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Treblinka extermination camp

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Treblinka
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German Nazi concentration camp during World War II. Located near the village of Treblinka, Pol., it opened in 1941 as a forced-labour camp. A larger and ultrasecret second camp a mile away, called T.II, opened in 1942 as an extermination camp for Jews. Victims were stripped and marched into "bathhouses," where they were gassed with carbon monoxide from ceiling pipes. Ukrainian guards and up to 1,500 Jewish prisoner-workers performed the executions. The total number killed has been estimated at 700,000 to 900,000. In 1943 a group of prisoner-workers rose in revolt and escaped, but most were soon killed or recaptured. The T.II camp was closed in October 1943, the labour camp in July 1944.

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Holocaust: Treblinka
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Extermination Camp in the northeastern part of the Generalgouvernement, located 2.5 miles from the train station of Malkinia on the main line running from Warsaw to Bialystok. Treblinka was established in early summer 1942 as part of Aktion Reinhard---the Nazis' plan to exterminate the Jews in the Generalgouvernement area. In all, some 870,000 people were murdered at Treblinka.

The first transports reached Treblinka on July 23, 1942; these included Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. From that day until September 21, 1942, some 254,000 Jews from Warsaw itself and 112,000 Jews from other places in the Warsaw district were murdered at Treblinka. Hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Radom and Lublin districts of the Generalgouvernement were also executed there. In all, approximately 738,000 Jews from the Generalgouvernement perished at Treblinka, as well as 107,000 Jews from the Bialystok district. Thousands of Jews from outside Poland were also brought to Treblinka; these included Jews from Slovakia, Greece, Macedonia and Thrace, and some who had previously been interned at Theresienstadt. Altogether, 29,000 Jews from outside Poland were murdered at Treblinka, as were 2,000 Gypsies. The mass extermination program was in operation at Treblinka until April 1943, after which only a handful of transports arrived.

From August 1942 Treblinka was run by camp commandant SS-Obersturmfuehrer Franz Stangl, who had previously served as commander of the Sobibor extermination camp. Stangl's deputy was Kurt Franz. They were assisted by 20--30 SS men (who had participated in the Euthanasia Program), and 90--120 Ukrainian soldiers who worked as camp guards.

Treblinka was situated in a sparsely populated area that was heavily wooded; this site was chosen in order to conceal the atrocities taking place there. Treblinka contained living, reception, and extermination areas. The extermination area included a brick building that housed three Gas Chambers. A diesel engine was housed in an adjoining shed; this engine produced the carbon monoxide that fueled the chambers. The gas flowed through pipes attached to the ceiling of the chambers that ended in what looked like showerheads. The Germans arranged the gas chamber in this way in order to create the impression that the Jews were merely entering the building to take showers---not to be murdered. A hallway in the building led to each of the three gas chambers, and in each chamber was another door through which the corpses were removed. About 200 yards away lay the huge trenches where the corpses were buried.

The extermination process at Treblinka was based on experience gained by the Nazis in Belzec and Sobibor---the two other Aktion Reinhard camps. When a train, made up of 50--60 cars and holding some 6,000--7,000 people, arrived at the nearby train station, 20 cars were brought into the camp, while the rest were made to wait in the station. The car doors were opened, and SS men ordered the Jews to disembark. Next, a camp officer would announce to the new arrivals that they had reached a transit camp where they would take showers and have their clothes disinfected, and then travel on to various labor camps. After this announcement, the Jews were taken to "deportation square." Men and women were then separated (children going with the women). The women and children were made to undress in a barrack, and the women's hair was cut. Naked, they were forced to leave the barrack and enter the "pipe"---a narrow, fenced-in, camouflaged path that led to the gas chambers. After the victims were locked into the chambers, the engine was started and poison gas poured in. Within half an hour, all inside were dead, and the next group of victims would prepare to enter. Meanwhile, the bodies were removed and taken for burial in the trenches. This last job was done by a team of Jewish prisoners called Sonderkommando. These prisoners were not immediately executed upon arrival at the camp; rather, they were selected to do horrific jobs such as cleaning the train cars, preparing the victims for their execution, dealing with the possessions and clothing of the victims, and of course, handling the dead. When the Nazis decided to cremate the corpses in the spring of 1943, rather than just burying them, these prisoners were made to do that, as well. Most of these Jews were exterminated themselves after a few days or weeks of work, newer arrivals taking their places.

After a while, the Germans decided that the extermination process at Treblinka was not efficient enough. Thus, between August and October 1942 ten new gas chambers were constructed there. In addition, the Germans added another improvement to their extermination system: those new arrivals who were too weak to walk to the gas chambers unaided were told that they were being sent to the infirmary. They were taken to a closed-in area with a Red Cross flag adorning it; inside were SS men and Ukrainian guards who murdered them on the spot.

Aktion 1005---the campaign to destroy all evidence of the Nazis' murderous activities---was launched at Treblinka in March 1943, and lasted until July. After this operation was completed, Treblinka was shut down. Most of the camp structures were destroyed, the ground was plowed and planted over, and the site was turned into a farm that was given to a Ukrainian family.

Hundreds of Jews tried to escape the trains on their way to the camp, but most failed in their attempts. Others attempted to escape the camp itself, but almost all were caught and hanged. Jews from several transports offered resistance in which German and Ukrainian guards were wounded or killed. An uprising was planned when the prisoners found out that the Germans were planning to liquidate the camp; however, the uprising was suppressed and most of the 750 prisoners who tried to escape were caught.

After the war, many of the SS men who worked at Treblinka were put on trial. Both commandant Franz Stangl and deputy commandant Kurt Franz were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Wikipedia: Treblinka extermination camp
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Coordinates: 52°37′35″N 22°2′49″E / 52.62639°N 22.04694°E / 52.62639; 22.04694

"Treblinka" redirects here. For other uses, see Treblinka (disambiguation).
Sign from Treblinka railway station on display at Yad Vashem
Symbolic concrete blocks mark the path of the former railway line at Treblinka
A memorial at Treblinka. Each stone represents a Jewish town or city, the population of which was exterminated at the camp
Memorial stone for Warsaw Ghetto, from where over 310,000 Jews were sent to Treblinka in just over three months

Treblinka II was a Nazi German extermination camp in occupied Poland during World War II. Around 850,000[1] people—more than 99.5 percent[citation needed] of whom were Jews, but also other victims (among them 2,000 Romani people)—were killed there between July 1942 and October 1943; the camp was closed after a revolt during which a few Germans were killed and a small number of prisoners escaped. The nearby Treblinka I was a forced labour camp and administrative complex in support of the death camp.

Contents

Establishment of Treblinka

German Nazi extermination camps in occupied Poland (marked with black and white skulls)

Treblinka was designed purely for extermination of people, its area measuring just 600 by 400 metres (1968' x 1312') and was one of four secret camps of Operation Reinhard the other three being Bełżec, Sobibór and Majdanek.[2] Kulmhof (Chełmno) extermination camp was originally built as a pilot project for the development of the other camps. Operation Reinhard was overseen by SS-Obergruppenführer Odilo Globocnik in occupied Poland as Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler's deputy. Unlike other Nazi concentration camps, Operation Reinhard camps reported directly to Himmler's office (the RSHA) in Berlin. Himmler kept the control of the program close to him but delegated the work to Globocnik. Operation Reinhard used the euthanasia program (Action T4) for site selection, construction and trained personnel.[3]

Before Operation Reinhard over half a million Jews had been killed by the Einsatzgruppen, mobile SS units whose sole purpose was to murder Jews and commissars in territories conquered by the German army. It became evident, however, that they could not handle the millions of Jews that they had concentrated in the ghettos of occupied countries. So Treblinka, along with the other Operation Reinhard camps were especially designed for the rapid elimination of the Jews in ghettos. Treblinka was ready on July 24, 1942, when the shipping of Jews began: "According to the SS Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop report, a total of approximately 310,000 Jews were transported in freight trains from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka during the period from July 22 to October 3, 1942."[4]

The camp

Sketch plan of Treblinka extermination camp. 1) Loading dock-rail platform. 2) fake rail station (used to trick victims before they were murdered). 3) Barracks, in which the victims were compelled to undress. 4) Gas chambers. 5). Pits where the bodies of the gassed victims were burned.

The camp of Treblinka was located 100 km (62 miles) northeast of the Polish capital Warsaw,[5] near the village of Małkinia Górna, 2.5 km (1.5 miles) from the Treblinka railroad station.[6] The camp was organized in two subdivisions: Treblinka I and Treblinka II.

Treblinka I was further divided into two parts: The first part was the administrative section, which included barracks for the SS troops, the guards, the camp commander's barrack, a bakery, a storage and barracks for up to 800 prisoners who were used to operate the camp. A road left this part of the camp and rejoined the highway. The second section of Treblinka I was the receiving area where the railroad extended from the Treblinka station into the camp. There were two barracks near the tracks that were used to store the belongings of prisoners; one was disguised to look like a railway station, complete with a wooden clock.[7] There were two other buildings about 100 m (328 feet) from the track. All of the buildings were used to contain the clothing and belongings of the prisoners. One was used as an undressing room for the women, who were also shorn of all of their hair. There was a cashier's office which collected money and jewelry for "safekeeping". There was also an "infirmary", where the sick, old, wounded and already dead were taken. It was a small barrack painted white with a red cross on it. There, the prisoners were led to the edge of a ditch where bodies were continuously burning. They had to strip naked and then sit in the edge of the pit before they were shot in the back of the head. Then they fell in the ditch and burned.

Treblinka II was on a small hill. From camp one there was an uphill path (cynically called Himmelstraße—the Road to Heaven—by the SS) lined with barbed wire fences—der Schlauch, "the tube"—which led directly into the gas chambers building. Behind this building there was a large pit, one meter wide by twenty metres long, inside which burned fires. Rails were laid across the pit and the bodies of gassed victims were placed on the rails to burn. There was also a barrack for the prisoners who operated camp II.

At the very beginning, people were buried in mass graves or piled up in camp II because the workers did not have time to bury them. The stench from the decomposing bodies could be smelled up to ten kilometres away. Many of the soon-to-be-murdered Jews waiting in the railway wagons correctly guessed what would happen to them; thousands instead chose suicide in the trains over death at the hands of the Nazis. In September 1942, new gas chambers were built. These death chambers could kill three thousand people in two hours.

Organization of the camp

Nazi timetable for a "special resettlement train" (umsiedlersonderzug) from Lukow to Siedlce to Treblinka, August 1942

The camp was operated by 20–25 SS overseers (Germans and Austrians) and 80–120 guards. The historic record shows that many Treblinka camp guards were of varied ethnic groups and nationalities not only Germans (Volksdeutscher), but also a number of Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Moldovans, Latvians, representatives of Soviet Central Asia, including a number of collaborating Soviet prisoners of war (POWs). Among them in Treblinka served former Red Army soldiers Ivan Marchenko and Nikolay Shaleyev. [8]

The majority of the camp work was performed on a forced basis by 700–800 Jewish prisoners, organized into specialized squads (Sonderkommandos). The blue squad was responsible for unloading the train, carrying the luggage and cleaning the wagons. The red squad had the task of undressing the passengers and taking their clothes to the storage areas. The Geldjuden ("money Jews") were in charge of handling the money, gold, stocks and jewelry. They were forced to search the prisoners just before the gas chambers. Another, the dentist, would open the mouths of the dead and pull out gold teeth with a pair of pliers. Another group, dubbed the Totenjuden (the Jews of death), lived in Treblinka II and were forced to carry the dead from the gas chamber to the furnaces, sift through the ashes of the dead, grind up recognizable parts, and bury the ashes in pits. Yet another group took care of the upkeep of the camp. Lastly, the camouflage Kommando went every day into the forest and gathered branches to camouflage the camp and the "funnel" by weaving branches in the barbed wires.[9] The work squads prisoners were continuously whipped and beaten by the guards and were often killed. New workers (usually the most healthy people) were selected from the daily arrivals and pressed into the commandos.

There was a bruise rule; if a prisoner had been bruised on the face, he would be shot that evening at roll call, or the next morning if the bruise had begun to show. Many prisoners, in utter despair at the horrible deaths of their families and unwilling to go on living, committed suicide by hanging themselves in the sleeping barracks with their belts.[10] Normally, the work crews were almost entirely replaced every three to five days, with the old crew being sent to their deaths.

Extermination

A mass grave in Treblinka opened in March 1943; the bodies were removed for burning. In the background, dark grey piles of ash from cremated bodies can be seen
A picture taken of the Treblinka site in 1945. Among the ashes and bone fragments in the disturbed mass burial pits are larger fragments of bone and various personal effects

At Treblinka, arriving by train, victims were pulled from the train, separated by gender, and ordered to strip naked. In winter, the temperature often dropped to -20 °C (-5 °F). The guards chose who would go to the "infirmary". Jews who were too resistant to the process were taken to the infirmary and shot. Women had their hair cut off before going into the gas chamber.[7] This hair was used "in the manufacture of hair-yarn socks for 'U'-boat crews and hair-felt foot-wear for the Reichs-railway" to quote from a directive sent to all concentration camp commanders in 1942. [11]

The gas chamber had portholes through which the Germans could watch the victims die.[7] The victims were gassed with carbon monoxide generated by diesel engines. [12] After the gassing of the victims in the gas chamber, when the doors of the gas chamber were opened, "the disfigured, bitten prisoners, with ears torn off, lay on top of each other in the most varied posture." The bodies were initially buried in large mass graves; in a later stage of the camp's operation, they were burned on open-air grids made of concrete pillars and railway tracks. Sometimes, the people were not dead and began to revive in the fresh air, especially pregnant women. They were shot by the guards and burned like the others. Some 800–1,000 bodies were burned at the same time, and would burn for five hours. The incinerator operated 24 hours a day.[13]

The killing centers had no other function, unlike concentration camps where prisoners were used as forced labor for the German war effort. The camp was disguised as a railway station to prevent incoming victims from realizing their fate, complete with train schedules, posters of destinations and what appeared to be a working clock (in reality, a prisoner would move the hands to the approximate time before each convoy arrived). [14] The camp and the process of mass murder is described by Vasily Grossman, a Jewish correspondent serving in the Red Army, in his work "A Hell Called Treblinka", which was used as evidence and distributed at the Nuremberg Trials.

Resistance

August 2, 1943, the prisoners in the work details rebelled. They seized small arms, sprayed kerosene on all the buildings and set them ablaze. In the confusion, a number of German soldiers were killed but many more prisoners perished: of 1,500 prisoners, about 600 managed to escape the camp, while only 40 are known to have survived until the end of the war. These survivors are almost all of the known survivors of Treblinka camp. The camp ceased operation. Camp commander Kurt Franz recalled during his testimonies: "After the uprising in August 1943 I ran the camp single-handedly for a month; however, during that period no gassings were undertaken. It was during that period that the original camp was leveled off and lupins were planted."[15] There was also a revolt at Sobibór two months later.

After the revolt, it was decided to shut down the death camp and shoot the last of the Jewish prisoners.[16] The camp had been badly damaged by the fire, and the murder of the Polish Jews was also largely complete. Odilo Globocnik wrote to Himmler: "I have on [October 19, 1943], completed Operation Reinhard, and have dissolved all the camps."[17] The final group of about thirty Jewish girls at Treblinka was shot at the end of November.

Death toll and the aftermath

In 1965, after a report by Dr. Helmut Krausnick, director of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, the Court of Assize in Düsseldorf concluded that the minimum number of people killed in Treblinka was 700,000.[18] In 1969, the same court, after new evidence revealed in a report by expert Dr. Wolfgang Scheffler, reassessed that number to 900,000.[18] According to the Germans and the guards who were stationed in Treblinka, the figure ranges from 1,000,000 to 1,400,000. It is somewhat difficult to assess exactly the actual number of those killed, however the approximate number can be established on the basis of the Hoefle telegram and surviving transports documentation.

The Hofle Telegram.

In 2001, a copy of a decrypted telegram sent by the deputy commander of the Operation Reinhard was discovered among recently declassified information in Britain. The Höfle Telegram listed 713,555 Jews killed in Treblinka up to the end of December 1942. With the addition of 1943 transports listed in Yitzhak Arad's book, one may arrive at the figure 800,000. On the basis of the telegram and additional data for 1943 Jacek Andrzej Młynarczyk estimates the minimum death toll as 780,863.[19]

In Israel on April 25, 1988, John Demjanjuk was sentenced to death for war crimes committed in the camp. He was accused of being the notorious guard known as "Ivan the Terrible" by survivors. His conviction was overturned in 1993 by Israel's Supreme Court based on "reasonable doubt" that Demjanjuk was the guard known as "Ivan the Terrible"; the Supreme Court was in fact convinced beyond doubt that Demjanjuk had served as a concentration camp guard but felt that it had to release Demjanjuk since the specific charge was that he was "Ivan the Terrible". In 2009, he was charged with 29,000 counts of murder by German prosecutors relating to his alleged service time at Sobibor extermination camp. On May 11, 2009, Demjanjuk left his Cleveland home by ambulance, and was taken to the airport, where he was deported by plane to Germany. [2]

Demjanjuk was formally charged with 27,900 counts of being an accessory to murder in World War II, though he continued to deny being a guard at the Sobibor death camp despite numerous documents including an SS identity card placing him at Sobibor in the capacity of guard between March and September 1943, and a plethora of witness statements. [3]

The Austrian Franz Stangl was the commandant at Treblinka from Summer 1942 on. In 1951, Stangl escaped to Brazil where he found work at a Volkswagen factory in Sao Paulo. His role in the mass murder of men, women and children was known to the Austrian authorities, but Austria did not issue a warrant for Stangl's arrest until 1961. In spite of his registration under his real name at the Austrian consulate in Brazil,[20] it took another six years before he was tracked down by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and arrested in Brazil. After extradition to West Germany he was tried for the deaths of around 900,000 people. He admitted to these killings but argued: "My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty". Found guilty on October 22, 1970, Stangl was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died of heart failure in Düsseldorf prison on June 28, 1971.

Footnotes

  1. ^ Treblinka - ein Todeslager der "Aktion Reinhard", in: "Aktion Reinhard" - Die Vernichtung der Juden im Generalgouvernement, Bogdan Musial (ed.), Osnabrück 2004, pp. 257-281.
  2. ^ Höfle Telegram Public Record Office, Kew, England, HW 16/23, decode GPDD 355a distributed on January 15, 1943, radio telegrams nos 12 and 13/15, transmitted on January 11, 1943.
  3. ^ Lanzmann, Claude, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust.
  4. ^ Court of Assizes in Düsseldorf, Germany. Excerpts From Judgments (Urteilsbegründung). AZ-LG Düsseldorf: II 931638.
  5. ^ Steiner, Jean-Francois, and Weaver, Helen. Treblinka.
  6. ^ United States Department of Justice. Excerpts from Interrogation of Defendant Pavel Vladimirovitch Lelenko.
  7. ^ a b c Testimony of Alexsandr Yeger at the Nizkor Project
  8. ^ Surviving Treblinka by Samuel Willenberg – Basil Blackwell 1989.
  9. ^ Steiner & Weaver, pp. 92–95.
  10. ^ Steiner & Weaver, p. 84.
  11. ^ Concentration Camp Dachau 1933-1945, ISBN 3-87490-528-4, p. 137; Plate 282 with translation.
  12. ^ http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/reinhard.html#5
  13. ^ Klee, Ernst., Dressen, W., Riess, V. The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders. ISBN 1568521332.
  14. ^ Lanzmann.
  15. ^ Arad, p.247.
  16. ^ Arad, p.373.
  17. ^ The Nizkor Project. The Killing Centers.
  18. ^ a b [1], Reinhard: Treblinka Deportations
  19. ^ Treblinka - ein Todeslager der "Aktion Reinhard", in: "Aktion Reinhard" - Die Vernichtung der Juden im Generalgouvernement, Bogdan Musial (ed.), Osnabrück 2004, pp. 257-281.
  20. ^ Sereny, Gitta Into That Darkness: from Mercy Killing to Mass Murder, a study of Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka 1974

References


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