, building trades foreman, Nazi Party member and member of the ''Schutzstaffel'' with the rank of SS-''Unterscha ...
. It contained 8–10 gas chambers, each of which was , and it had a corridor in the centre. Stangl supervised its construction and brought in building materials from the nearby village of Małkinia by dismantling factory stock. During this time victims continued to arrive daily and were led naked past the building site to the original gas chambers. The new gas chambers became operational after five weeks of construction, equipped with two fume-producing engines instead of one. The metal doors, which had been taken from Soviet military bunkers around Białystok, had portholes through which it was possible to observe the dead before removing them. Stangl said that the old gas chambers were capable of murdering 3,000 people in three hours. The new ones had the highest possible capacity of any gas chambers in the three Reinhard death camps and could murder up to 22,000 or 25,000 people every day, a fact which Globocnik once boasted about to Kurt Gerstein, a fellow SS officer from Disinfection Services. The new gas chambers were seldom used to their full capacity; 12,000–15,000 victims remained the daily average.
The killing process at Treblinka differed significantly from the method used at Auschwitz and Majdanek, where the poison gas Zyklon B
Zyklon B (; translated Cyclone B) was the trade name of a cyanide-based pesticide invented in Germany in the early 1920s. It consisted of hydrogen cyanide (prussic acid), as well as a cautionary eye irritant and one of several adsorbents such ...
(hydrogen cyanide) was used. At Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec, the victims were murdered by suffocation and carbon monoxide poisoning
Carbon monoxide poisoning typically occurs from breathing in carbon monoxide (CO) at excessive levels. Symptoms are often described as "flu-like" and commonly include headache, dizziness, weakness, vomiting, chest pain, and confusion. Large e ...
from engine exhaust in stationary gas chambers. At Chełmno, they were carried within two specially equipped and engineered trucks, driven at a scientifically calculated speed so as to murder the Jews inside it during the trip, rather than force the drivers and guards to murder them at the destination. After visiting Treblinka on a guided tour, Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss concluded that using exhaust gas was inferior to the cyanide used at his extermination camp. The chambers became silent after 12 minutes and were closed for 20 minutes or less. According to Jankiel Wiernik, who survived the 1943 prisoner uprising and escaped, when the doors of the gas chambers had been opened, the bodies of the victims were standing and kneeling rather than lying down, due to the severe overcrowding. Dead mothers embraced the bodies of their children. Prisoners who worked in the ''Sonderkommandos'' later testified that the dead frequently let out a last gasp of air when they were extracted from the chambers. Some victims showed signs of life during the disposal of the corpses, but the guards routinely refused to react.
Cremation pits
The Germans became aware of the political danger associated with the mass burial of corpses in April 1943 after they discovered the graves of Polish victims of the 1940 Katyn massacre
The Katyn massacre, "Katyń crime"; russian: link=yes, Катынская резня ''Katynskaya reznya'', "Katyn massacre", or russian: link=no, Катынский расстрел, ''Katynsky rasstrel'', "Katyn execution" was a series of m ...
carried out by the Soviets near Smolensk. The bodies of the 10,000 Polish officers executed by the NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
...
were well preserved despite their long burial. The Germans formed the Katyn Commission
The Katyn Commission or the International Katyn Commission was a committee formed in April 1943 under request by Germany to investigate the Katyn massacre of some 22,000 Polish nationals during the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland, mostly pri ...
to prove that the Soviets were solely responsible, and used radio broadcast and newsfilm to alert the Allies to this war crime. Subsequently, the Nazi leadership, concerned about covering up their own crimes, issued the secret orders to exhume the corpses buried at death camps and burn them. The cremations began shortly after Himmler's visit to the camp in late February or early March 1943.
To incinerate bodies, large cremation pits were constructed at Camp 3 within Treblinka II. The burning pyres were used to cremate the new corpses along with the old ones, which had to be dug up as they had been buried during the first six months of the camp's operation. Built under the instructions of Herbert Floß, the camp's cremation expert, the pits consisted of railroad rails laid as grates on blocks of concrete. The bodies were placed on rails over wood, splashed with petrol, and burned. It was a harrowing sight, according to Jankiel Wiernik, with the bellies of pregnant women exploding from boiling amniotic fluid
The amniotic fluid is the protective liquid contained by the amniotic sac of a gravid amniote. This fluid serves as a cushion for the growing fetus, but also serves to facilitate the exchange of nutrients, water, and biochemical products betwee ...
. He wrote that "the heat radiating from the pits was maddening." The bodies burned for five hours, without the ashing of bones. The pyres operated 24 hours a day. Once the system had been perfected, 10,000–12,000 bodies at a time could be incinerated.
The open air burn pits were located east of the new gas chambers and refuelled from 4 a.m. (or after 5 a.m. depending on work-load) to 6 p.m. in roughly 5-hour intervals. The current camp memorial includes a flat grave marker resembling one of them. It is constructed from melted basalt and has a concrete foundation. It is a symbolic grave, as the Nazis spread the actual human ashes, mixed with sand, over an area of .
Organization of the camp
The camp was operated by 20–25 German and Austrian members of the ''SS-Totenkopfverbände
''SS-Totenkopfverbände'' (SS-TV; ) was the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) organization responsible for administering the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps for Nazi Germany, among similar duties. While the ''Totenkopf'' was the univer ...
'' and 80–120 '' Wachmänner'' ("watchmen") guards who had been trained at a special SS facility in the Trawniki concentration camp near Lublin
Lublin is the ninth-largest city in Poland and the second-largest city of historical Lesser Poland. It is the capital and the center of Lublin Voivodeship with a population of 336,339 (December 2021). Lublin is the largest Polish city east of t ...
, Poland; all ''Wachmänner'' guards were trained at Trawniki. The guards were mainly ethnic German ''Volksdeutsche
In Nazi German terminology, ''Volksdeutsche'' () were "people whose language and culture had German origins but who did not hold German citizenship". The term is the nominalised plural of '' volksdeutsch'', with ''Volksdeutsche'' denoting a sin ...
'' from the east and Ukrainians, with some Russians, Tatar
The Tatars ()[Tatar]
in the Collins English Dictionary is an umbrella term for different s, Moldovans, Latvians, and Central Asians
Central Asia is a diverse land with many ethnic groups, languages, religions and tribes. The nations which make up Central Asia are five of the former Soviet republics: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, which have ...
, all of whom had served in the Red Army. They were enlisted by Karl Streibel
Karl Streibel (11 October 1903 – 5 August 1986) was the second and last commander of the Trawniki concentration camp – one of the subcamps of the KL Lublin system of Nazi concentration camps in occupied Poland during World War II.
Streibel w ...
, the commander of the Trawniki camp, from the prisoner of war (POW) camps for Soviet soldiers. The degree to which their recruitment was voluntary remains disputed; while conditions in the camps for Soviet POWs were dreadful, some Soviet POWs collaborated with the Germans even before cold, hunger, and disease began devastating the POW camps in mid-September 1941.
The work at Treblinka was carried out under threat of death by Jewish prisoners organised into specialised work details. At the Camp 2 ''Auffanglager'' receiving area each squad had a different coloured triangle. The triangles made it impossible for new arrivals to try to blend in with members of the work details. The blue unit (''Kommando Blau'') managed the rail ramp and unlocked the freight wagons. They met the new arrivals, carried out people who had died en route, removed bundles, and cleaned the wagon floors. The red unit (''Kommando Rot''), which was the largest squad, unpacked and sorted the belongings of victims after they had been "processed". The red unit delivered these belongings to the storage barracks, which were managed by the yellow unit (''Kommando Gelb''), who separated the items by quality, removed the Star of David
The Star of David (). is a generally recognized symbol of both Jewish identity and Judaism. Its shape is that of a hexagram: the compound of two equilateral triangles.
A derivation of the ''seal of Solomon'', which was used for decorative ...
from all outer garments, and extracted any money sewn into the linings. The yellow unit was followed by the ''Desinfektionskommando'', who disinfected the belongings, including sacks of hair from women who had been murdered there. The ''Goldjuden'' unit ("gold Jews") collected and counted banknotes and evaluated the gold and jewellery.
A different group of about 300 men, called the ''Totenjuden'' ("Jews for the dead"), lived and worked in Camp 3 across from the gas chambers. For the first six months they took the corpses away for burial after gold teeth had been extracted. Once cremation began in early 1943 they took the corpses to the pits, refuelled the pyres, crushed the remaining bones with mallets, and collected the ashes for disposal. Each trainload of "deportees" brought to Treblinka consisted of an average of sixty heavily guarded wagons. They were divided into three sets of twenty at the layover yard. Each set was processed within the first two hours of backing onto the ramp, and was then made ready by the ''Sonderkommandos'' to be exchanged for the next set of twenty wagons.
Members of all work units were continuously beaten by the guards and often shot. Replacements were selected from the new arrivals. There were other work details which had no contact with the transports: the ''Holzfällerkommando'' ("woodcutter unit") cut and chopped firewood, and the ''Tarnungskommando'' ("disguise unit") camouflaged the structures of the camp. Another work detail was responsible for cleaning the common areas. The Camp 1 ''Wohnlager'' residential compound contained barracks for about 700 ''Sonderkommandos'' which, when combined with the 300 ''Totenjuden'' living across from the gas chambers, brought their grand total to roughly one thousand at a time.
Many ''Sonderkommando'' prisoners hanged themselves at night. Suicides in the ''Totenjuden'' barracks occurred at the rate of 15 to 20 per day. The work crews were almost entirely replaced every few days; members of the old work detail were murdered except for the most resilient.
Treblinka prisoner uprising
In early 1943, an underground Jewish resistance organisation was formed at Treblinka with the goal of seizing control of the camp and escaping to freedom. The planned revolt was preceded by a long period of secret preparations. The clandestine unit was first organised by a former Jewish captain of the Polish Army, Dr. Julian Chorążycki, who was described by fellow plotter Samuel Rajzman as noble and essential to the action. His organising committee included Zelomir Bloch (leadership), Rudolf Masaryk, Marceli Galewski, Samuel Rajzman, Dr. Irena Lewkowska ("Irka", from the sick bay for the ''Hiwis
Hiwi (), the German abbreviation of the word ''Hilfswilliger'' or, in English, auxiliary volunteer, designated, during World War II, a member of different kinds of voluntary auxiliary forces made up of recruits indigenous to the territories of Ea ...
''), Leon Haberman, Chaim Sztajer, Hershl (Henry) Sperling from Częstochowa
Częstochowa ( , ; german: Tschenstochau, Czenstochau; la, Czanstochova) is a city in southern Poland on the Warta River with 214,342 inhabitants, making it the thirteenth-largest city in Poland. It is situated in the Silesian Voivodeship (admin ...
, and several others. Chorążycki (who treated the German patients) killed himself with poison on 19 April 1943 when faced with imminent capture, so that the Germans could not discover the plot by torturing him. The next leader was another former Polish Army officer, Dr. Berek Lajcher
Berek Lajcher (24 October 1893 – 2 August 1943) was a Jewish physician and social activist from Wyszków before the Holocaust in Poland, remembered for his leadership in the prisoner uprising at Treblinka extermination camp. More than 800,000 Jew ...
, who arrived on 1 May. Born in Częstochowa, he had practised medicine in Wyszków
Wyszków (; yi, ווישקאָוו ''Vishkov'') is a town in eastern Poland with 26,500 inhabitants (2018). It is the capital of Wyszków County in Masovian Voivodeship.
History
The village of Wyszków was first documented in 1203. It was grant ...
and was expelled by the Nazis to Wegrów in 1939.
The date of the revolt was initially set for 15 June 1943, but it had to be postponed. A fighter smuggled a grenade in one of the early May trains carrying captured rebels from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which had begun on 19 April 1943. When he detonated it in the undressing area, the SS and guards were thrown into a panic. After the explosion, Treblinka received only about 7,000 Jews from the capital for fear of similar incidents; the remaining 42,000 Warsaw Jews were deported to Majdanek
Majdanek (or Lublin) was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, a ...
, instead. The burning of unearthed corpses continued at full speed until the end of July. The Treblinka II conspirators became increasingly concerned about their future as the amount of work for them began to decline. With fewer transports arriving, they realised "they were next in line for the gas chambers."
Day of the revolt and survivors
The uprising was launched on the hot summer day of 2 August 1943 (Monday, a regular day of rest from gassing), when a group of Germans and 40 Ukrainians drove off to the River Bug to swim. The conspirators silently unlocked the door to the arsenal near the train tracks, with a key that had been duplicated earlier. They had stolen 20–25 rifles, 20 hand grenades, and several pistols, and delivered them in a cart to the gravel work detail. At 3:45 p.m., 700 Jews launched an insurgency that lasted for 30 minutes. They set buildings ablaze, exploded a tank of petrol, and set fire to the surrounding structures. A group of armed Jews attacked the main gate, and others attempted to climb the fence. Machine-gun fire from about 25 Germans and 60 Ukrainian ''Trawnikis'' resulted in near-total slaughter. Lajcher was killed along with most of the insurgents. About 200 Jews escaped from the camp. Half of them were killed after a chase in cars and on horses. The Jews did not cut the phone wires, and Stangl called in hundreds of German reinforcements, who arrived from four different towns and set up roadblocks along the way. Partisans of the ''Armia Krajowa
The Home Army ( pl, Armia Krajowa, abbreviated AK; ) was the dominant resistance movement in German-occupied Poland during World War II. The Home Army was formed in February 1942 from the earlier Związek Walki Zbrojnej (Armed Resistance) esta ...
'' (Polish: Home Army) transported some of the surviving escapees across the river and others like Sperling ran and were then helped and fed by Polish villagers. Of those who broke through, around 70 are known to have survived until the end of the war, including the future authors of published Treblinka memoirs: Richard Glazar
Richard Glazar (November 29, 1920 – December 20, 1997) was a Czech-Jewish inmate of the Treblinka extermination camp in German-occupied Poland during the Holocaust. One of a small group of survivors of the camp's prisoner revolt in August 1943, G ...
, Chil Rajchman, Jankiel Wiernik, and Samuel Willenberg
Samuel Willenberg, ''nom de guerre'' Igo (16 February 1923 – 19 February 2016), was a Polish Holocaust survivor, artist, and writer. He was a ''Sonderkommando'' at the Treblinka extermination camp and participated in the unit's planned revol ...
.[ ''Also in:'' ]
Among the Jewish prisoners who escaped after setting fire to the camp, there were two 19-year-olds, Samuel Willenberg and Kalman Taigman
Kalman Taigman also Teigman he, קלמן טייגמן ( – ) was an Israeli citizen who was born and grew up in Warsaw, Poland. One of the former members of the Jewish ''Sonderkommando'' who escaped from the Treblinka extermination camp during ...
, who had both arrived in 1942 and had been forced to work there under the threat of death. Taigman died in 2012 and Willenberg in 2016. Taigman stated of his experience, "It was hell, absolutely hell. A normal man cannot imagine how a living person could have lived through it – killers, natural-born killers, who without a trace of remorse just murdered every little thing." Willenberg and Taigman emigrated to Israel after the war and devoted their last years to retelling the story of Treblinka. Escapees Hershl Sperling and Richard Glazar both suffered from survivor guilt syndrome and eventually killed themselves. Chaim Sztajer, who was 34 at the time of the uprising, had survived 11 months as a ''Sonderkommando'' in Treblinka II and was instrumental in the coordination of the uprising between the two camps. Following his escape in the uprising, Sztajer survived for over a year in the forest before the liberation of Poland. Following the war, he migrated to Israel and then to Melbourne, Australia
Melbourne ( ; Boonwurrung/Woiwurrung: ''Narrm'' or ''Naarm'') is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, and the second-most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Its name generally refers to a metropol ...
where later in life he constructed from memory a model of Treblinka which is currently displayed at the Jewish Holocaust Centre
The Melbourne Holocaust Museum (MHM) (formerly known as the Jewish Holocaust Centre) was founded in Elsternwick, Melbourne, Australia, in 1984 by Holocaust survivors. It is currently Australia’s largest institution dedicated to Holocaust educati ...
in Melbourne.
After the uprising
After the revolt, Stangl met the head of Operation Reinhard, Odilo Globocnik, and inspector Christian Wirth in Lublin, and decided not to draft a report, as no native Germans had died putting down the revolt. Stangl wanted to rebuild the camp, but Globocnik told him it would be closed down shortly and Stangl would be transferred to Trieste
Trieste ( , ; sl, Trst ; german: Triest ) is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is the capital city, and largest city, of the autonomous region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, one of two autonomous regions which are not subdivided into provi ...
to help fight the partisans there. The Nazi high command may have felt that Stangl, Globocnik, Wirth, and other Reinhard personnel knew too much and wanted to dispose of them by sending them to the front
Front may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Films
* ''The Front'' (1943 film), a 1943 Soviet drama film
* ''The Front'', 1976 film
Music
* The Front (band), an American rock band signed to Columbia Records and active in the 1980s and e ...
. With almost all the Jews from the German ghettos (established in Poland) murdered, there would have been little point in rebuilding the facility. Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...
had enough capacity to fulfil the Nazis' remaining extermination needs, rendering Treblinka redundant.
The camp's new commandant Kurt Franz, formerly its deputy commandant, took over in August. After the war he testified that gassings had stopped by then. In reality, despite the extensive damage to the camp, the gas chambers were intact, and the murder of Polish Jews continued. Speed was reduced, with only ten wagons rolled onto the ramp at a time, while the others had to wait. The last two rail transports of Jews were brought to the camp for gassing from the Białystok Ghetto
The Białystok Ghetto ( pl, getto w Białymstoku) was a Nazi ghetto set up by the German SS between July 26 and early August 1941 in the newly formed District of Bialystok within occupied Poland. About 50,000 Jews from the vicinity of Białyst ...
on 18 and 19 August 1943. They consisted of 76 wagons (37 the first day and 39 the second), according to a communiqué published by the Office of Information of the ''Armia Krajowa'', based on observation of Holocaust trains passing through the village of Treblinka. The 39 wagons that came to Treblinka on 19 August 1943 were carrying at least 7,600 survivors of the Białystok Ghetto Uprising.
On 19 October 1943, Operation Reinhard was terminated by a letter from Odilo Globocnik. The following day, a large group of Jewish ''Arbeitskommandos'' who had worked on dismantling the camp structures over the previous few weeks were loaded onto the train and transported, via Siedlce
Siedlce [] ( yi, שעדליץ ) is a city in eastern Poland with 77,354 inhabitants (). Situated in the Masovian Voivodeship (since 1999), previously the city was the capital of a separate Siedlce Voivodeship (1975–1998). The city is situated b ...
and Chełm, to Sobibór
Sobibor (, Polish: ) was an extermination camp built and operated by Nazi Germany as part of Operation Reinhard. It was located in the forest near the village of Żłobek Duży in the General Government region of German-occupied Poland.
As ...
to be gassed on 20 October 1943. Franz followed Globocnik and Stangl to Trieste in November. Clean-up operations continued over the winter. As part of these operations, Jews from the surviving work detail dismantled the gas chambers brick-by-brick and used them to erect a farmhouse on the site of the camp's former bakery. Globocnik confirmed its purpose as a secret guard post for a Nazi-Ukrainian agent to remain behind the scenes, in a letter he sent to Himmler from Trieste on 5 January 1944. A ''Hiwi'' guard called Oswald Strebel, a Ukrainian ''Volksdeutscher'' (ethnic German), was given permission to bring his family from Ukraine for "reasons of surveillance", wrote Globocnik; Strebel had worked as a guard at Treblinka II. He was instructed to tell visitors that he had been farming there for decades, but the local Poles were well aware of the existence of the camp.
Operational command of Treblinka II
Irmfried Eberl
SS-''Obersturmführer'' Irmfried Eberl was appointed the camp's first commandant on 11 July 1942. He was a psychiatrist
A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in psychiatry, the branch of medicine devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, study, and treatment of mental disorders. Psychiatrists are physicians and evaluate patients to determine whether their sy ...
from Bernburg Euthanasia Centre
The Nazi Euthanasia Centre at Bernburg (german: NS-Tötungsanstalt Bernburg) operated from 21 November 1940 to 30 July 1943 in a separate wing of the State Sanatorium and Mental Hospital (''Landes-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt'') in Bernburg on the River ...
and the only physician-in-chief to command an extermination camp during World War II. According to some, his poor organisational skills caused the operation of Treblinka to turn disastrous; others point out that the number of transports that were coming in reflected the Nazi high command's wildly unrealistic expectations of Treblinka's ability to "process" these prisoners. The early gassing machinery frequently broke down due to overuse, forcing the SS to shoot Jews assembled for suffocation. The workers did not have enough time to bury them, and the mass graves were overflowing. According to the testimony of his colleague ''Unterscharführer'' Hans Hingst, Eberl's ego and thirst for power exceeded his ability: "So many transports arrived that the disembarkation and gassing of the people could no longer be handled." On incoming Holocaust trains to Treblinka, many of the Jews locked inside correctly guessed what was going to happen to them. The odour of decaying corpses could be smelled up to away.
Oskar Berger, a Jewish eyewitness, one of about 100 people who escaped during the 1943 uprising, told of the camp's state when he arrived there in August 1942:
When Globocnik made a surprise visit to Treblinka on 26 August 1942 with Christian Wirth and Wirth's adjutant from Bełżec, Josef Oberhauser
Josef Oberhauser (21 January 1915 – 22 November 1979) was a low-ranking German SS commander during the Nazi era. He participated in Action T4 and Operation Reinhard. Oberhauser was the only person to be successfully convicted of crimes committ ...
, Eberl was dismissed on the spot. Among the reasons for dismissal were: incompetently disposing of the tens of thousands of dead bodies, using inefficient methods of murder, and not properly concealing the mass-murder. Eberl was transferred to Berlin, closer to operational headquarters in Hitler's Chancellery
Hitler's Chancellery, officially known as the ''Kanzlei des Führers der NSDAP'' (" Chancellery of the Führer of the Nazi Party"; abbreviated as KdF) was a Nazi Party organization. Also known as the ''Privatkanzlei des Führers'' ("Private Chanc ...
, where the main architect of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler, had just stepped up the pace of the programme. Globocnik assigned Wirth to remain in Treblinka temporarily to help clean up the camp. On 28 August 1942, Globocnik suspended deportations. He chose Franz Stangl, who had been the commandant of the Sobibór extermination camp, to assume command of the camp as Eberl's successor. Stangl had a reputation as a competent administrator with a good understanding of the project's objectives, and Globocnik trusted that he would be capable of resuming control.
Franz Stangl
Stangl arrived at Treblinka in late August 1942. He replaced Eberl on 1 September. Years later, Stangl described what he first saw when he came on the scene, in a 1971 interview with Gitta Sereny
Gitta Sereny, CBE (13 March 192114 June 2012) was an Austrian-British biographer, historian, and investigative journalist who came to be known for her interviews and profiles of infamous figures, including Mary Bell, who was convicted in 1968 of ...
:
Stangl reorganised the camp, and the transports of Warsaw and Jews from the Radom Ghetto began to arrive again on 3 September 1942. According to Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad, Stangl wanted the camp to look attractive, so he ordered the paths paved in the ''Wohnlager'' administrative compound. Flowers were planted along ''Seidel Straße'' as well as near the SS living quarters. He ordered that all arriving prisoners should be greeted by the SS with a verbal announcement translated by the working Jews. The deportees were told that they were at a transit point on the way to Ukraine. Some of their questions were answered by Germans wearing lab coats as tools for deception. At times Stangl carried a whip and wore a white uniform, so he was nicknamed the "White Death" by prisoners. Although he was directly responsible for the camp's operations, according to his own testimony Stangl limited his contact with Jewish prisoners as much as possible. He claimed that he rarely interfered with the cruel acts perpetrated by his subordinate officers at the camp.Robert S. Wistrich
Robert Solomon Wistrich (April 7, 1945 – May 19, 2015) was the Erich Neuberger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the head of the University's Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study ...
. ''Who's Who in Nazi Germany'', pp. 295–296. Macmillan, 1982. He became desensitised to the murders, and came to perceive prisoners not as humans but merely as "cargo" that had to be destroyed, he said.
Treblinka song
According to postwar testimonies, when transports were temporarily halted, then-deputy commandant Kurt Franz wrote lyrics to a song meant to celebrate the Treblinka extermination camp. In reality, prisoner Walter Hirsch wrote them for him. The melody came from something Franz remembered from Buchenwald. The music was upbeat, in the key of D major. The song was taught to Jews assigned to work in the ''Sonderkommando''. They were forced to memorise it by nightfall of their first day at the camp. ''Unterscharführer'' Franz Suchomel
Franz Suchomel (3 December 1907 – 18 December 1979)Samuel Willenberg: ''Treblinka Lager. Revolte. Flucht. Warschauer Aufstand.'' Anm. 9, p. 217. Unrast-Verlag, Münster 2009, was a Sudeten German Nazi war criminal. He participated in the Actio ...
recalled the lyrics as follows: "We know only the word of the Commander. / We know only obedience and duty. / We want to keep working, working, / until a bit of luck beckons us some time. Hurray!"[Suchomel's lyrics in German: ''"Wir kennen nur das Wort des Kommandanten / und nur Gehorsamkeit und Pflicht / Wir wollen weiter, weiter leisten / bis daß das kleine Glück uns einmal winkt. Hurrah!"'' ]
A musical ensemble was formed, under duress, by Artur Gold, a popular Jewish prewar composer from Warsaw. He arranged the theme to the Treblinka song for the prisoner orchestra which he conducted. Gold arrived in Treblinka in 1942 and played music in the SS mess hall at the ''Wohnlager'' on German orders. He died during the uprising.
Kurt Franz
After the Treblinka revolt in August 1943, and termination of Operation Reinhard in October 1943, Stangl went with Globocnik to Trieste in northern Italy where SS reinforcements were needed. The third and last Treblinka II commandant was Kurt Franz, nicknamed "Lalka" by the prisoners ( pl, the doll) because he had "an innocent face".[ ''Also in:'' .] According to survivor testimonies, Franz shot and beat prisoners to death for minor infractions or had his dog Barry tear them to pieces.[ ''Also in:'' .] He managed Treblinka II until November 1943. The subsequent clean-up of the Treblinka II perimeter was completed by prisoners of nearby Treblinka I ''Arbeitslager'' in the following months. Franz's deputy was '' Hauptscharführer'' Fritz Küttner, who maintained a network of informers among the prisoners and did the hands-on murders.
Kurt Franz maintained a photo album against orders never to take photographs inside Treblinka. He named it ''Schöne Zeiten'' ("Good Times"). His album is a rare source of images illustrating the mechanised grave digging, brickworks in Małkinia and the Treblinka zoo, among others. Franz was careful not to photograph the gas chambers.
The Treblinka I gravel mine functioned at full capacity under the command of Theodor van Eupen until July 1944, with new forced labourers sent to him by ''Kreishauptmann'' Ernst Gramss from Sokołów. The mass shootings continued into 1944. With Soviet troops closing in, the last 300 to 700 prisoners disposing of the incriminating evidence were executed by ''Trawnikis'' in late July 1944, long after the camp's official closure. Strebel, the ethnic German who had been installed in the farmhouse built in place of the camp's original bakery using bricks from the gas chambers, set fire to the building and fled to avoid capture.
Arrival of the Soviets
In late July 1944, Soviet forces approached from the east. The departing Germans, who had already destroyed most direct evidence of genocidal intent
Genocidal intent is the ''mens rea'' for the crime of genocide. "Intent to destroy" is one of the elements of the crime of genocide according to the 1948 Genocide Convention. There are some analytic differences between the concept of intent under n ...
, burned surrounding villages to the ground, including 761 buildings in Poniatowo, Prostyń
Prostyń is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Małkinia Górna, within Ostrów Mazowiecka County, Masovian Voivodeship, in east-central Poland. It lies approximately south-west of Małkinia Górna, south of Ostrów Mazowiecka, an ...
, and Grądy. Many families were murdered. The fields of grain that had once fed the SS were burned. On 19 August 1944, German forces blew up the church in Prostyń and its bell tower, the last defensive strongpoint against the Red Army in the area. When the Soviets entered Treblinka on 16 August, the extermination zone had been levelled, ploughed over, and planted with lupin
''Lupinus'', commonly known as lupin, lupine, or regionally bluebonnet etc., is a genus of plants in the legume family Fabaceae. The genus includes over 199 species, with centers of diversity in North and South America. Smaller centers occur ...
s. What remained, wrote visiting Soviet war correspondent Vasily Grossman, were small pieces of bone in the soil, human teeth, scraps of paper and fabric, broken dishes, jars, shaving brushes, rusted pots and pans, cups of all sizes, mangled shoes, and lumps of human hair. The road leading to the camp was pitch black. Until mid-1944 human ashes (up to 20 carts every day) had been regularly strewn by the remaining prisoners along the road for in the direction of Treblinka I. When the war ended, destitute and starving locals started walking up the Black Road (as they began to call it) in search of man-made nuggets shaped from melted gold in order to buy bread.
Early attempts at preservation
The new Soviet-installed government did not preserve evidence of the camp. The scene was not legally protected at the conclusion of World War II. In September 1947, 30 students from the local school, led by their teacher Feliks Szturo and priest Józef Ruciński, collected larger bones and skull fragments into farmers' wicker baskets and buried them in a single mound. The same year the first remembrance committee ''Komitet Uczczenia Ofiar Treblinki'' (KUOT; Committee for the Remembrance of the Victims of Treblinka) formed in Warsaw, and launched a design competition for the memorial.
Stalinist officials allocated no funding for the design competition nor for the memorial, and the committee disbanded in 1948; by then many survivors had left the country. In 1949, the town of Sokołów Podlaski protected the camp with a new fence and gate. A work crew with no archaeological experience was sent in to landscape the grounds. In 1958, after the end of Stalinism in Poland
Stalinism is the means of governing and Marxist-Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin. It included the creation of a one-party totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory o ...
, the Warsaw provincial council declared Treblinka to be a place of martyrology. Over the next four years, of land that had formed part of the camp was purchased from 192 farmers in the villages of Prostyń, Grądy, Wólka Okrąglik and Nowa Maliszewa
Nowa Maliszewa is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Kosów Lacki, within Sokołów County, Masovian Voivodeship
The Masovian Voivodeship, also known as the Mazovia Province ( pl, województwo mazowieckie ) is a voivodeship (prov ...
.
Construction of the memorial
The construction of a monument in height designed by sculptor Franciszek Duszeńko
Franciszek Duszeńko (6 April 1925 – 11 April 2008) was a Polish sculptor, professor of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and its Rector in the years 1981–87. He was a former prisoner of Nazi concentration camps in World War II.
During the ...
was inaugurated on 21 April 1958 with the laying of the cornerstone at the site of the former gas chambers. The sculpture represents the trend toward large avant-garde forms introduced in the 1960s throughout Europe, with a granite tower cracked down the middle and capped by a mushroom-like block carved with abstract reliefs and Jewish symbols. Treblinka was declared a national monument of martyrology on 10 May 1964 during an official ceremony attended by 30,000 people. The monument was unveiled by Zenon Kliszko
Zenon Kliszko (Łódź, December 8, 1908 – September 4, 1989, Warsaw), was a politician in the Polish People's Republic, considered the man of Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) leader Władysław Gomułka.
Kliszko graduated from Warsaw Univ ...
, the Marshal
Marshal is a term used in several official titles in various branches of society. As marshals became trusted members of the courts of Medieval Europe, the title grew in reputation. During the last few centuries, it has been used for elevated o ...
of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland, in the presence of survivors of the Treblinka uprising from Israel, France, Czechoslovakia and Poland. The camp custodian's house (built nearby in 1960) was turned into an exhibition space following the collapse of communism in Poland in 1989 and the retirement of the custodian; it opened in 2006. It was later expanded and made into a branch of the Siedlce Regional Museum.
Victims
There are many estimates of the total number of people murdered at Treblinka; most scholarly estimates range from 700,000 to 900,000, meaning that more Jews were murdered at Treblinka than at any other Nazi extermination camp except for Auschwitz. The Treblinka museum in Poland states that at least 800,000 people were murdered at Treblinka; Israel's Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem ( he, יָד וַשֵׁם; literally, "a memorial and a name") is Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered; honoring Jews who fought against th ...
, puts the number at 870,000; and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is the United States' official memorial to the Holocaust. Adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the USHMM provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust hi ...
gives a range of 870,000 to 925,000.
First estimates
The first estimate of the number of people murdered at Treblinka came from Vasily Grossman, a Soviet war reporter who visited Treblinka in July 1944 as the Soviet forces marched westward across Poland. He published an article called "The Hell Called Treblinka", which appeared in the November 1944 issue of ''Znamya'', a monthly Russian literary magazine. In the article, he claimed that 3 million people had been murdered at Treblinka. He may not have been aware that the short station platform at Treblinka II greatly reduced the number of wagons that could be unloaded at one time, and may have been adhering to the Soviet trend of exaggerating Nazi crimes for propaganda purposes. In 1947, the Polish historian Zdzisław Łukaszkiewicz Judge Zdzisław Łukaszkiewicz was a member of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland ( pl, Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce) upon the conclusion of World War II. The Commission has been replaced, u ...
gave an estimate of 780,000 murders, based on the accepted record of 156 transports with an average of 5,000 prisoners each.
Court exhibits and affidavits
The Treblinka trials of the 1960s took place in Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf ( , , ; often in English sources; Low Franconian and Ripuarian: ''Düsseldörp'' ; archaic nl, Dusseldorp ) is the capital city of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state of Germany. It is the second-largest city in th ...
and produced the two official West German estimates. During the 1965 trial of Kurt Franz, the Court of Assize in Düsseldorf concluded that at least 700,000 people were murdered at Treblinka, following a report by Dr. Helmut Krausnick
Helmut Krausnick (1905–1990) was a German historian and writer. From 1959 to 1972, he was the head of the Institute of Contemporary History, a leading German research institute on the history of National Socialism.
Krausnick co-authored '' ...
, director of the Institute of Contemporary History.[ Source: Donat, Alexander (1979), The Death Camp Treblinka: A Documentary, New York, pp. 296–316. Decision of the Düsseldorf County Court (AZ-LG Düsseldorf: II-931638, p. 49 ff.) in translation] During Franz Stangl's trial in 1969, the same court reassessed the number to be at least 900,000 after new evidence from Dr. Wolfgang Scheffler.
A chief witness for the prosecution at Düsseldorf in the 1965, 1966, 1968 and 1970 trials was Franciszek Ząbecki
Lieutenant Franciszek Ząbecki (; 8 October 1907 – 11 April 1987) was a station master at the village of Treblinka. During the German occupation of Poland in World War II, Ząbecki worked as a dispatcher for the ''Deutsche Reichsbahn''; he also ...
, who was employed by the ''Deutsche Reichsbahn'' as a rail traffic controller at Treblinka village from 22 May 1941. In 1977 he published his book ''Old and New Memories'', in which he used his own records to estimate that at least 1,200,000 people were murdered at Treblinka. His estimate was based on the maximum capacity of a trainset during the ''Grossaktion'' Warsaw of 1942 rather than its yearly average. The original German waybill
A waybill ( UIC) is a document issued by a carrier giving details and instructions relating to the shipment of a consignment of goods. Typically it will show the names of the consignor and consignee, the point of origin of the consignment, its de ...
s in his possession did not have the number of prisoners listed. Ząbecki, a Polish member of railway staff before the war, was one of the few non-German witnesses to see most transports that came into the camp; he was present at the Treblinka station when the first Holocaust train arrived from Warsaw. Ząbecki was a member of the ''Armia Krajowa'' (Polish: Home Army), which formed most of the Polish resistance movement in World War II
The Polish resistance movement in World War II (''Polski ruch oporu w czasie II wojny światowej''), with the Polish Home Army at its forefront, was the largest underground resistance movement in all of occupied Europe, covering both German a ...
, and kept a daily record of the extermination transports. He also clandestinely photographed the burning Treblinka II perimeter during the uprising in August 1943. Ząbecki witnessed the last set of five enclosed freight wagons carrying ''Sonderkommandos'' to the Sobibór gas chambers on 20 October 1943. In 2013, his son Piotr Ząbecki wrote an article about him for ''Życie Siedleckie'' that revised the number to 1,297,000. Ząbecki's daily records of transports to the camp, and demographic information regarding the number of people deported from each ghetto to Treblinka, were the two main sources for estimates of the death toll.
In his 1987 book ''Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps'', Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad stated that at least 763,000 people were murdered at Treblinka between July 1942 and April 1943. A considerable number of other estimates followed: see table
Table may refer to:
* Table (furniture), a piece of furniture with a flat surface and one or more legs
* Table (landform), a flat area of land
* Table (information), a data arrangement with rows and columns
* Table (database), how the table data ...
(below).
Höfle Telegram
A further source of information became available in 2001. The Höfle Telegram
The Höfle Telegram (or Hoefle Telegram) is a cryptic one-page document, discovered in 2000 among the declassified World War II archives of the Public Record Office in Kew, England. The document consists of several radio telegrams in translatio ...
was an encrypted message sent to Berlin on 31 December 1942 by Operation Reinhard deputy commander Hermann Höfle
Hermann Julius Höfle, also Hans (or) Hermann Hoefle ((; 19 June 1911 – 21 August 1962), was an Austrians, Austrian-born SS commander and Holocaust perpetrator during the Nazi era. He was deputy to Odilo Globočnik in the ''Aktion Reinhard'' p ...
, detailing the number of Jews deported by DRB to each of the Operation Reinhard death camps up to that point. Discovered among declassified documents in Britain, it shows that by the official count of the German Transport Authority 713,555 Jews were sent to Treblinka in 1942. The number of murders was probably higher, according to the ''Armia Krajowa'' communiqués. On the basis of the telegram and additional undated German evidence for 1943 listing 67,308 people deported, historian Jacek Andrzej Młynarczyk calculated that by the official DRB count, 780,863 people were brought by ''Deutsche Reichsbahn'' to Treblinka.
Table of estimates
:
*The information in the rows with an empty last column comes from ''Dam im imię na wieki'', page 114.
Treblinka trials
The first major trial for war crimes committed at Treblinka was held in Düsseldorf between 12 October 1964 and 24 August 1965, preceded by the 1951 trial of ''SS-Scharführer'' Josef Hirtreiter, which was triggered by charges of war crimes unrelated to his service at the camp. The trial was delayed due to the decreased interest by the United States and the Soviet Union in prosecuting German war crimes with the onset of the Cold War
The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...
. Many of the more than 90,000 Nazi war criminals recorded in German files were serving in positions of prominence under West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. In 1964 and 1965, eleven former SS camp personnel were brought to trial by West Germany, including commandant Kurt Franz. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, along with Artur Matthes (''Totenlager'') and Willi Mentz and August Miete (both from ''Lazaret''). Gustav Münzberger
'' SS-Unterscharführer'' Gustav Münzberger (17 August 1903 – 23 March 1977), born in Weißkirchlitz (''Sudetenland''), was a carpenter and factory worker before his involvement in the Holocaust. Following the Nazi German invasion of Poland at ...
(gas chambers) received 12 years, Franz Suchomel (gold and money) 7 years, Otto Stadie
Otto Stadie (10 March 1897 – 28 July 1977) was a German nurse and member of the Action T4, the Nazi forced euthanasia programme. During the Holocaust in occupied Poland he kept the register of stolen gold and diamonds at the Treblinka exterminat ...
(operation) 6 years, Erwin Lambert (gas chambers) 4 years, and Albert Rum (''Totenlager'') 3 years. Otto Horn (corpse detail) was acquitted.
The second commandant of Treblinka II, Franz Stangl, escaped with his wife and children from Austria to Brazil in 1951. Stangl found work at a Volkswagen
Volkswagen (),English: , . abbreviated as VW (), is a German Automotive industry, motor vehicle manufacturer headquartered in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, Germany. Founded in 1937 by the German Labour Front under the Nazi Party and revived into a ...
factory in São Paulo
São Paulo (, ; Portuguese for 'Saint Paul') is the most populous city in Brazil, and is the capital of the state of São Paulo, the most populous and wealthiest Brazilian state, located in the country's Southeast Region. Listed by the GaWC a ...
. His role in the mass murder of Jews was known to the Austrian authorities, but Austria did not issue a warrant for his arrest until 1961. Stangl was registered under his real name at the Austrian consulate in Brazil. It took another six years before Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal
Simon Wiesenthal (31 December 190820 September 2005) was a history of the Jews in Austria, Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer. He studied architecture and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II. He surviv ...
tracked him down and triggered his arrest. After his extradition from Brazil to West Germany, Stangl was tried for the murders of around 900,000 people. He admitted to the murders but argued: "My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty." Stangl was found guilty on 22 October 1970, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died of heart failure in prison in Düsseldorf on 28 June 1971.
Between the 1940s and early 1960s, the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
prosecuted 21 people for crimes committed at Treblinka. All of them were executed or died in prison. In 1986, the Soviet Union tried another Treblinka guard, Feodor Fedorenko
Feodor Fedorenko or Fyodor Federenko; ''Fedir Fedorenko''; russian: Фёдор Демьянович Федоренко (September 17, 1907 – July 28, 1987) was a Soviet-Nazi collaborator and war criminal who served at Treblinka exterminatio ...
. Fedorenko had been deported to the Soviet Union after his crimes were exposed, resulting in him being stripped of his American citizenship. Fedorenko was sentenced to death and executed in 1987.
Material gain
The theft of cash and valuables, collected from the victims of gassing, was conducted by the higher-ranking SS men on an enormous scale. It was a common practice among the concentration camps' top echelon everywhere; two Majdanek concentration camp
Majdanek (or Lublin) was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, a ...
commandants, Koch and Florstedt, were tried and executed by the SS for the same offence in April 1945. When the top-ranking officers went home, they would sometimes request a private locomotive from Klinzman and Emmerich at the Treblinka station to transport their personal "gifts" to Małkinia for a connecting train. Then, they would drive out of the camp in cars without any incriminating evidence on their person, and later arrive at Małkinia to transfer the goods.
The overall amount of material gain by Nazi Germany is unknown except for the period between 22 August and 21 September 1942, when there were 243 wagons of goods sent and recorded. Globocnik delivered a written tally to Reinhard headquarters on 15 December 1943 with the SS profit of ℛℳ
The (; sign: ℛℳ; abbreviation: RM) was the currency of Germany from 1924 until 20 June 1948 in West Germany, where it was replaced with the , and until 23 June 1948 in East Germany, where it was replaced by the East German mark. The Reichs ...
178,745,960.59, including of gold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile met ...
, of silver
Silver is a chemical element with the Symbol (chemistry), symbol Ag (from the Latin ', derived from the Proto-Indo-European wikt:Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h₂erǵ-, ''h₂erǵ'': "shiny" or "white") and atomic number 47. A soft, whi ...
, of platinum
Platinum is a chemical element with the symbol Pt and atomic number 78. It is a dense, malleable, ductile, highly unreactive, precious, silverish-white transition metal. Its name originates from Spanish , a diminutive of "silver".
Platinu ...
, and 249,771.50 American dollars, as well as 130 diamond solitaires, of brilliants, of diamonds, and of pearls. The amount of loot Globocnik stole is unknown; Suchomel claimed in court to have filled a box with one million Reichsmarks for him.
Archaeological studies
Neither the Jewish religious leaders in Poland nor the authorities allowed archaeological excavations at the camp out of respect for the dead. Approval for a limited archaeological study was issued for the first time in 2010 to a British team from Staffordshire University using non-invasive technology and Lidar
Lidar (, also LIDAR, or LiDAR; sometimes LADAR) is a method for determining ranges (variable distance) by targeting an object or a surface with a laser and measuring the time for the reflected light to return to the receiver. It can also be ...
remote sensing. The soil resistance was analysed at the site with ground-penetrating radar. Features that appeared to be structural were found, two of which were thought to be the remains of the gas chambers, and the study was allowed to continue.
The archaeological team performing the search discovered three new mass graves. The remains were reinterred out of respect for the victims. At the second dig the findings included yellow tiles stamped with a pierced mullet star resembling a Star of David
The Star of David (). is a generally recognized symbol of both Jewish identity and Judaism. Its shape is that of a hexagram: the compound of two equilateral triangles.
A derivation of the ''seal of Solomon'', which was used for decorative ...
, and building foundations with a wall. The star was soon identified as the logo of Polish ceramics factory manufacturing floor tiles, founded by Jan Dziewulski and brothers Józef and Władysław Lange (Dziewulski i Lange – D✡L since 1886), nationalised and renamed under communism after the war. As explained by forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls
Caroline Sturdy Colls (born 1985) is a Professor of Conflict Archaeology and Genocide Investigation at Staffordshire University specializing in Holocaust studies, identification of human remains, forensic archaeology and crime scene investigati ...
, the new evidence was important because the second gas chambers built at Treblinka were housed in the only brick building in the camp; Colls claimed that this provides the first physical evidence for their existence. In his memoir describing his stay in the camp, survivor Jankiel Wiernik says that the floor in the gas chambers (which he helped build) was made of similar tiles. The discoveries became a subject of the 2014 documentary by the Smithsonian Channel. More forensic work has been planned.
March of the Living
Treblinka museum receives most visitors per day during the annual March of the Living educational programme which brings young people from around the world to Poland, to explore the remnants of the Holocaust. The visitors whose primary destination is the march at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, visit Treblinka in the preceding days. In 2009, 300 Israeli students attended the ceremony led by Eli Shaish from the Ministry of Education. In total 4,000 international students visited. In 2013 the number of students who came, ahead of the Auschwitz commemorations, was 3,571. In 2014, 1,500 foreign students visited.
Operation Reinhard leadership and Treblinka commandants
:
Footnotes
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* ''Original:'' the Fourth Department of the SMERSH
SMERSH (russian: СМЕРШ) was an umbrella organization for three independent counter-intelligence agencies in the Red Army formed in late 1942 or even earlier, but officially announced only on 14 April 1943. The name SMERSH was coined by Josep ...
Directorate of Counterintelligence of the 2nd Belorussian Front
The 2nd Belorussian Front (Russian: Второй Белорусский фронт, alternative spellings are 2nd Byelorussian Front) was a military formation, of Army group size, of the Soviet Army during the Second World War. Soviet army g ...
, USSR (1978). Acquired by OSI in 1994
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Further reading
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External links
Muzeum Treblinka, Nazi Extermination and Forced Labour Camp 1941-1944
Treblinka
at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)
Treblinka
at PBS
Treblinka
at Yad Vashem
at Holocaust Education Archive & Research Team (HEART)
Treblinka Extermination Camp
at the Jewish Virtual Library
Virtual tour
of Treblinka Extermination Camp
Treblinka Death Camp
at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Virtual Shtetl
*Chronicles of Terror – Repository (2017),
Original depositions of Polish citizens who testified before the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland after World War II
including former Sonderkommando
''Sonderkommandos'' (, ''special unit'') were work units made up of German Nazi death camp prisoners. They were composed of prisoners, usually Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber vict ...
prisoners, bystanders, and Jews who escaped from the Holocaust train
Holocaust trains were Rail transport, railway transports run by the ''Deutsche Reichsbahn#1939-1945: The Reichsbahn in the Second World War and the Holocaust, Deutsche Reichsbahn'' national railway system under the control of Nazi Germany and Co ...
s to Treblinka.'' Center for Totalitarian Studies, Warsaw.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Treblinka Extermination Camp
1942 in Poland
1943 disestablishments
1943 in Poland
Jewish resistance during the Holocaust
World War II sites in Poland
World War II sites of Nazi Germany
German extermination camps in Poland
History of Masovian Voivodeship