Treblinka extermination camp
Treblinka was the second-deadliest extermination camp to be built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II, second only to Auschwitz. It was in a forest north-east of Warsaw, south of the village of Treblinka in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship. The camp operated between 23 July 1942 and 19 October 1943 as part of Operation Reinhard, the deadliest phase of the Final Solution. During this time, it is estimated that between 800,000 and 925,000 Jews were murdered in its gas chambers, along with 2,000 Romani people. More Jews were murdered at Treblinka than at any other Nazi extermination camp apart from Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Managed by the German SS with assistance from Trawniki guards – recruited from among Soviet POWs to serve with the Germans – the camp consisted of two separate units. Treblinka I was a forced-labour camp 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, 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 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.
In the postwar Polish People's Republic, 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 Regional Museum.
Background
Following the invasion of Poland in 1939, most of the 3.5 million Polish Jews 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. In 1941, the initial victories of the Wehrmacht over the Soviet Union inspired plans for the German colonisation of occupied Poland, including all territory within the new district of General Government. 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. and was separate from the Einsatzgruppen 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 and Sobibór. All three were equipped with gas chambers 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 that began operating in 1941 and used gas vans. Chełmno was a testing ground for the establishment of faster methods of murdering and incinerating 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 were developed at the Majdanek concentration camp in March 1942, and at Auschwitz II-Birkenau 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, a deputy of Heinrich Himmler, 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.
Location
The two parallel camps of Treblinka were built northeast of Warsaw. 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 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 capital of the newly formed Bialystok District. 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. 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, 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 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.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 łapankas, 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, the local station master, Eupen often murdered prisoners by "taking shots at them, as if they were partridges". A widely feared overseer was Untersturmführer Franz Schwarz, who killed prisoners with a pickaxe or hammer.
Treblinka II
Treblinka II 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 and imprisoned at the Warsaw Ghetto. Hauptsturmführer Richard Thomalla, 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, 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 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 were built with supplies delivered from Warsaw, Sokołów Podlaski, and Kosów Lacki. There were 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 in the centre next to his horse stables, containing two foxes, two peacocks and a roe deer. Smaller rooms were built as laundry, tailors, 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.
File:2 Nota 8.jpg|thumb|Page 7 from "Raczyński's Note" with Treblinka, Bełżec and Sobibór extermination camps identified- Part of the official note of the Polish government-in-exile to Anthony Eden, 10 December 1942.
The next section of Treblinka II, 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 Josef Hirtreiter, 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 "Lazarett", with the Red Cross 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 "Lazarett" shack, there was an open excavation pit seven metres deep. These prisoners were led to the edge of the pit and shot one at a time by Blockführer Willi Mentz, nicknamed "Frankenstein" by the inmates. Mentz single-handedly killed thousands of Jews, aided by his supervisor, August Miete, 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 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 1970 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. From the undressing barracks, a fenced-off path led through the forested area to the gas chambers. The SS cynically called it die Himmelstraße or der Schlauch. 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.