Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps

by Yitzhak Arad

  The Deportation from Warsaw

  The first deportation transports to Treblinka were from the Warsaw ghetto, which was the largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe. The Jews from the entire region west and southwest of Warsaw were concentrated there. At the beginning of 1941, the population of the ghetto had reached 450,000. However, owing to the terrible conditions—hunger and disease—the death rate assumed dire proportions, and by the time the deportations began, the ghetto population numbered approximately 350,000 Jews.

  The deportation from the Warsaw ghetto was conducted by Sturmbannführer Höfle. On the morning of July 22, 1941, Höfle, accompanied by SS and government officials, arrived at the Judenrat offices of the ghetto and announced to Adam Czerniakow, the Judenrat chairman, that the Jews, regardless of sex or age and with but a few exceptions, were to be evacuated to the East. That same day the Judenrat was ordered to supply 6,000 Jews for transportation and to announce the evacuation to Warsaw Jewry. The announcement explained that the only exceptions to the deportation rule would be workers in German factories who had valid work permits, Judenrat employees, the Jewish Order Service, hospital patients and employees, and the families of the exempt. The deportees would be permitted to carry with them 15 kg of baggage, food for three days, money, gold, and other valuables. The Judenrat was told that, from that day on, it had to ensure that 6,000 Jews reported to the embarkation place (Umschlagplatz) every day by 4 p.m. to board the trains.

  That day Czerniakow noted in his diary: “Sturmbannführer Höfle (who is in charge of the evacuation) asked me into his office and informed me that for the time being my wife was free, but if the deportation were impeded in any way, she would be the first one to be shot as a hostage.”7 The next day Czerniakow committed suicide.

  In the afternoon hours of July 22, crowds gathered in front of the posters announcing the deportation. On the first day the designated contingent of deportees was delivered to the Umschlogplatz. It consisted partly of inmates of the refugee asylum and partly of inmates of the central detention station who had been arrested mostly for failure to obey administrative orders.

  The appearance of the ghetto streets changed according to the intensity of the Aktion. The technique of hunting the victims varied. During the initial stage, it consisted of blocking house-exits; later, whole streets were closed by German security forces. The street blockade consisted of surrounding the exits of the given section by squads of police, and a stringent examination of the documents of all who were caught. Those who did not hold a valid Ausweise (work permit) were loaded into cars and taken to the Umschlagplatz. The Jewish hospital at Stawki Street, whose patients and staff had been evacuated previously, and which was in the immediate neighborhood of the Umschlagplatz, became an assembly point for deportees prior to loading them into the trains. There was a side railroad track at the Umschlagplatz from which freight trains loaded with Jews departed.

  A transport of 5,000 to 6,000 deportees left daily. Loading took place in the afternoon hours, from 4 to 5 p.m. All those assembled were driven out of the hospital building to the accompaniment of brutal beatings with guns and sticks.

  To speed up the process and to encourage the ghetto Jews to report to the Umschlagplatz of their own volition, the German authorities announced through the Jewish Order Service that every person reporting on his own between July 29 and July 31 would receive a travel ration of 3 kg of bread and 1 kg of jam. In view of the prevailing famine conditions in the ghetto, this offer brought many to the assembly point. But the results still did not satisfy the deportation authorities. They changed their tactics. The next phase of the deportation became more violent.

  On Wednesday, July 29, houses and streets were cordoned off, German-owned enterprises were liquidated, and the workers were sent to the Umschlagplatz. The entire Aktion was accompanied by shooting.

  These scenes in the Warsaw ghetto during the deportation were repeated in the other ghettos throughout the General Government, as the deportation Aktionen were carried out simultaneously from all the districts of the General Government to the death camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The Aktionen were coordinated and conducted from the headquarters of Operation Reinhard in Lublin and lasted, with some interruptions, from the spring until the end of 1942.

  8

  The Trains of Death

  The extermination of the Jews was planned to be executed in the gas chambers, but, in practice, death and destruction began while the Jews were still in the freight cars rolling toward the death camps. Designed to carry a maximum of sixty to seventy people, including their belongings, the cars were packed with double that number. Deprived of air and water, with no sanitary facilities, forced to spend endless hours traveling or waiting in stations in the packed freight cars, many died en route. Personal belongings were stolen by the train guards—a few dozen SS men, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and occasionally Polish Blue Police (police that served the Germans and nicknamed “blue” by the local population because of their blue uniforms).

  Ada Lichtman described the journey to Sobibor:

  We were packed into a closed cattle train. Inside the freight cars it was so dense that it was impossible to move. There was not enough air, many people fainted, others became hysterical. . . . In an isolated place, the train stopped. Soldiers entered the car and robbed us and even cut off fingers with rings. They claimed that we didn’t need them any more. These soldiers, who wore German uniforms, spoke Ukrainian. We were disorientated by the long voyage, we thought that we were in Ukraine. Days and nights passed. The air inside the car was poisoned by the smell of bodies and excrement. Nobody thought about food, only about water and air. Finally we arrived at Sobibor.1

  The most terrible scenes took place on the trains to Treblinka at the end of July and in August 1942. Abraham Kszepicki described one such experience that the deportees from Warsaw went through:

  Over 100 people were packed into our car. . . . It is impossible to describe the tragic situation in our airless, closed freight car. It was one big toilet. Everyone tried to push his way to a small air aperture. Everyone was lying on the floor. I also lay down. I found a crack in one of the floorboards into which I pushed my nose in order to get a little air. The stink in the car was unbearable. People were defecating in all four corners of the car. . . . After some time, the train stopped suddenly. A Shaulist [Lithuanian volunteer in the Nazi service] entered the car . . . at first I didn’t understand why. It quickly became apparent that he had simply come to rob us. We had to approach him one by one and show him all our possessions. The Shaulist took everything that had not been well concealed previously: money, watches, valuables. . . . The situation inside the car was becoming worse. Water. We begged the railroad workers. We would pay them well. Some paid 500 and 1000 zlotys for a small cup of water. The Polish railroad workers and the Shaulists took the money. I paid 500 zlotys (more than half the money I had) for a cup of water—about half a liter. As I began to drink, a woman, whose child had fainted, attacked me. I drank; I couldn’t take the cup from my lips. The woman bit deep into my hand—with all her strength she wanted to force me to leave her a little water. I paid no attention to the pain. I would have undergone any pain on earth for a little more water. But I did leave a few drops at the bottom of the cup, and I watched the child drink. The situation in the car was deteriorating. It was only seven in the morning, but the sun was already heating the car. The men removed their shirts and lay half naked. Some of the women, too, took off their dresses and lay in their undergarments. People lay on the floor, gasping and shuddering as if feverish, their heads lolling, laboring to get some air into their lungs. Some were in complete despair and no longer moved. . . . We reached Treblinka. . . . Many were inert on the freight-car floor, some probably dead. We had been traveling for about twenty hours. If the trip had taken another half day, the number of dead would have been much higher. We would all have died of heat and asphyxiation. I later learned that there were transports to Treblinka from which only corp
ses were removed. . . .2

  Abraham Goldfarb testified about a Treblinka transport in which most of the passengers died en route:

  At the end of August 1942, the Germans carried out the expulsion from Mazaritz. . . . When the Jews were brought to the railway station, the Germans forced 150–200 of them into a freight car designed for sixty or seventy. The cars were closed from the outside with boards. Water and food were not provided. People were suffocating; there was no air to breathe. Before we moved off, the Germans sprinkled chlorine in the cars. It burned the eyes. The weaker among us fainted. People climbed on top of each other and banged on the walls with whatever they could find. The children were so thirsty they licked their mothers’ sweat. . . . There were 150 people in our freight car. During the two-day trip to Treblinka, 135 suffocated.3

  A Polish engineer, Jerzy Krolikowski, who was working on the construction of a railroad bridge near Treblinka, wrote in his memoirs:

  On July 23, 1942 (dates like that are not easily forgotten), while we were working on the railroad bridge between Malkinia and Siedlce, a rather strange train passed, with closed freight cars whose air apertures were covered with barbed wire. Between the bunched wires, one could make out pale and hunger-stricken faces. . . . One day in late July or early August 1942, I heard groaning voices from a train crossing the bridge; they wanted water . . . the people packed into those freight cars had been there for hours. They were simply dying of thirst. . . .4

  In the latter half of August, several dozen Jews were summoned from the Siedlce ghetto to the train station to unload a stalled freight car. When they opened the car, they were confronted by a horrible sight. The car was littered with the corpses of about a hundred Jews. It turned out that they were from the Radom ghetto and had been on their way to Treblinka. They had suffocated from lack of oxygen, the heat, and the lime sprinkled on the freight-car floor.5

  A German soldier, Hubert Pfoch, saw a transport of Jews for Treblinka at the Siedlce train station, while on his way to the front by military transport. He wrote in his diary:

  The next morning, August 22, 1942, our train was moved to a track near the platform. A rumor spread that the train in front of us was carrying a transport of Jews. The Jews began calling out to us that they had been without food or water for days. As they were forced into the freight cars, we witnessed a disgusting scene. The bodies of those shot the night before were thrown into a truck. It had to make four trips to remove them. . . . Calls of “Water! I’ll give my gold ring for water,” issued from the cars. Some offered 5,000 zlotys for a cup of water. When a few managed to get out of the cars through the air apertures, they were shot before they reached the ground. . . . By the time our train left the station, at least fifty dead women, men, and children, some of them entirely naked, were lying along the track. . . . Our train followed the transport, and we kept seeing bodies on both sides of the track—children and others. When we reached Treblinka station, the transport train was again alongside. Some of us vomited from the stench of decomposing bodies. The pleas for water were more intense, and the guards’ aimless firing continued. . . .6

  Thousands of Jews died en route to the death camps during that summer from thirst, suffocation, and lack of minimum sanitary facilities in the crowded freight cars. The trip from Warsaw and other ghettos to Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, which should have lasted a few hours, sometimes lasted a day or two. The combination of conditions in the freight cars and the extended journey led to mass deaths.

  The SS personnel in charge of Jewish transport purposely overloaded the freight cars. For example, Gedob placed a single daily train at the disposal of the Warsaw deportation. It consisted of fifty-eight or fifty-nine freight cars for the transport of 5,000 Jews in stifling conditions. However, one train daily, with this number of freight cars, was not nearly adequate to meet the demands of the deportation authorities. Therefore, in practice, 6,000–7,000 Jews were forced to board the train. The SS personnel in Warsaw in charge of the expulsion were so enthusiastic about their job of transporting the Jews to their death in a minimum of time that they disregarded entirely the optimum absorptive capacity of the trains.

  The Gedob transport directive of early August 1942 set the travel time for deportee trains from Warsaw to Treblinka at four hours. The train was to leave Warsaw at 12:25 and arrive at Treblinka at 16:30. An additional two and one-half hours were calculated as turn-around time at Treblinka. The train was planned to arrive empty back at Warsaw at 23:19. Warsaw to Treblinka and back was to take about eleven hours.7 In reality, the plan met with difficulties, and the Treblinka round trip took much longer.

  The deportation trains left Warsaw only in the evening, whereas in Treblinka the staff was unprepared to receive transports in the darkness. The trains, therefore, entered the camp only in the morning hours. Warsaw-Treblinka-Warsaw took almost twice the time planned and caused a decrease in the available trains for the deportations.

  There was an additional and unexpected problem that caused an increase in the number of transports to Treblinka. According to the plan, Jews deported for extermination from the Warsaw district were to be sent to both Treblinka and Sobibor. However, on July 28, 1942, the General Director of the German Transportation Office, Dr. Ganzenmüller, informed Himmler’s headquarters that the Warsaw-Lublin-Sobibor rail line would be out of commission until early October 1942, due to repair work, and that the Warsaw-Sobibor transports could not, therefore, be carried out. With the Sobibor camp out of operation, all deportee trains from Warsaw and a number of other ghettos were directed to Treblinka.8

  Treblinka alone was incapable of absorbing all the transports from the ghettos in the Warsaw and Radom districts. There were also many organizational and technical difficulties in this camp in the first months of its operation, which decreased killing capacity there (see chapter 11). Although Belzec was in operation at that time, receiving transports of Jews from the Lublin, Lvov, and Cracow districts, it was doubtful whether it could absorb additional deportees. As a result, the overloaded trains to Treblinka were delayed at the way stations.

  Due to lack of coordination between the size of the transports, their frequency, and Treblinka’s absorptive capacity, the deportees would be held in the trains for days en route, and in the interim many died. Even at the last station, Treblinka village, they would be delayed for hours. Franciszek Zabecki, a Pole in Treblinka village, noted that

  There were days when two or three trains stood at Treblinka station with their unfortunate cargo, waiting their turn to be sent to the death camp. The transports sometimes waited all night, because transfer to the camp was not carried out in darkness. The cruelty of the security guards, Germans, Latvians, and Ukrainians, is difficult to describe. Sadism and torture seemed to know no bounds. I saw how guards, who were always drunk, would open the freight-car doors at night and demand money and valuables. Then they would close the doors and fire into the cars. . . . During the day, the corpses remaining at the station were collected, loaded onto a car and sent to the death camp. This task was attended to by a group of Jews from the camp, under SS and Ukrainian supervision.9

  The train delays en route to the death camps were not planned in advance by those in charge of the transports and extermination. Rather, they were the result of inefficient planning, and they in turn caused additional overloading of a railway system already overburdened by the logistical requirements of the eastern front. However, the extreme crowding in the freight cars, which, indeed, was a deliberate act on the part of the deportation authorities, and the inhuman behavior of the train guards turned the journey into a shocking nightmare. Treblinka’s initial “running-in” difficulties contributed to additional delays. These factors, taken together, accounted for the high mortality rate of the Jews on the trains to the death camps.

  9

  Belzec: March 17 to

  June, 1942

  The full-scale extermination of Jews in Belzec began on March 17, 1942, with the onset of the deportation of the Jews
of Lublin. This date marks the actual start of Operation Reinhard.

  In an entry in Goebbels’ diary regarding the beginning of Operation Reinhard, ten days after the killings started in Belzec, on March 27, 1942, he wrote:

  Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in the General Government are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said about 60 percent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only about 40 percent can be used for forced labor.

  The former Gauleiter of Vienna [Globocnik], who is to carry this measure through, is doing it with considerable circumspection and according to a method that does not attract too much attention. Fortunately, a whole series of possibilities presents itself for us in wartime that would be denied us in peacetime. We shall have to profit by this. The ghettos that will be emptied in the cities of the General Government will now be refilled with Jews thrown out of the Reich. This process is to be repeated from time to time.1

  The reception and treatment of the transport from its arrival at Belzec station until the completion of the killing process was developed by Christian Wirth. Secrecy and deception of the victims were the cornerstones of this extermination technique.