Konzentrationslager Treblinka
The largest cemetery for Poles on Earth
Hi Everyone, Many apologies for not posting for a couple of weeks. It has been a busy time with tours, PhD, and applying for temporary residency in Poland.
Part of the three Operation Reinhard Extermination Camps (KL Sobibor, KL Belzec, & KL Treblinka), KL Treblinka has always been thought of as only an extermination camp. However, there were two Treblinka’s - Treblinka I and Treblinka II.
Treblinka I
Prior to the opening of the Treblinka extermination Camp, a concentration camp existed about 1 kilometre away from where the extermination camp would eventually be established, known as Treblinka I.
Treblinka I opened on 1 September 1941 as a forced labour camp (Arbeitslager). The camp was based around a quarry that existed there prior to the war and was appropriated by the Germans for road building throughout the new Reich. To gain a workforce for the camp, the German occupiers of Poland simply rounded up Poles from the streets and their homes and sentenced them for real or imagined offences to six months hard labour at Treblinka I.
The site was originally owned and run by local Gestapo leader Ernst Gramss. Gramss led a Gestapo office in nearby Sokolow and would sentence inmates from this office. Whilst the majority were sentenced to 6 months hard labour, most had their sentences extended, if they managed to survive.
As mentioned above, Treblinka I was in operation for the production of gravel for road building, however once Treblinka II opened, the labourers at Treblinka I were also used to collect wood from the forests surrounding the camp for use in the burning of victims’ bodies at Treblinka II.
At any one time approximately 1,000-2,000 prisoners were held in Treblinka I. By the time of its closing, it is estimated that 20,000 Poles passed through Treblinka I. Of the 20,000 victims, it is estimated that 10,000 were murdered via gunshot, exhaustion, hunger, or disease.
Treblinka I can be visited on trips to Treblinka and is well worth seeing as place of memory for the victims of the Nazi regime. A 500m walk into the forest reveals a wonderful memorial to the Roma and Sinti victims of the camp as well as a memorial to Poles murdered there. It is also worth seeing the sheer size of the quarry that remains there.
Here is a video of what remains of the Treblinka I camp
Treblinka II
Treblinka II, the straight-out killing centre for Jews, opened on 23 July 1942. Construction on the camp began on 10 April 1942. The German construction manager Richard Thomalla bought 238 German Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to construct the camp, simply because they could speak German. Once the camp was built, more Jews were bought to the camp to work on the railway spur from the station in the village of Treblinka into the camp.
All death camps were built in proximity to existing railway infrastructure. Generally, Jews were transported in trains to a junction close to a camp and either offloaded and walked or transported into a camp, or in the case of Treblinka and eventually Auschwitz-Birkenau, the carriages were shunted into the camp. Whilst local train drivers might be used to drive trains to the junctions, once they arrived at the junction, only Germans were allowed to drive the trains into the camps.
There were three parts to the camp:
Camp 1 was the administrative centre of the camp where the guards and commandant lived.
Camp 2 was the receiving area where victims were offloaded from the trains and prepared for execution.
Camps 3 was the location of the gas chambers and cremation pits.
By the time Treblinka II was opened for operations, both Sobibor and Belzec were in operation.
Treblinka was created, for the most part, for the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. At its height, the Warsaw Ghetto held approximately 450,000 Jews, the majority of whom were Poles. Whilst some Jews managed to escape the ghetto or were held in the little known concentration camp set up in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto – KL Waschau (German for Warsaw) – for clearing the rubble of the Ghetto, the majority were sent to their deaths at Treblinka.
The first victims to be sent to Treblinka were 6,000 Jews sent from the Warsaw Ghetto on 22 July 1942 who were subsequently murdered by gas the following morning. Subsequently, trains carrying between 4,000 to 7,000 victims were sent to Treblinka each day.
It was the day after being ordered to supply the names of the first 6,000 Jews sent to Treblinka that the President of the Warsaw Ghetto Judenrat, Adam Czerniakow, killed himself. Czerniakow chose death over being responsible for the supply of 6,000 Jews daily to their deaths.
A video of Treblinka I today
What did victims experience on arrival at Treblinka?
Maintaining secrecy about the intended murder of their Jewish victims, the Germans told the Jews they were being sent for resettlement in the East.
On arrival into the camp Treblinka, trains came to a stop at what appeared to be a real train station. There was a long barracks on the platform that had signs point to the next station. There were also men dressed in conductor’s uniforms and even a ticket booth. At one end of the barrack was a fake clock painted on the wall. Although the train ride in cattle cars would have been horrendous, arrival would have appeared somewhat like arriving at any station.
Victims were then guided towards a gate into the camp with the fencing each side stocked full of fresh green branches and leaves from the forest. The function of this greenery was to stop anyone seeing into the camp. It was once the victims were herded inside the gate that the true horror began. Once inside the gate, there was no escape.
For those who felt ill or couldn’t walk, they were sent to a small tent set up in a corner of the courtyard they found themselves in – this was referred to as the Lazarette. The Lazarette was set up to appear as a medical station, complete with a Red Cross flag flying from its roof. However, once through the door of the Lazarette, victims saw nothing but a vast pit full of burning bodies and before they knew it, they were stood on the edge of the pit and shot through the back of the head.
Victims were ordered to strip naked and leave their shoes and clothes behind as they were to take a shower. Women were herded into an enclosed barrack whilst men were forced to strip outside. Women subsequently also had their hair shaved off. Once naked, victims were herded towards a path about 2 metres wide. Again, the fencing of the path was made from barbed wire and covered in the same shrubbery as the outside fencing. Prisoner were kicked and whipped and beaten – the goal to create fear and confusion so that they could be easily controlled.
There are stories of one guard, known as Ivan the Terrible, who would use a sword to propel victims. For more on this story watch “The Devil Next Door” on Netflix.
This path leading from the undressing area to the gas chambers was known as the “Path to Heaven”. Here the deception continued. When victims first entered the path, they could not see where it led as it had an almost 90-degree angled turn to the right about halfway to the gas chambers. This was to ensure that once they entered the path, victims could not see their intended destination. Once victims made the turn towards the gas chambers, what they saw was a building with a large Star of David over the entrance.
On arrival at the building, men were forced to the front as they were to be gassed first. The Germans were motivated to get rid of the biggest threat of resistance first.
Originally there was a building with three gas chambers, but later another building with 10 gas chambers was built. At Treblinka, like Chelmno, Sobibor, and Belzec, carbon monoxide was the gas of choice for extermination. Each chamber had a vehicle engine hooked up to a hermetically seal gas chamber by an exhaust pipe. Once the engine started, carbon monoxide was fed into the gas chambers.
Thousands of victims were dead within about 20 minutes.
From arrival in Treblinka to death could take as little as 1 hour!
Once the German guards were sure all victims were dead, gangs of Jewish inmates called Sonderkommandos were bought in to remove the bodies from the gas chambers. Body cavities were searched for hidden valuables and gold teeth were removed by prisoner dentists. Initially, bodies were buried in huge pits, however, they were eventually dug up and burned on pyres.
Whilst victims at all death camps were buried up until 1943, the Germans decided to burn bodies from 1943 onwards. This included digging up those already buried and burning them also.
It has been suggested that the Germans decided to dig up and burn bodies after they discovered the mass graves of 22,500 Polish Officers at Katyn. The discovery clearly implicated the Soviet leadership (although they denied it) and the Germans did not want the same happening to them. The truth however appears that what was a secret operation to get rid of all evidence of German crimes began in June 1942 under what was called Sonderaktion 1005. Conjection exists as to when the Germans first found the mass graves at Katyn, but it appears that their initial understanding of the significance of the graves wasn’t until at least late 1942. The idea to hide their crimes appears to have pre-dated the discovery at Katyn, although one can only imagine the discovery hastened their planned cover-up.
Personnel at Treblinka
Those in charge at the camp were about 20-25 German and Austrian SS guards and about 80-120 guards trained at the Trawniki Concentration Camp near Lublin. The guards trained at Trawniki tended to be POW’s who’d served in the Red Army, mostly of Ukrainian, Estonian, and Latvian nationality, and were enticed into the role due to the horrendous conditions for Red Army soldiers in German POW camps.
SS Obersturmfuher Irmfried Eberl was the first commandant of the camp from its inception on 11 July 1942 until August 1942 when Franz Stangl took over. Eberl was sent from Germany after his involvement with the T4 program and was the only physician – a psychiatrist – to be an officer-in-charge of a death camp in all of WWII.
Eberl was removed as when there was an inspection carried out of the camp, it was found to have dead bodies simply laying around, other bodies not disposed of correctly and not enough being done to conceal the crime. Stangl came in and “cleaned up” the camp and ensured it ran like clockwork.
The final commandant of the camp was Kurt Franz who took over from Stangl in the aftermath of the Treblinka prisoner Uprising that broke out on 2 August 1943. He only ran the camp until November 1943. KL Treblinka officially closed on 19 October 1943, when all three Operation Reinhard were closed, however, final clean up and eradication of evidence of the camp took further time.
It would be nice to think the Operation Reinhard camps were closed because of the Uprisings in Treblinka and Sobibor, however the truth is, their job was done – The eradication of Polish Jewry.
Significance of Treblinka
Treblinka was created for the eradication of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. It fulfilled that task and then some.
It is estimated that somewhere between 700,000 to 900,000, mainly Jews, but also Sinti and Roma, died in Treblinka. And remember this total of mass murder was achieved within about 16 months.
This number of victims makes Treblinka the second most deadly of all of the death camps behind Auschwitz. It is interesting to consider that if it were not for the deportation of the Hungarian Jews in April 1944 to Auschwitz, Treblinka would have far exceeded Auschwitz as the deadliest of all the death camps.
Some estimates have put the number of victims at more than 900,000. A Polish worker at the Treblinka train station Franciszek Ząbecki, who was a member of the AK, put the number of victims at 1,200,000 based on him calculating a standard number of Jews per carriage and then counting all carriages that came through his station. However, Franciszek could not see inside individual carriages and therefore could not know that sometimes the carriages had less than the number of victims he expected.
When I was at Treblinka two weeks ago, the guide told me that Treblinka was the site of the greatest number of deaths of Polish Jews of all the death camps. He made the poignant statement:
“Treblinka is the largest graveyard of Poles in all of Poland”
Never Forget!
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treblinka_extermination_camp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderaktion_1005
https://www.deathcampsmemorialsite.com/en/knowledge-base/256-treblinka-railway-station.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre