Holocaust Heroes

by Felton, Mark;

  The nickname ‘Trawnikis’ was derived from Trawniki Concentration Camp, located south-west of the Polish city of Lublin, where the ex-Soviet soldiers were turned into SS auxiliaries. The camp had been established in 1941, and the first prisoners were, ironically, Soviet PoWs and Polish Jews. In mid-1942, Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia arrived – in total around 20,000 passed through the camp, most on their way to their deaths at Belzec Extermination Camp, or they were shot to death in nearby woods.

  In late 1942, Trawniki became a manufacturing centre, using the Jews and other prisoners as forced labour, and this process was accelerated following the Warsaw Rising in April 1943, when 10,000 workers and many Warsaw factories were relocated to Trawniki. In May 1943, more Jews from the Netherlands, Bialystok, Minsk and Smolensk in the Soviet Union were sent to Trawniki. Approximately 10,000 were killed when the Germans initiated Operation Erntefest in autumn 1943, part of the 43,000 Jews in total who were murdered (see Chapter 8).

  One former guard recalled his training at Trawniki: ‘You were taught there how to shoot with a gun, machine gun and sub-machine gun and to throw grenades and all this in the German language.’ The ex-Soviets learned how to be German soldiers and SS men. Apart from drill and weapons training, Trawniki also provided the Ukrainians with a pool of live prisoners for them to learn how to command – with the utmost brutality. They were kitted out in grey-brown uniforms with black collars and black forage caps adorned with the eagle and death’s head insignia of the SS. Armed with Mauser rifles or holstered automatic pistols, the Trawnikis also routinely carried leather bullwhips.

  The extent to which the SS employed Ukrainians and other foreign soldiers is not particularly well known. Usually, a concentration camp would have a small German SS officer corps, along with a cadre of German NCOs who operated as junior management in the various sections of the camp. Most of the ordinary guards were Trawniki volunteer SS-Wachmänner.

  At Treblinka I, the camp’s second-in-command, SS-Untersturmführer Franz Schwarz, enjoyed beating prisoners to death with a pickaxe or sledgehammer. But Treblinka I was a forced labour camp, or Arbeitslager, and though run extremely brutally, it was never the intention of Commandant Van Eupen and his men, including the Trawnikis, to kill the entire workforce. Treblinka II, however, was an entirely different institution with a very specific homicidal purpose.

  Treblinka II was the last of the three Reinhard camp to open, after Belzec and Sobibor. Located just over a mile from Treblinka I, the camp’s first commandant was a psychiatrist, SS-Obersturmführer Dr Irmfried Eberl. Thirty-one-year-old Eberl had been an early adherent of Hitler, joining the Austrian Nazi Party in 1931 while still a medical student at Innsbruck University. He had been heavily involved with the T4 euthanasia programme, as medical director of a killing facility in Brandenburg in 1940. Eberl, who sported a Hitler moustache and slicked-back brown hair, was transferred to Treblinka II as commandant in July 1942 after a short spell at the Chelmno Extermination Camp. He rapidly gained a reputation among his SS colleagues as extremely ambitious.

  Treblinka II, in common with the Belzec and Sobibor camps, was divided into several distinct sections, each with a specific role in the process of genocide. Camp I, or the Wohnlager, contained the administration building (Kommandantur) where the commandant, other officers and senior NCOs had their offices. There was accommodation for the camp’s 20 to 25 SS-TV and 80 to 120 SS-Trawnikis, who lived separately from the Germans with their own messing facilities. A paved road, named Seidel Strasse after its supervisor of construction, SS-Untersturmführer Kurt Seidel, passed through Camp I from the main gate on the north side. There were side roads paved in gravel. There was a kitchen, bakery and dining rooms staffed by Polish and Ukrainian prisoners, who formed a special Sonderkommando. They lived in two barracks inside Camp I.

  Second-in-command of Treblinka II, the baby-faced SS-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, known to prisoners as ‘The Doll’, even set up a small zoo beside the horse stables that contained two foxes, a pair of peacocks and a roe deer. Camp I also contained a laundry, tailor’s shop, cobblers, metalworking shop and a small medical facility for the exclusive use of SS personnel.

  Camp II, or the Auffangslager, was the receiving area where fresh transports of Jews would be processed through to Camp III. The station platform where the evacuation trains stopped had been disguised by the Germans to look like a regular Polish station, complete with terminal signs, a wooden clock and neat buildings. As at other extermination centres, an evacuation train normally consisted of sixty wagons packed with Jews. The platform could accommodate the offloading of twenty wagons at a time, so the process of admitting Jews into the camp was repeated three times for each shipment. SS-Scharführer Josef Hirtreiter normally oversaw the offloading of the Jews. Any resistance or arguments were dealt with brutally. Troublemakers, as well as the sick, lame or very elderly, were separated from the main transport and taken to a small building that was disguised as a Lazarett or medical centre. In reality, there was a deep pit behind the building. Here, SS-Unterscharführer Willi Mentz, nicknamed ‘Frankenstein’, would shoot the prisoners in the back of the head, often assisted by his boss, SS-Scharführer August Miete.

  For the rest of the transport, they would progress to two long barracks manned by Jewish Sonderkommandos, where the prisoners would undress, pass by a cashier’s booth where they were told to deposit their valuables for ‘safekeeping’ and to an area where women and children would have their heads shaved. The Sonderkommandos, who searched and sorted them, would collect the piles of clothing.

  Screened from the railway line and Camp II by a high earthen bank was Camp III. The fences around this area of Treblinka II were camouflaged with tree branches that were woven into the fences, and parts of the original forest had been retained as a further screen to prying eyes. The undressing barracks in Camp II were connected to Camp III via a long, fenced corridor that the SS sarcastically nicknamed the Himmelstrasse (‘Road to Heaven’). At the end of the fenced corridor were the gas chambers and large open-air cremation facilities, and several massive burial pits. Here also were 300 Sonderkommandos who were forced to assist in the killing process, and who lived in a separate barracks directly behind the gas chambers.

  In total, there were between 800 and 1,000 Jews who were kept alive for a short time to work as Sonderkommandos. They were subject to arbitrary executions or beatings from the SS, and when they died, strong new men selected from arriving transports replaced them.

  In Camp II each Sonderkommando unit wore a coloured badge to aid identification and control by the SS. Kommando Blau (Unit Blue) manned the rail ramp and platform, unlocked the wagons and also cleaned them out after their human cargo had been emptied. Kommando Rot (Unit Red) was the biggest Sonderkommando. They unpacked and sorted the belongings of the arrivals and delivered them to special storage barracks. Kommando Gelb (Unit Yellow) separated items by quality, removed the Star of David badge from all clothing and extracted any money that arrivals had sewn into their clothes. The Disinfektionskommando disinfected the arrivals’ belongings and the sacks of hair. The Goldjuden collected and collated banknotes and evaluated gold and jewellery, under the watchful eyes of SS NCOs.

  The 300 Sonderkommando who worked in the gas chambers and crematorium facilities were called Totenjuden (Jews of Death) by the SS. Suicides in the Totenjuden barracks ran at fifteen to twenty a day, the shortfall in labour being made up by the SS from new arrivals. Finally, there was the Holzfallerkommando, a group used to cut wood in the surrounding forest for the crematoria, and the Tarnungskommando, or Disguise Unit, whose job was to refresh the foliage that was woven into the barbed wire fences to prevent any unauthorized persons from seeing what was going on inside this part of the camp.

  Although regular SS were in charge of the gas chambers, they relied heavily upon Ukrainian auxiliaries to get the Jews into the killing facilities after they had been driven up the Himmelstrasse. ‘I met Ivan Marchenko in August 1942 in th
e Treblinka death camp, where he served as a guard in a guard company,’ wrote former SS-Wachmann Aleksandr Yeger on 16 April 1948, whilst in Soviet captivity. Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, had launched an operation to investigate the Aktion Reinhard death camps and one name had kept coming up in association with Treblinka – ‘Ivan the Terrible’. A Ukrainian guard of fearsome and sadistic reputation, ‘Ivan’ had apparently tortured and mutilated Jews on the way to their deaths. Former comrades had identified ‘Ivan’ as a certain Ivan Marchenko and he would be sought for decades after the war by survivors’ groups desperate to bring the SS auxiliary to justice. ‘He viciously beat and shot persons of Jewish nationality,’ reported former SS auxiliary Yeger. ‘At the end of 1943 after the destruction of the … camp he left for Italy along with the commander of the camp. I never saw him after that and I do not know where he is now.’4 Another former SS auxiliary named Pavel Leleko recalled on 21 February 1945 the scene before the gas chambers at Treblinka: ‘When the procession of the condemned approached the gas chambers, the “motorists” of the gas chambers, Marchenko and Nikolay [Shalayev], would shout: “Go quickly or the water will get cold”.’ Five or six German SS with dogs, clubs and whips would help the two Ukrainians fill the gas chambers, using the utmost savagery as the Jews realized what was going to be done to them. ‘In this the Germans would compete with the “motorists” in brutality towards the people selected to die. Marchenko for instance, had a sword with which he mutilated the people. He cut off the breasts of women.’5 Aleksandra Kirpa, a Ukrainian forced labourer who worked as a maid in the German SS quarters at Treblinka, recalled on 18 April 1951: ‘The man identified to me as Ivan Ivanovich Marchenko served in the “SS” detachment. He wore a black uniform of the German “SS” forces and was armed with a pistol – on the shoulder-strap he wore one or two (I do not recall exactly) white stripes and had the rank of “Oberwachmann” or “Gruppenwachmann”.’6 To this day, Ivan Marchenko has never been positively identified or captured. For many years, a former Ukrainian SS guard named Ivan ‘John’ Demjanjuk, who was living in the United States, was believed to be Ivan the Terrible and he faced trial on several occasions, but the evidence against Demjanjuk was never conclusive. In 1951, when he applied to emigrate to America, Demjanjuk gave his mother’s maiden name as Marchenko. Coincidence perhaps, but many suspected that the Ivan Marchenko at Treblinka had been using an assumed name. The Ukrainian SS were, after all, traitors and collaborators. John Demjanjuk died in 2012.

  Some Jews had attempted individual escapes from Treblinka II, while others had even attempted acts of sabotage. Some people had managed to return to nearby ghettos, or even to Warsaw, and try to warn others about what was happening at Treblinka. One example was Avraham Krzepicki, who escaped from Treblinka after eighteen days and later fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt.

  Occasional escapes were made by Sonderkommandos concealing themselves in freight trains that left Treblinka loaded with belongings and loot taken from Jewish victims. In early December 1942, seven escapees were caught attempting this way out. They were shot on Deputy Commandant Franz’s orders. But the SS were always keen to terrify and cow their prisoners, so Franz also ordered that for each escaped Jew a further ten prisoners would be shot, so this one escape attempt ended up costing the lives of seventy-seven people.7

  Prisoners working in Camp III, the death camp, constructed an escape tunnel. A breakout was attempted on the night of 31 December 1942, five men managing to get free under German fire. The SS recaptured four of them soon afterwards. Of the four, one was shot on the spot while the other three were brought back to Treblinka and publicly hanged in front of the assembled Sonderkommandos as a warning. The unfortunate outcome of the tunnel was that the Germans beefed up the camp’s perimeter defences to make any attempts on or under the wire much more difficult. Six large wooden guard towers armed with machine guns were constructed, overlooking all areas of the camp.

  One of the most notorious acts of resistance involved a hand grenade. One day, a line of male prisoners shuffled forward into the undressing barracks, their clothes tatty and soiled from their journey from Warsaw 50 miles away. Escorting them were several hard-looking Ukrainian SS auxiliaries with Mauser rifles slung over their shoulders. Standing apart from them was a German SS sergeant, a coiled whip grasped firmly in one hand. He was yelling orders, to which the Ukrainians responded by pushing and shoving the Jewish prisoners. Occasional shots were fired into the air to ‘encourage’ the prisoners forward. The shipment had arrived fresh from the crushing of the Warsaw Ghetto, and contained several ZOB fighters. As the men undressed, piling their grimy clothing on benches that the SS provided, one young man hesitated. During the uprising he had fought valiantly until captured in the ruins of the ghetto and been sent to the camp to be killed. But unknown to the SS, this ZOB fighter had managed to conceal a single hand grenade on his person. In their urgency to clear the ghetto and move the prisoners to camps, the Germans accidentally overlooked the odd weapon that was well hidden. The fighter was under no illusions about where this particular road ended, no matter what lies the Germans had told the prisoners on the station platform when the train had first pulled in. Waiting until the crowd had thinned a little as prisoners moved to the next section of their processing, the fighter quickly dug the grenade out from its hiding place in the folds of his clothing and, yelling a defiant message in Polish, wrenched out the pin.

  The detonation of the grenade inside the undressing barracks caused prisoners and guards in the rest of the camp to involuntarily duck. The windows in the barracks were blown out, smoke rising from their glassless frames. To guttural cries of ‘Alarm!’, German SS came running, drawing their Luger pistols from their holsters, ready for anything. They thought that a rebellion had begun. But it was only the final act of a brave man who had lost his battle of resistance against the Nazis. The SS were frightened and shaken by the grenade incident. If they had but known it, their cowed prisoners were even then planning the uprising that they so badly feared. The Jews who slaved for the Germans, the poor wretches who were forced to help the SS to kill their own people, were planning a mass escape.

  Commandant Dr Eberl’s methods aroused amazement and then harsh criticism from his SS superiors. He was so ambitious that he took to ordering more transports than the camp could cope with, in a vain attempt to impress his superiors. ‘That meant that trains had to wait outside the camp because the occupants of the previous transport had not yet all been killed,’ said SS-Unterscharführer Mentz. ‘At the time it was very hot and as a result of the long wait inside the transport trains in the intense heat many people died. At that time whole mountains of bodies lay on the platform. Then Hauptsturmführer Christian Wirth came to Treblinka and kicked up a terrific row. And one day Dr Eberl was no longer there.’8 Irmfried Eberl was dismissed on 26 August 1942 for incompetence in the disposal of bodies and replaced by Franz Stangl. It was interesting that Wirth and Eberl had already worked together during the T4 Euthanasia Programme that had preceded the horrors of Reinhard. Wirth, born in 1895, came from humble origins, the son of a cooper. After serving in the army from 1905 to 1910, he had joined the police in Stuttgart, being made a detective. When the First World War broke out, Wirth immediately volunteered and served on the Western Front, winning the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class for bravery. In 1919, he returned to policing as a detective sergeant, next joining the Nazi Party and the SA. In 1937, Wirth joined the SD and was soon commissioned into the SS. As a captain in the Kripo, or Criminal Police, Wirth was detached from Stuttgart to join the T4 programme, serving in an administrative role. In Prussia, he served alongside Dr Eberl at Brandenburg an der Fulda before becoming personnel director at the Hartheim Institute. Wirth’s value was recognized by his appointment as commandant of the Chelmno Extermination Camp, where he oversaw gassing operations using special vans. On 1 August 1942, Odilo Globocnik appointed Wirth inspector of the Reinhard death camps, with special responsibility over Sobibor and Treblinka I
I.

  Wirth’s choice for the new commandant of Treblinka II, to replace Dr Eberl, was another valued T4 man. Thirty-four-year-old Stangl, an Austrian like his predecessor Eberl, had been an apprentice weaver in the 1920s before moving to Innsbruck and joining the police in 1930. And like Eberl, Stangl joined the Nazi Party in 1931, which was an illegal act for a policeman at the time. After the German takeover of Austria in 1938, Stangl was assigned to the Gestapo-administered Schutzpolizei, working in the Jewish Bureau in Linz. The same year, Stangl joined the SS. From this, Stangl gravitated to the T-4 Programme as security director at the Hartheim Institute near Linz, serving under Christian Wirth. In March 1942, Stangl was offered a choice. Either return to the police in Linz, where he had been having problems with his boss, or transfer to Lublin in Poland as part of Globocnik’s Aktion Reinhard. The then SS-Obersturmführer Stangl naturally chose the latter and was appointed the first commandant of Sobibor Extermination Camp, overseeing the final construction phase, before command was transferred to SS-Hauptsturmführer Franz Reichleitner.

  In August 1942, Stangl was ordered by Globocnik to Treblinka II to replace Eberl. He brought with him an outstanding reputation as an administrator and manager of staff, with a good eye for detail. He inherited a complete mess from Eberl, a camp that was literally knee-deep in unburied corpses, and a demoralized and often drunken staff. But Stangl rose to the challenge set by his SS masters and quickly got things cleaned up and running efficiently. He was promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer and soon got used to the death that surrounded him on a daily basis. ‘They were cargo,’ Stangl said of the Jews. His desensitization began on the day of his arrival. ‘I remember Wirth standing there, next to the pits full of blue-black corpses … It was a mass – a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said “What shall we do with all this garbage?” I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo … I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. I sometimes stood on the wall and saw them in the “tube” [or Road of Heaven] – they were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips.’9 The prisoners called Stangl ‘The White Death’ because he often wore a white summer tunic with his grey SS cap and trousers. Stangl generally stayed away from the prisoners, making him an austere and remote figure within the world of the camp.