Treblinka Claimed 800, 000 Victims

Treblinka II, to be more precise – Treblinka I was a forced labor camp. As was the case with all other killing centers, no comprehensive statistics on the victims survived (most likely, it never existed to begin with). Most scholarly estimates range from 700,000 to 900,000 with 800,000 being the most likely number.

Treblinka II (officially the SS-Sonderkommando Treblinka) was divided into three areas: Camp 1 was the administrative compound where the guards lived, Camp 2 was the receiving area where incoming transports of prisoners were offloaded, and Camp 3 was the location of the gas chambers.

The entire killing center was surrounded by two rows of barbed-wire fencing 2.5 m high. This fence was later woven with pine tree branches to obstruct the view of the death factory from the outside.

Decision to establish Treblinka II was most likely made in October 1942 (by Himmler, Heydrich and Globocnik) but for some reason – possibly, insufficient resources – its construction began only on April 10, 1942, when Belzec and Sobib;r death factories were already operational. Treblinka II commenced its murderous operations on July 23, 1942.

The primary objective of Treblinka II was to facilitate the extermination of Jews in Warsaw Ghetto (the largest one in Poland); consequently, it was to play the same role for Warsaw as Chelmno for Lodz and Belzec for Lublin, Krakow and Lwow.

Camp 3 (also called the upper camp) was the killing zone, with gas chambers at its center. It was completely concealed from the railway tracks by an earth bank built with the help of a mechanical digger.

On the other sides, the zone was shielded from new arrivals like the rest of the camp, using tree branches woven into barbed wire fences. From the undressing barracks, a fenced-off path led through the forested area to the gas chambers.[78] The SS cynically called it the Road to Heaven – just like in Belzec

For the first eight months of the camp’s operation, the excavator was used to dig burial ditches on both sides of the gas chambers. In early 1943, these ditches were replaced with cremation pyres up to 30 m long, with rails laid across the pits on concrete blocks.

Unlike SS forced labor camps in which inmates were used as slaves, killing centers such as Treblinka had only one function: to kill those sent there. To keep the victims in the dark about the true nature of the facility until the very last moments, Treblinka II was disguised as a transit camp for deportations further East.

For this purpose, it had fake railway station, fake train schedules, a fake train-station clock with hands painted on it, names of destinations, a fake ticket window… everything was fake there except death.

The mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto began on July 22, 1942 with the first transportation of 6,000 people. The gas chambers became operational the following morning. For the next two months, deportations from Warsaw continued daily, via two shuttle trains (the second one was launched on August 6, 1942).

Geographically, Treblinka was mainly used for the murder of Polish Jews, Belzec to kill Jews also from Austria and the Sudetenland, and Sobib;r was used to “process” Jews from France and the Netherlands. Auschwitz-Birkenau was used to kill Jews from almost every country in Europe.

The Holocaust trains’ passage to their destination was routinely delayed; some transports took many days to arrive. Hundreds of prisoners died by exhaustion, suffocation and thirst while in transit to the camp in the overcrowded wagons. In extreme cases, such as the Bia;a Podlaska transport of 6,000 Jews travelling only a 125 km distance, up to 90% of inmates were already dead when the sealed doors were opened at Treblinka.

The deportees (those who survived the trip, that is) were told that they had arrived at a transit point on the way to Ukraine and needed to shower and have their clothes disinfected before receiving work uniforms and new orders.

All new arrivals were sent immediately to the undressing area by the Bahnhofskommando squad that managed the arrival platform, and from there to the gas chambers.

Victims were separated by gender behind the gate; women were pushed into the undressing barracks and barber on the left, and men were sent to the right. All were ordered to tie their shoes together and strip. Some kept their own towels.

Those who resisted were taken to the “Lazarett” (infirmary), and shot behind it. Women had their hair cut off before gassing; therefore, it took longer to prepare them for the gas chambers than men. Their hair was used in the manufacture of socks for U-boat crews and hair-felt footwear for the Deutsche Reichsbahn.

After undressing, newly arrived Jews were often beaten with whips to drive them towards the gas chambers; hesitant men were treated particularly brutally. Men were always gassed first, while women and children waited outside the gas chambers for their turn.

During this time, the women and children could hear the screams of suffocating victims from inside the chambers, and they became aware of what awaited them, which caused panic, distress, and even involuntary defecation.

The gas chambers at Treblinka were completely enclosed by a high wooden fence. Originally, they consisted of three interconnected barracks 8 m long and 4 m wide, disguised as showers.

They had double walls insulated by earth packed down in between. The interior walls and ceilings were lined with roofing paper. The floors were covered with tin-plated sheet metal, the same material used for the roof. Solid wooden doors were insulated with rubber and bolted from the outside by heavy cross-bars.[78]

According to Stangl, a train transport of about 3,000 people could be “processed” in three hours. In a 14-hour workday, 12,000 to 15,000 people were murdered.[106] After the new gas chambers were built, the duration of the killing process was reduced to an hour and a half.

The victims were murdered by the exhaust fumes conducted through pipes from V-2 diesel engine of a captured Soviet T-34 tank – just as in Sobibor and Belzec. Usually, it took about 20 minutes to kill everyone in death chamber. Then the bodies were removed by dozens of Sonderkommandos, placed onto carts and wheeled away.

In August-September 1942, ten new gas chambers were constructed (it took about five weeks to complete this project) in a new large new building built from bricks and mortar under the guidance of Erwin Lambert, who had supervised the construction of gas chambers for the Aktion T4 (no surprise here).

 The building was equipped with two diesel engines instead of one. The metal doors, which had been taken from Soviet military bunkers around Bia;ystok, had portholes through which SS guards watched the process of mass murder.

Old gas chambers were capable of murdering 3,000 people in three hours.[106] The new ones had the highest possible capacity of any gas chambers in the three Reinhard death camps and could murder up to 25,000 victims every day. However, the new gas chambers were seldom used to their full capacity; about 15,000 was the daily average.

Mass graves with hundreds of thousands of rotting bodies presented a serious health hazard; besides, after the discoveries in Katyn forest there was a significant political danger as well. So, Himmler, concerned about covering up their own crimes, issued the secret orders to exhume the corpses buried at killing centers and burn them.

Cremations in Treblinka began shortly after Himmler’s visit to the camp in late February or early March 1943. To incinerate bodies, large cremation pits were constructed at Camp 3 within Treblinka II.

The burning pyres were used to burn the new corpses and the old ones, which had to be dug up as they had been buried during the first six months of the camp’s operation. Built under the instructions of Herbert Floss, the camp’s cremation expert, the pits consisted of railroad rails laid as grates on blocks of concrete.

The bodies were placed on rails over wood, splashed with petrol, and burned. According to witnesses, it was a genuine Hell on Earth. The bodies burned for five hours – after that the bones (that did not burn) had to be crushed. The pyres operated 24 hours a day. Once the system had been perfected, up to 12,000 bodies at a time could be incinerated.

The last two rail transports of Jews were brought to Treblinka II for gassing from the Bia;ystok Ghetto on 18 and 19 August 1943. On October 19, 1943, Odilo Globocnik officially terminated Operation Reinhard and started a massive coverup.

The following day, a large group of Jewish Arbeitskommandos who had worked on dismantling the camp structures over the previous few weeks were loaded onto the train and transported, to Sobib;r where they were gassed on 20 October 1943.

As part of these operations, Jews from the surviving work detail dismantled the gas chambers brick-by-brick and used them to erect a farmhouse on the site of the camp’s former bakery.