Trawniki men
During World War II, Trawniki men were Eastern European Nazi collaborators, consisting of either volunteers or recruits from prisoner-of-war camps set up by Nazi Germany for Soviet Red Army soldiers captured in the border regions during Operation Barbarossa launched in June 1941. Thousands of these volunteers served in the General Government territory of German-occupied Poland until the end of World War II. Trawnikis belonged to a category of Hiwis, Nazi auxiliary forces recruited from native subjects serving in various jobs such as concentration camp guards.
Between September 1941 and September 1942, the German SS and police trained 2,500 Trawniki men known as Hiwi Wachmänner at the special training camp at Trawniki outside of Lublin; by the end of 1944, 5,082 men were on active duty. Trawnikimänner were organized by Streibel into two SS Sonderdienst battalions. Some 1,000 Hiwis are known to have run away during field operations. Although the majority of Trawniki men or Hiwis came from among the prisoners of war, there were also Volksdeutsche from Eastern Europe among them, valued because of their ability to speak Russian, Ukrainian and other languages of the occupied territories. All the officers at the Trawniki camp were Reichsdeutsche, and most of the squad commanders were Volksdeutsche. The conscripted civilians and former Soviet POWs included Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Belarusians, Estonians, Georgians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Russians, Tatars, and Ukrainians. The Trawnikis took a major part in Operation Reinhard, the Nazi plan to exterminate Jews. They also served at extermination camps and played an important role in the annihilation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, among others.
Creation
In 1941 Himmler instructed SS officer Odilo Globocnik to start recruiting mainly Ukrainian auxiliaries among the Soviet POWs, due to ongoing close relations with the local Ukrainian Hilfsverwaltung. Globocnik had selected Karl Streibel from Operation Reinhard as the key person for this new secret project. Streibel, with the assistance of his officers, visited all POW camps for the Soviets behind the lines of the advancing Wehrmacht, and after individual screening recruited Ukrainian as well as Latvian and Lithuanian volunteers as ordered.Due to successful adaptation of Soviet army's strategy and tactics against German forces, as well as Nazi policy of Soviet war prisoners' extermination, the influx of POW was dramatically reduced, so Streibel's personnel from the summer of 1942 started to conscript civilians of Ukrainian nationality, generally young males, from Western Ukraine.
The Trawniki-men were assembled at a training facility adjacent to the Trawniki concentration camp built for the Jews deported from the Warsaw Ghetto. The complex was set up in the industrialized village of Trawniki about southeast of Lublin with rail lines in all directions in the occupied territory. From there, the Hiwi shooters were deployed to all major killing sites of the Final Solution. It was their primary purpose of training. They took an active role in the extermination of Jews at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka II, Warsaw, Częstochowa, Lublin, Lvov, Radom, Kraków, Białystok, Majdanek as well as Auschwitz, not to mention Trawniki concentration camp itself, and the remaining subcamps of KL Lublin/Majdanek camp complex including Poniatowa, Budzyn, Kraśnik, Puławy, Lipowa, and also during massacres in Łomazy, Międzyrzec, Łuków, Radzyń, Parczew, Końskowola, Komarówka and all other locations, augmented by the SS and Schupo, as well as the Reserve Police Battalion 101, part of over two dozen Order Police battalions deployed to the occupied territories. The German Order Police performed roundups inside the Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland shooting everyone unable to move or attempting to flee, while the Trawnikis conducted large-scale civilian massacres in the same locations.
Organization
Auxiliaries were not allowed to wear German uniforms or insignia, carry German weapons, or use German ranks. This was mostly for political reasons. The racial policies of Nazi Germany regarded Slavs as subhuman and not deserving to be treated as German soldiers. There was also a real fear of mutiny or desertion by foreigners in German uniform. To reinforce the social levels between them, guards were therefore referred to as Wachmänner rather than Schützen and given different uniforms and rank insignia. A practical reason for this policy was that there was a dearth of German equipment to be spared, yet piles of captured war materiel that would otherwise be unused.The German officers and senior NCOs were issued the obsolete black M32 SS tunic or field-grey M37 tunic with blue facings. This was to mark them out from the men they commanded, but at the same time denoted them as auxiliaries rather than regular troops.
Units were initially organized in Gruppen of about 50 men and Züge of around 90 to 120 men. These were further assigned to companies and battalions, under German officers and higher-level NCOs. After they abandoned Trawniki in 1944 ahead of the Soviet advance, they were reorganized into combat units. This is when they introduced the Rotten level of organization at a time when the depleted German Army was consolidating into Halbzüge. This was perhaps adopted to deter desertion, a big problem towards the end of the war.
The guards initially wore their Soviet Army uniforms. In the autumn of 1941 they were given the dyed-black Polish Army uniforms worn by the former Selbstschutz forces. In the summer of 1942 they were issued brown Belgian Army uniforms for warm weather wear. The guardsmen tended to wear a mixture of the two. They were usually issued captured enemy weapons but sometimes received German Mauser Kar-98 carbines. Automatic rifles and pistols were issued when on special assignment.
Role of Trawniki men in the Final Solution
At each of the Operation Reinhard extermination camps Trawniki Hiwi men served as the Sonderkommando guard units and were selected to act as the gas chambers operators. They came under the jurisdiction of the relevant camp commandant. Almost all of the Trawniki guards were involved in shooting, beating, and terrorizing Jews. The Russian historian Sergei Kudryashov, who made a study of the Trawniki men serving at death camps, claimed that there was little sign of any attraction to National Socialism among them. He claimed that most of the guards volunteered in order to leave the POW camps and/or because of self-interest. On the other hand, the Holocaust historian Christopher R. Browning wrote that Hiwis "were screened on the basis of their anti-Communist and hence almost invariably anti-Semitic sentiments." Despite the generally apathetic views of the Trawniki guards, the vast majority faithfully carried out the SS expectations in the mistreatment of Jews. Most Trawniki men had executed Jews already as part of their job training. Similarly to Christopher Browning's 1992 book Ordinary Men, Kudryashov argued that the Trawniki men were examples of how ordinary people could become willing killers.Murder operations
The Trawniki shooters were assigned to the worst of the "on-the-spot dirty work" by Hauptsturmführer Karl Streibel, so the Germans from the parallel Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the Order Police from Hamburg "would not go crazy" from the horror of hands-on killing for hours or days on end. The Trawnikis used to arrive in squads numbering around 50 at the killing site, and start by sitting down to a sandwich and bottles of vodka from their knapsacks behaving like guests, while the Germans dealt with unruly crowds of thousands of ghetto inhabitants: as in Międzyrzec, Łuków, Radzyń, Parczew, Końskowola, Komarówka and all other locations. In one case, when the Trawniki men got too drunk to show up in Aleksandrów, Major Wilhelm Trapp ordered the release of prisoners rounded up for mass execution.File:Askaris im Warschauer Getto - 1943.jpg|thumb|right|280px|"Trawniki" men during the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto at Zamenhofa 42 / Kupiecka 18.<. Photo from Jürgen Stroop Report, May 1943
The Trawniki men shot so fast and so wildly that the German policemen "frequently had to take cover to avoid being hit." Ukrainian Hiwis were perceived as indispensable. In Łomazy, the Germans were "overjoyed" to see them coming after the messy Józefów massacre which permanently traumatized the untrained executioners. The wave of mass killings of Jews from the Międzyrzec Podlaski Ghetto lasting non-stop for several days were conducted by the Trawniki battalion of about 350 to 400 men, same as in Parczew, or the Izbica Ghetto. The German unit had shot 4,600 Jews by September 1942, but only 78 ethnic Poles, "the poorest of the poor".
The SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop who was in charge of the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the methodical destruction of the Ghetto itself – responsible for the massacre of over 50,000 Polish Jews – later remarked in a prison interview with Kazimierz Moczarski, published in his original Polish edition of the Conversations with an Executioner:Andrzej Szczypiorski, text with Notes and Biography by Andrzej Krzysztof Kunert. Page 103. Retrieved
Trawniki personnel was also used in the August 1943 suppression of the Białystok Ghetto Uprising, as well as the lesser-known Mizocz Ghetto uprising of October 1942 among similar others. In other locations, the lists compiled by the local Ukrainian Hilfsverwaltung enabled them to quickly and precisely identify their Jewish targets.
End and post-war
The Trawniki training camp was dismantled in July 1944 because of the approaching frontline. The last 1,000 Hiwis forming the SS Battalion Streibel led by Karl Streibel himself, were transported west to still functioning death camps. The Jews of the adjacent Trawniki labor camp were massacred in November 1943 during Aktion Erntefest. Their exhumed bodies were incinerated in Sonderaktion 1005 by Sonderkommandos from Milejów who in turn were executed on site upon the completion of their task by the end of 1943. The Soviets entered the completely empty training facility on 23 July 1944. After the war, the Soviet authorities arrested and prosecuted hundreds, possibly as many as one thousand Hiwis who returned home. The more conservative number of trials given by Kudryashov is over 140 between 1944 and 1987. Those brought to trial in the Soviet Union were tried before both civilian courts and military tribunals. Almost all of those tried in the Soviet Union were convicted and some were executed. Most were sentenced to a Gulag, and released under the Khrushchev amnesty of 1955.The number of Hiwis tried in the West was very small by comparison. Six defendants were acquitted on all charges and set free by a West German court in Hamburg in 1976 including commandant Streibel. The main difference between them and the Trawnikis apprehended in the Soviet Union was that the former claimed lack of awareness and left no live witnesses who could testify against them, while the latter were charged with treason and therefore were doomed from the start. In the U.S. some 16 former Hiwi guards were denaturalized.