The SS of Treblinka

Ian Baxter

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780752449951
• eBook ISBN: 9780750979801
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

In January 1942 senior officials of the Nazi regime met to discuss the 'final solution to the Jewish question', at a gathering that became known as the Wannsee Conference. As part of the resulting Operation Reinhard, camps were built with one aim in mind, not to imprison the Jews, but to kill them. By the time the extermination camp of Treblinka was made fully operational in July 1942, the SS had built a killing factory capable of despatching hundreds of thousands of people which could be run by only a handful of guards. But who were these men who ran Treblinka, many of whom had volunteered for the job? Were they ordinary people following terrible orders, or were they monsters? In The SS of Treblinka, Ian Baxter reveals the true natures of the men who during the camp's short operation, murdered some 850, 000 Jews. Some of them appeared outwardly to have been kind family men who then inflicted terrible cruelties on those in their power, while a few were afterwards spoken about with affection and gratitude by survivors. Using official documents, trial transcripts and private correspondence, he describes how these men lived day to day, inured to scenes of tragedy, eating and drinking the provisions their victims had brought with them under the delusion that they would be resettled, and what they thought of the thousands of people who arrived at the rail station positioned only metres from the gas chambers, whose bodies they would oversee being burned within the hour.

Chapter I

Plans for Genocide

Long before the defeat of Poland, Adolf Hitler had planned the large-scale annexation of the doomed country. When victory swiftly came at the end of September 1939, the Germans acquired territory with a population of over 20 million, of whom 17 million were Poles and 675,000 Germans. Hitler had decided to incorporate large areas of Poland into the Reich and clear the Poles and Jews out of the incorporated areas replacing them with German settlers. What followed was a period of more or less unrestrained terror in Poland in the incorporated territories. The areas that were not incorporated had a population of some 11 million. They comprised the Polish province of Lublin and parts of the provinces of Warsaw and Krakow. It was initially termed the ‘General Government of the Occupied Polish Areas’, but in 1940 was renamed the ‘General Government’. This large unincorporated area was deemed the dumping ground for all undesirables and those considered enemies of the State. It was here that the first deportations of Poles and Jews were sent in their thousands.

During the first cold months of 1940 the General Government absorbed thousands of homeless and penniless people in an area that was already over-populated. In their place came thousands of ethnic Germans moving into the newly incorporated territories, all of which had to be provided with suitable housing. The scale of the relocation was enormous and chaotic.

By February the immense problems of simultaneously attempting to relocate Poles, Jews and the ethnic Germans had become such an administrative nightmare that it was agreed that the Jews should be forced to live in ghettos. This would not only relieve the burden of the resettlement programme, but it was a way of temporarily getting rid of the growing Jewish problem. Isolating them in ghettos was deemed immediately practicable not least because it was believed that Eastern Jews in particular were carriers of diseases, and needed to be isolated for that reason alone.

Whilst plans were put into practice to create the ghettos, the SS pursued harsh policies in order to deal with the threat of subversion by Polish nationalists and Jewish ‘Bolshevists’ in the newly incorporated territories. Already by early 1940 the situation in the various detention centres and concentration camps had become untenable due to the new policies of arresting and detaining enemies of the State. News had already circulated through SS channels that government officials were demanding immediate expansion of the concentration camp system through its newly conquered territory, Poland. The German authorities quickly pressed forward to establish various camps in Poland where Jews and other enemies of the State could be incarcerated and set to work as stonebreakers and construction workers. It was envisaged that these Poles would remain as a slave labour force, and it was therefore deemed necessary to erect these so called ‘quarantine camps’.

Initially, it had been proposed that the ‘quarantine camps’ were to hold the prisoners until they were sent to the various other concentration camps in the Reich. However, it soon became apparent that this was totally impracticable so it was decided that these camps would function as a permanent prison for all those that were sent there.

Throughout 1940 the SS concentration camp system in Poland began to expand. In April a new camp was erected in the town of Oswiecim, which was situated in a remote corner of south-western Poland, in a marshy valley where the Sola River flows into the Vistula about 35 miles west of the ancient city of Krakow. The town was virtually unknown outside Poland and following the occupation of the country Oswiecim was incorporated into the Reich together with Upper Silesia and renamed by the German authorities Auschwitz.

Auschwitz was technically deemed a quarantine camp for labour exchange. The nearby town and surrounding area was to be expanded beyond all recognition. SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler envisaged that a German settlement at Auschwitz would be built, and from this model town a Germanization of various villages would be effected.

When the Germans unleashed their attack against the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the Jewish problem escalated. For the Nazi empire the prospect of a war against Russia entailed a transition from one policy of murder to another, far more ambitious. It engendered the most radical ideas imaginable in the minds of the SS. As Hitler had explained to his generals just a few months prior to the invasion, the war would be no normal war; it was an ‘ideological war’ of extermination. In the eyes of Hitler the Soviet Union represented the home of Bolshevism and international Jewry, which needed to be rooted out and destroyed.

Knowledge of the Jews is the only key whereby one may understand the inner nature and therefore the real aims of Social Democracy. The man who has come to know this race has succeeded in removing from his eyes the veil through which he had seen the aims and meaning of his Party in a false light; and then, out of the murk and fog of social phrases rises the grimacing figure of Marxism … The Jewish doctrine of Marxism repudiates the aristocratic principle of Nature and substitutes for it the eternal privilege of force and energy, numerical mass and its dead weight. Thus it denies the individual worth of the human personality, impugns the teaching that nationhood and race have a primary significance, and by doing this it takes away the very foundations of human existence and human civilization. If the Marxist teaching were to be accepted as the foundation of the life of the universe, it would lead to the disappearance of all order that is conceivable to the human mind. And thus the adoption of such a law would provoke chaos in the structure of the greatest organism that we know, with the result that the inhabitants of this earthly planet would finally disappear. Should the Jew, with the aid of his Marxist creed, triumph over the people of this world, his Crown will be the funeral wreath of mankind, and this planet will once again follow its orbit through ether, without any human life on its surface, as it did millions of years ago. (Hitler, Mein Kampf)

This was a matter of life and death; the very survival of the human race depended on an answer to ‘the Jewish question’.

To deal with the Jews in Russia four Einsatzgruppen (Action Groups) were formed that consisted of Sipo-SD personnel, Waffen-SS units, and police. Progress through the Soviet heartlands was swift and a massacre of the Jewish population ensued. Although the killing of the Jews by shooting proved effective in terms of the large numbers murdered, commanders in the field soon became aware it had many disadvantages as a method of mass murder. Firstly, the killings were difficult to conceal and were often witnessed by large numbers of unauthorized persons including the Wehrmacht, which sometimes complained about the brutality. This was not so much out of sympathy for those being executed but because of the psychological effects it had on the men. The stress it caused among many of the participants was such that it often led to soldiers consuming large amounts of alcohol whilst they killed. Others had nervous breakdowns, and there were numerous suicides. Some men simply could not face the strain and refused to take part in the slaughter. These men were regarded as weak and were quickly weeded out by their commanding officers and posted elsewhere to the front. They might have been deemed by their superiors as cowards, but no one was directly punished for such refusal – apart from the consequence of being sent to the thick of the fighting. For every soldier that refused to take part in the killings, there was always another to replace him. Virtually all men accepted their orders automatically, and soon became accustomed to the daily butchery of men, women and children.

At higher levels, there were occasional objections; especially from the Wehrmacht, but these complaints were generally politically or tactically motivated. Himmler made it clear to the Wehrmacht that they would have to simply accept the wholesale liquidations in the East as policy. It was a matter of ideology supervening over military or economic needs and for this reason they would have to accept it and cooperate. On 1 August, when his Brigade received the ‘explicit order’ from Reichsführer-SS (Himmler): ‘All male Jews must be shot – drive the female Jews into the swamps’, the then Sturmbannführer der Reserve, Commander of the mounted branch of 1.SS Cavalry Regiment Gustave Lombard was quick to disseminate the policy. ‘No male Jew survives; no leftover familes remain the in the villages.’

Whilst the Wehrmacht accepted the killings in the East, the SS were aware that they needed a better technique to murder large numbers as quickly and as anonymously as possible. One idea, which was utilized in 1941, was to give the nastiest and most degrading jobs to the ‘inferior’ races, ‘in order to preserve the psychic balance of our people’, the Poles, Ukrainians, Balts and Jews, who were already destined to be killed. This was found to be an effectve policy, especially when rounding up and killing women and children. However, it did not solve the problem of murdering ever greater numbers of people. They needed something cheaper, tidier and quicker, which would also be less distressing to the executioners. Even the Reichsführer was all too well aware of the problems of mass execution. In fact, in August 1941, whilst near Minsk he witnessed a mass killing and nearly fainted during the spectacle. He commented to a commander in the field that the execution was not humane and would lower the morale of the troops. He made it clear he wanted a more effective method of killing, such as explosives or gas.

The use of gas was not a new method at this time. A special department known as T4, which had organized the ‘Euthanasia Programme’, first used gassing installations in Germany to kill the insane and metnally handicapped. The programme was considered a complete success and ran for two years, but owing to growing public objections to euthanasia in Germany the killings were suspended, reluctantly. Now, it was proposed that this method of killing should be used outside Germany against enemies of the State, especially those from the East. The invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 gave access to thousands of Jews and other groups regarded by the Nazis as ‘subhuman’, and plans were quickly enacted to use gas.

Over the coming weeks whilst the Wehrmacht continued to advance ever deeper into Russia, gas was introduced for the first time to the Einsatzgruppen. A special vehicle had been built to resemble an ambulance or refrigerator truck that was air tight. The victims would be placed in the cabin and carbon monoxide was introduced by means of a pipe. By the autumn of 1941, the first gas van prepared for the Eastern Front was tested on Russian prisoners of war in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. This crude method of systematic annihilation of human beings was considered the best and most effective means of mass killing whilst the troops pushed forward through the Soviet Union. It was also deemed to help the special commando killing squads because they never need look into the eyes of their victims as they had when they gunned them down.

Dr Albert Wildmann of the RSHA’s Criminal Technical Institute described how the new method was decided upon.

After only a brief period, the commandos of the Einsatzgruppen got into considerable difficulties. The members of the Einsatz – and special commandos, some of whom were themselves fathers, were in the long run not up to the mental strain caused by the mass shootings, particularly when women and children were involved. There were disputes, refusals to obey orders, drunken orgies, but also serious psychological illness. Himmler, who was at first not aware of the situation was looking for a way of reducing the nervous psychological strain on the men involved in the shooting. Thus, in discussions with Heydrich and other leading figures the plan emerged of utilizing gas vans for this purpose, which were to be used for the liquidation of women and children in particular … In September or October 1941, the head of Department IID in the RSHA, SS Obersturmbannführer Rauff, was ordered by Heydrich to build gas vans.¹

Although many thousands of Jews and Russians were captured and herded into the new gas vans and murdered, the vans were not very popular with the SS since they were deemed unpleasant to operate, worse than mass executions by shooting. However, they were to remain the preferred method of liquidating the Jews in Russia.

Gas vans were also used in the first extermination centre which was built in the nearby village of Chelmno. The first transport of Jews arrived in lorries on 5 December 1941. Over a five month period some 55,000 Jews from the nearby Lodz ghetto were gassed along with at least 5,000 Gypsies.

Whist the Chelmno extermination centre had been geared to the liquidation of the Jews in the surrounding district in the Warthegau, the vast majority of Polish Jews, including many deported or who had fled from the Warthegau, were in the General Government area. A total of some 2,300,000 were now contained in ghettos there.

At the Wannsee conference held in Berlin in January 1942, it was agreed that it would be the Jews in the General Government that would be dealt with first. In fact, preparations had already been undertaken and the Nazi leadership was under no illusion that it required great organizational skills to commit mass murder. Already a pool of experts had been drafted in to undertake this mammoth task. The Wannsee Conference, presided over by Generalleutnant Reinhard Heydrich involved fourteen representatives of the military and governmental departments that would be most closely concerned with the Final Solution to the Jewish question. Attending were Gauleiter Dr Alfred Meyer and Reichamtsleiter (Chief Officer); Dr Georg Leibrandt – Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories; State Secretary Dr Wilhelm Stuckart – Reich Ministry of the Interior; State Secretary Dr Erich Neumann – Office of the Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan; State Secretary Dr Roland Freisler – Reich Justice Ministry; State Secretary Dr Josef Bühler – Office of Governor General (Poland) representing Hans Frank; SS-Oberführer Gerhard Klopfer – Party Chancellery representing Martin Bormann; Ministerial Director Friedrich Kritzinger – Reich Chancellery; SS Major-General Otto Hofmann – Race and Resettlement Main Office; SS Major-General Heinrich Müller – Reich Security Main Office; SS Lt-Colonel Adolf Eichmann – Reich Security Main Office; Under State Secretary Martin Luther – Foreign Office; SS Senior-Colonel Dr Eberhard Schöngarth – Commander of the Security Police and the SD in the General Government (Poland); and SS Major Dr Rudolf Lange – Commander of Security Police and Security Service for General Commissariat Latvia, as Deputy of Commanding Officer of Security Police and Security Service for Reich Commissariat Ostland (the Baltic States and White Russia) Security Police and Security Service.

We know from the minutes of the meeting that there was no ambiguity about that ‘Solution’. Having listed the number of Jews living in each country, Heydrich stated in the minutes, or protocol:

In large, single-sex labour columns, Jews fit to work will work their way eastwards constructing roads. Doubtless the large majority will be eliminated by natural causes. Any final remnant that survives will doubtless consist of the most resistant elements. They will have to be dealt with appropriately because otherwise, by natural selection, they would form the germ cell of a new Jewish revival.

They would have to be eliminated.

From the onset they were aware that transporting large numbers of Jews to Russia and liquidating them there would be a logistical nightmare, especially when the war in Russia had not been won. They soon came to the conclusion that it was more practical to transport German and other Jews to Poland and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Glossary and Abbreviations
• Preface
• The Author
• Introduction
• Chapter I: Plans for Genocide
• Chapter II: Under the Command of Dr Eberl (phase one)
• Chapter III: Under the Command of Franz Stangl (phase two)
• Chapter IV: ‘Obermajdan’ Treblinka (phase three)
• Chapter V: End of Treblinka (phase four)
• Epilogue
• Appendix I: List of SS Commandants, Officers and Guards
• Appendix II: SS Personnel who served in Aktion Reinhard Death Camps
• Appendix III: Deportations to Treblinka from the General Government and Bialystok General District
• Appendix IV: List of Camps
• Appendix V: List of Ukrainian Guards
• Appendix VI: Operation Reinhard Death Camps and the Estimated Death Toll
• Appendix VII: Rank Equivalents
• Bibliography
• Endnotes
• Picture Section