Treblinka Death Camp History

The death camp at Treblinka was located in the north-eastern region of the Generalgouvernement,   in a sparsely populated area near Malkinia Gora, a junction on the Warsaw – Bialystok railway line, some 4km northwest of the small Treblinka village and its railway station.

Near to an established Arbeitslager (forced labour camp) known as Treblinka l, the site chosen was heavily wooded and well hidden from view. Treblinka I housed both Poles and Jews, and was located by a gravel pit, one and half km from the site of the death camp.

The labour camp functioned from June 1941 until 23 July 1944. The death camp was established as part of Aktion Reinhard. Construction work began at the beginning of April 1942, after SS men came to the village of Poniatowo and inspected the locality.

The building contractors were the German construction firms `Schonbronn’ from Leipzig, and `Schmidt – Munstermann’, which had an office in Warsaw. SS- Hauptsturmführer Richard Thomalla from the SS-Bauleitung Zamosc supervised the construction work. Primarily, the workers building the death camp were Jews brought there in trucks from neighbouring villages, such as Wegrow and Stoczek Wegrowski. Prisoners, mainly Polish, from the Treblinka l labour camp were also utilised in the building work. The witness Lucjan Puchala recalled:

“Initially we did not know the reason for building the branch track, and it was only at the end of the job that I found out from conversation among the Germans that the track was to lead to a camp for Jews. The work took two weeks and it was completed on 15 June 1942. Parallel to the construction of the track, earthworks continued.

The SS-men and Ukrainians supervising the work killed a few dozen people every day, so that when I looked from the place where I worked to the place where the Jews worked, the field was covered with corpses. The imported workers were used to dig deep ditches and to build various barracks. In particular, I know that a building was built of bricks and concrete, which as I later learned, contained people  to be exterminated”.

The camp’s first commander was the Austrian SS-Obersturmführer,  Dr Irmfried Eberl, who had served in Bernburg (a “euthanasia” killing centre), and also, for a short time, at the Sobibor death camp. In August 1942 Eberl was relieved of his command by Globocnik, when Globocnik and Wirth visited Treblinka, having been made aware of a chaotic breakdown in the extermination process.

This had arisen because Eberl had accepted more transports than Treblinka could handle. In late August Eberl was replaced by SS-Obersturmführer Franz Stangl, the former commander of the Sobibor death camp. Christian Wirth stayed in Treblinka to sort out the chaos created by Eberl, and brought several experienced SS-men from Belzec, such as Franz and Hackenholt, to assist with the task.

 The camp staff of Treblinka, responsible  for the smooth operation of the mass killings, consisted of about 35–40 Germans, all of whom wore the field-grey uniform of the Waffen-SS. None of them held a rank lower than SS-Unterscharführer.

Read more about Treblinka here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/treblinka.html

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

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