Treblinka

Treblinka, major Nazi German concentration camp and extermination camp, located near the village of Treblinka, Poland, 50 miles (80 km) northeast of Warsaw on the main Warsaw-Bialystok railway line. There were actually two camps. The Nazis opened the first, Treblinka, 2.5 miles (4 km) from the railway station in December 1941 as a small forced-labour camp. The second, larger, ultrasecret camp—called “T.II” (Treblinka II) in official dispatches—was 1 mile (1.6 km) from the first and opened in July 1942 as an extermination camp for Jews as part of the “final solution to the Jewish question,” or the Holocaust. The Nazis established this camp—along with Belzec and Sobibor—as part of Operation Reinhard, an effort to exterminate the Jews of occupied Poland.

Massive deportations from Warsaw began on July 22, 1942. Over the next two months, the Nazis deported more than 250,000 Jews from Warsaw to their deaths at Treblinka. The Nazis also murdered more than 100,000 Jews from other areas of Poland at the death camp. Upon arrival at Treblinka II in railway freight cars, victims were separated by sex, stripped of their clothing and other possessions, marched into buildings containing “bathhouses,” and gassed with carbon monoxide that issued through ceiling pipes from diesel engines. (The camp may later also have used the poison gas Zyklon-B.) Camp workers took those unable to walk to an area called the infirmary, replete with a Red Cross flag. Inside was a large ditch where they were killed.

In August 1942 the camp’s first commander, Irmfried Eberl was replaced by another SS (Nazi paramilitary corps) officer, Franz Stangl, who had previously served at Sobibor. Treblinka’s German staff, numbering some 30 men, including Stangl, were all veterans of the T4 Program through which the infirm and disabled were killed. About 100 Ukrainians and 700–1,000 Jewish male prisoners assisted with the executions, removing gold teeth, dentures, and other valuables from the corpses and transporting the remains to mass graves.

Initially, the pace of arrivals for gassing was so intense that a bottleneck developed because of the limited capacity of the gas chambers; however, a month after its opening, the Nazis constructed additional gas chambers that more than tripled the camp’s killing capacity. The total number killed at Treblinka was some 750,000 or more, making it second only to Auschwitz in the numbers of Jews killed.

On August 2, 1943, a group of Jewish prisoner-workers rose in a planned revolt, killing some Ukrainian guards and one SS officer but generally failing in a confusion of mistiming and ill luck. Most of the 200 or more who did escape were eventually killed or recaptured.

The Nazis closed the facilities at Treblinka II in October 1943 and those at Treblinka I in July 1944. Fewer than 100 survivors could be found after World War II.

In the 1960s, Poland erected an impressive monument at Treblinka. Comprising 17,000 stones, it outlines the shape of the death camp. Concrete blocks resembling railroad ties mark the entrance to the camp where the railroad cars were brought in. A large stone arch marks the gas chamber, and a sunken, blackened stone sculpture marks the site where the bodies were burned.

After the war, several Treblinka officers faced trial in West Germany. In a trial lasting 10 months and concluding in August 1965, 10 defendants were tried, including deputy camp commander Kurt Franz, who was sentenced to life imprisonment. In a 1970 trial, Commandant Stangl was also sentenced to life imprisonment.