The Treblinka extermination camp

On 22 July 1942, the first day of the Great Deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto, a goods train carrying several thousand Jews left the siding at the Umschlagplatz. It headed north-east, to a newly completed camp in the forest between the villages of Poniatowo and Wólka Okrąglik, a few kilometres from Treblinka station. The Germans called the place SS-Sonderkommando Treblinka; historians call it the Treblinka extermination camp, or Treblinka II, to distinguish it from the nearby labour camp. The train arrived on the morning of 23 July, and that day the camp began to operate: the people brought there were murdered in the gas chambers within a few hours of arrival. It was Tisha B’Av, the day of mourning for the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.

War chronologies state that on 22 July “Treblinka II, the model extermination camp, was opened”. The date is a convention: on that day the first transport left Warsaw, and the killing began the following day. The word “model” also needs qualifying. Treblinka was designed as the third and most “efficient” camp of Operation Reinhard, drawing on the experience of Bełżec and Sobibór, but its first weeks of operation were, even for the perpetrators themselves, a series of embarrassing failures. The camp became the smoothly running machine later described as a model only after a reorganisation carried out at the turn of August and September 1942.

Operation Reinhard

Treblinka was the last link in a system that, from the autumn of 1941, had been built in the General Government by the SS and Police Leader of the Lublin District, Odilo Globocnik. A meeting between Globocnik, Heinrich Himmler and the Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government, Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, on 13 October 1941 preceded the start of construction of the first camp, at Bełżec. At the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 the representative of the General Government authorities pressed for the “Final Solution” to begin with the Jews of his own territory. The murder of the Jews of the General Government was given the code name Operation Reinhard; on 17 March 1942 the first transports from Lublin and Lwów (Lviv) arrived at Bełżec, and at the beginning of May the camp at Sobibór began operating.

The method was not new. Most of the staff of the Operation Reinhard camps came from the cadres of Aktion T4, the murder of the mentally ill and disabled in the Reich, which had been formally halted in August 1941. These men already knew the gas chamber disguised as a bathhouse and knew how to drive victims into it quickly, without warning and under the pressure of haste. The difference from Chełmno on the Ner, where people were killed in gas vans, was that at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka permanent gas chambers were built, into which engine exhaust was pumped.

Bełżec and Sobibór lay in the east of the Lublin District and could not take hundreds of thousands of people from the largest ghetto in occupied Europe. According to Polish historians, the direct impulse for building a third camp was Himmler’s visit to Warsaw on 17 April 1942, during which he most probably ordered preparations for the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. In mid-July Himmler was in Lublin, and on 19 July 1942 he ordered Krüger to complete the “resettlement” of the entire Jewish population of the General Government by 31 December 1942, with the exception of a few labour camps. Three days later the Great Deportation began in Warsaw.

Choice of site and construction

The site was chosen carefully. The Treblinka area lay in the commune of Kosów Lacki, in the Sokołów county of the Warsaw District, some 80 kilometres north-east of Warsaw, where the Warsaw and Lublin Districts met the Białystok District, home to hundreds of thousands of Jews. A few kilometres away, at Małkinia, the railway lines from Warsaw, Białystok and Siedlce crossed. Since the autumn of 1941 there had already been a penal labour camp there, later called Treblinka I, whose prisoners dug gravel in a nearby pit. A railway siding led to the gravel pit and only needed to be extended. The name “Treblinka” was also known in the district as a place of forced labour, which was meant to lend credibility to German assurances that the Jews were being taken “to work in the East”.

An SS team searched for a site at the end of April or the beginning of May 1942. Construction began, according to Polish researchers, on 1 June, and according to some German studies at the end of May. The contracting authority was the Central Construction Office of the Waffen-SS in Warsaw, the work was done by two building firms, and the whole was directed by Richard Thomalla, an SS engineer who had previously supervised the construction of Bełżec and Sobibór. Sources differ on who built the camp. The Polish historian Jacek Andrzej Młynarczyk writes of Jewish labourers from the ghettos in Węgrów and Stoczek and of Polish prisoners from the nearby labour camp; other authors point to a group of German Jews deported earlier from Berlin and Hanover to the Warsaw Ghetto, and from there to Treblinka I. What is certain is that many Jewish labourers were murdered during the construction itself: SS men beat them to death, shot them, crushed them with felled trees. The building materials and equipment had to be supplied by Jewish communities, including that of Warsaw.

By mid-July a brick building with three gas chambers and an engine room had been completed; the engine room housed an internal-combustion engine – according to witnesses, taken from a Soviet tank – which also powered the camp generator. The chambers, tiled and fitted with dummy showers, held, according to witnesses, a total of about 500 to 750 people at a time. Mass graves were dug next to them. The site, some 20 hectares in area, was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence densely interwoven with branches so that no one could see in, and by entanglements and watchtowers with machine guns. A letter from the first commandant to Heinz Auerswald, the German commissioner of the Jewish district in Warsaw, shows that construction was completed on 11 July 1942.

Commandant and staff

The first commandant was Irmfried Eberl, an Austrian doctor who under Aktion T4 had run the killing centres for the sick at Brandenburg and Bernburg. He was the only doctor ever to command an extermination camp. Before the camp opened he had an office in Warsaw, in the Brühl Palace.

The German staff numbered 30–40 SS men, Germans and Austrians, most of them veterans of Aktion T4. Guard duty was performed by a company of 90–120 guards trained at the SS camp at Trawniki (PL), mostly former Soviet prisoners of war. The prisoners called them “Ukrainians”, although they included members of other nations of the USSR and Soviet Germans. The physical work – unloading the wagons, sorting clothes, dragging the bodies out of the chambers and burying them – the Germans made Jewish prisoners selected from the transports do; these prisoners were murdered at intervals and replaced with new ones.

The first transports

According to the railway plan in the General Government, each “special train” from Warsaw was to consist of about 60 wagons and 5,000 people; the first, according to most studies, carried about 6,000. Goods wagons intended for a few dozen people were filled to more than twice that, without water or sanitation. At Treblinka station the train was split into sections of about 20 wagons, and a small locomotive pushed them along the siding into the camp. A station employee, Franciszek Ząbecki, a member of the Polish underground, recorded from the first day where the trains came from and how many wagons they had; after the war his notes served as evidence in trials.

On the ramp SS men and guards drove people out of the wagons with shouts and blows, and ordered them to leave their luggage and undress “for the bath”. Men were separated from women and children, whose heads were shaved before their deaths. The naked people were driven into the gas chambers; once the doors were shut the engine was started, and the exhaust fumes containing carbon monoxide killed them within about half an hour. The old, the sick and small children without carers, who could not walk unaided, were taken to a “field hospital” marked with the Red Cross and killed with a shot in the back of the head over a pit.

From 22 July one such train left the Umschlagplatz every day, and from 6 August two. Until mid-August Treblinka received some 5,000–7,000 people a day, later as many as 10,000–12,000, including from the smaller ghettos of the Warsaw District. The camps at Bełżec and Sobibór did not take on any of this burden: the railway line to Sobibór was under repair that summer, so almost the entire stream of deportations from the Warsaw and Radom Districts flowed to Treblinka.

The chaos of August 1942

Eberl wanted his camp to outdo the others in the number of people killed, and demanded more and more transports, even though the gas chambers could not keep up and the engine kept breaking down. Trains waited for days at stations, and people died in the wagons of thirst and lack of air; at times there were more dead than living in the wagons. When the gassing could not keep pace, entire transports were shot on the ramp. The prisoners could not bury the bodies fast enough, and corpses lay about the camp and along the tracks; according to local residents, in August the stench could be smelt even in Ostrów Mazowiecka. Concealing the crime became impossible, and panic broke out in the arriving transports.

The Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad estimated that from 23 July to 28 August 1942 some 312,000 Jews were murdered at Treblinka, including about 245,000 from Warsaw and the Warsaw District. For the leadership of Operation Reinhard, however, the problem was not the scale of the suffering, but the lack of secrecy and the disorder in the looted property, which lay in the open air. After an inspection by Christian Wirth, the inspector of the extermination camps, Globocnik came to Treblinka at the end of August – according to some sources on 26 August – and dismissed Eberl. On 28 August the transports were halted. Wirth spent several weeks putting the camp in order, and on 1 September Franz Stangl, until then commandant of Sobibór, became commandant. As early as 3 September the trains from Warsaw started running again.

Place in the war

Under Stangl, Treblinka became what is often called a “model”. The camp was divided into a living area, a reception area and an extermination area hidden behind an earth rampart; a ramp was built, and in December 1942 the building beside the track was disguised as a railway station with a fake timetable. From mid-October 1942 a new building with between several and ten larger gas chambers was in operation, designed by Lorenz Hackenholt and built under the supervision of Erwin Lambert. Treblinka received the ghettos of the Warsaw and Radom Districts, part of the Lublin District and the Białystok District, as well as transports from Theresienstadt, from Greece and from Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia. The Great Deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto ended on 21 September 1942; according to German figures some 254,000 people were deported from the ghetto in the summer of 1942, according to other estimates up to 265,000, almost all of them to Treblinka.

An encrypted report of 11 January 1943 by Globocnik’s deputy Hermann Höfle, with figures up to 31 December 1942, intercepted by the British and discovered only in 2000, gives for Treblinka up to the end of 1942 the figure of 713,555 people. Historians most often estimate the camp’s total number of victims at 800,000–900,000: the Treblinka Museum puts it at no fewer than 800,000, the Institute of National Remembrance at about 850,000, Yad Vashem at about 870,000, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington at about 925,000. Some 2,000 Roma and Sinti were also killed there. Treblinka was the largest camp of Operation Reinhard and – after Auschwitz-Birkenau – the second-largest site of the murder of Jews in occupied Europe by number of victims.

The truth about Treblinka came out quickly. Escapees brought it to the Warsaw Ghetto as early as the beginning of August 1942; in mid-August an internal Home Army bulletin listed the transports and wrote of gas chambers; and at the end of the year a study of Treblinka prepared by the Oyneg Shabes (Ringelblum Archive) was brought to London by the courier Jan Karski. Like the Bund Report before it, it met with disbelief in the West.

In the spring of 1943, after a visit by Himmler, the Germans began exhuming the bodies from the mass graves and burning them on grates made of railway rails. On 2 August 1943 the prisoners staged an uprising in the camp: they set fire to some of the barracks and the fuel store, and some 400 of them broke through the fence; fewer than 70 survived the war, among them Samuel Willenberg and Jankiel Wiernik, author of one of the first accounts of the camp. In the autumn of 1943, with the end of Operation Reinhard, the camp was dismantled, the site ploughed and sown with lupins, and a farm was set up on it for a former guard. Eberl committed suicide in American custody in 1948, unrecognised. Kurt Franz, the last commandant, and three other SS men were sentenced to life imprisonment in Düsseldorf in 1965; Stangl, tracked down in Brazil, was sentenced in the same city in 1970. Today the site of the camp is marked by a monument surrounded by a field of some 17,000 stones; more than two hundred of them bear the names of the towns and villages from which the victims were brought.