Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps

by Yitzhak Arad

  A survivor from Sobibor, Ada Lichtman, described how Michel addressed the people as they arrived:

  We heard word for word how Oberscharführer Michel, standing on a small table, convinced the people to calm down. He promised them that after the baths all their belongings would be returned to them and that it was time for Jews to become a productive element. At present all of them would be going to the Ukraine to live and work. This address aroused confidence and enthusiasm among the people. They applauded spontaneously and sometimes even danced and sang.4

  Elderly people, the sick, and invalids who were unable to walk were told that they would be taken to a Lazarett (infirmary) where they would receive medical treatment. Actually they were put on carts, pushed by men or pulled by horse, and at a later stage on a narrow-gauge railway carriage, and were taken into Camp III, directly to the open pits, and there they were shot.5

  The alleged “transfer” of the disabled to the Lazarett also served as part of the deception—the deportees had been taken to a labor camp, and those unable to work were undergoing medical treatment.

  After the first few weeks, during which the undressing took place on the open square of Camp II, a barrack for this purpose was erected (see Chapter 4 for the plan of Sobibor, Camp II). Inside this barrack were signs indicating the direction to the “cashier” and the “baths.” At the “cashier” the Jews were ordered to submit their money and valuables. In the forest house was a room which overlooked the path where the naked people had to pass on their way to the “tube” and gas chambers, and the victims handed over their money and valuables through the window of this room. They were warned that those who attempted to hide anything would be shot. The cashier was SS Oberscharführer Alfred Ittner, who was the accountant of the camp. Later he was replaced by SS Scharführer Hans Schütt and SS Scharführer Floss. When time permitted, the Jews received numbers as receipts for the money and valuables they had submitted, to make them believe that they would truly receive everything back after the baths.6

  SS Oberscharführer Erich Bauer, one of the men in charge of Camp II, testified:

  Usually the undressing went smoothly. Subsequently, the Jews were taken through the “tube” to Camp III—the real extermination camp. The transfer through the “tube” proceeded as follows: one SS man was in the lead and five or six Ukrainian auxiliaries were at the back hastening the [Jews] along. The women were taken through a barrack where their hair was cut off. In Camp III the Jews were received by SS men. . . . As I already mentioned, the motor was then switched on by Go[t]ringer and one of the [Ukrainian] auxiliaries whose name I don’t remember. Then the gassed Jews were taken out. . . .7

  When transports arrived in the evening or night, they disembarked and were kept under guard in Camp II until the morning. Then they were taken to undress and to the gas chambers.8 Usually no extermination activity was carried out in the dark.

  Many times the whole process, from disembarkation until entering the gas chambers, was accompanied by beatings and atrocities carried out by some of the Germans and the Ukrainians. For example, there was a dog called Barry who was trained by the SS men to bite the Jews, especially when they were naked on the way to the gas chambers. The beatings, the bitings of Barry, and the shooting and shouting of the guards caused the Jews to run through the “tube” and push themselves into the “baths,” hoping to find some escape from the hell around them.

  Sometimes the SS men mocked the victims and gave them “special treatment.” For example, on June 10, 1942, a transport with Jews arrived from the ghetto of Biala Podlaska. The people believed that they had been sent to a labor camp. When they disembarked from the train, a Judenrat member who had arrived with this transport handed over a letter to one of the SS men who was on the ramp. The letter included a request from the municipality of Biala Podlaska for decent treatment of the arriving Jews. For the “insolence” and “impudence” of bringing such a letter, 200 of the Jews were taken for “special treatment”; all the others were taken directly to the gas chambers. The 200 Jews were forced to take luggage from Camp II and load it on a train, while the Germans and Ukrainians created a cordon around them. While carrying the luggage, the Jews had to run between the guards, and as they ran by they were whipped and clubbed. The dog Barry was also set to bite them. After the “special treatment,” these Jews were also gassed.9

  A limited number of skilled workers, among them carpenters, tailors, and shoemakers, and a few dozen strong young men and women were selected from some of the transports. It was their duty to carry out the physical work. Every day some of them were shot or sent to the gas chambers, and their ranks were filled by arrivals from new transports. Their work was to unload the corpses of those who had died in the trains and take them to the pits and to transfer the old, sick, and invalids to Camp III, where they were shot. Some of the Jews selected for work were taken to Camp III, where their duty was to remove the gassed bodies and bury them. Others were engaged in collecting and sorting out the goods left behind by the victims and preparing them for transferral from the camp. The selection of some of the arriving Jews for work was frequently used to make them believe that they had been brought to a labor camp.

  Hershl Zukerman, who arrived at Sobibor on May 13, 1942, described the process of forming groups of men to be sent to the gas chambers:

  Every few minutes some SS men approached and inquired who among us was a shoemaker, tailor, etc. People believed it was worthwhile to appear as a skilled worker and therefore responded. Then they marched in groups consisting of 300–400 men who believed they were being sent to a labor camp. Actually they were taken directly to Camp III, to the gas chambers.10

  From some of the transports, however, young men and women were indeed selected and sent to labor camps in Ossowa, Sawin, and Krychow, which were not far from Sobibor. These groups numbered a few hundred people, and most of them were returned to Sobibor several months later, when these camps were liquidated.11

  The unawareness of what happened to the Jews who were taken to Camp III weighed heavily on the daily life of those selected to work. Days and even weeks passed until the Jewish prisoners who worked in Camp I and Camp II found out that those who had been taken there were gassed. In Sobibor, unlike Belzec, the extermination area with the gas chambers was more isolated from the other parts of the camp, and nothing could be seen. Dov Freiberg, who came to Sobibor in May 1942 and was selected for work, says that “for two weeks he and those with him hoped that the people had not been murdered, but had been sent to the Ukraine. This in spite of the fact that they worked only a few hundred meters away from the gas chambers.”12

  The 200–300 Jewish prisoners who were kept in Camp III, who removed the bodies from the gas chambers and buried them, had no contact with those in the other parts of the camp. The food for them was cooked in Camp I and taken by Jewish prisoners to the gate of Camp III. No physical contact was permitted between the Jewish prisoners from the different parts of the camp. But the Jewish prisoners in Camp I wanted desperately to find out what was going on in Camp III. Hershl Zukerman, who was a cook and prepared the food for prisoners in Camp III, testified:

  I came up with an idea. Everyday, I used to send twenty or twenty-five buckets with food for the workers in Camp III. The Germans were not interested in what I cooked, so once I prepared a thick crumb pie and inside I put the following letter: “Friends, write what is going on in your camp.” When I received the bucket back, I found in one of them a piece of paper with the answer: Here the last human march takes place, from this place nobody returns. Here the people turn cold. . . .” I informed some other people about the substance of this letter.13

  The truth of what was going on in Camp III became known to the Jewish prisoners in Sobibor at the beginning of June 1942.

  The extermination machine of Sobibor operated for months without interruptions and in an orderly way. The structure of the camp was adapted to the extermination technique and enabled a more efficient treatment of the arri
ving transports than in Belzec. Moreover, the frequency of the transports to Sobibor was lower than in Belzec and, in most cases, less people were in each train. Usually only one train with deportees arrived daily, and there were even days without any transports. The size of the transports rarely exceeded twenty freight cars carrying from 2,000 to 2,500 people.

  Stangl was the leading figure in Sobibor and supervised the work. His personality and years of experience as a police officer and with the euthanasia program provided him with the most suitable training for the assignment of commander of a death camp. The order and smooth operation of the camp should be attributed to him. His name or his attendance is seldom mentioned in the testimonies of the survivors—contrary to other SS men like Michel, Wagner, Bauer, Frenzel, and others, who are referred to many times—but he was the dominant figure behind the scenes. The following event sheds some light on Stangl’s personality.

  In the spring of 1942, a Jewish woman from Chelm came to Sobibor on her own to search for her husband, who had been taken with a transport of Jews to the camp. She was brought to Stangl and asked him to allow her to visit her husband. This innocent woman did not know what was going on in Sobibor and that her husband had already been gassed. Stangl called in the SS man Alfred Ittner and ordered him to take the woman to Camp III. When the woman turned her back to Stangl, he signaled to Ittner the pulling of a trigger. Stangl made it clear to Ittner that the woman should be shot in Camp III. Ittner took the woman and handed her over to a Ukrainian guard who shot her. Returning from Camp III, Ittner met Stangl, who was waiting for him and who asked him whether Ittner himself had shot the woman. When Ittner replied that it had been done by a Ukrainian, Stangl said: “You coward.” Stangl wanted all the SS men in the camp to be individually involved in the killing, making them all partners to the murder.14

  The first stage of killing operations in Sobibor lasted from May until the end of July 1942. In this period Jews were sent there from ghettos in the Lublin district and from Czechoslovakia and Austria. The Jews who came from foreign countries were deported either to ghettos in the Lublin district and from there to Sobibor or directly to the camp. In May (6–12) 1942, close to 21,000 Jews arrived in Sobibor from ghettos in Pulawy county. Between May 12 and 15, 1942, about 9,500 Jews arrived from Krasnystaw county. Between May 3 and 15, 7,200 Jews arrived in Sobibor from Zamosc county. In the second half of May 1942, over 6,000 Jews arrived from Chelm county. In the first half of June 1942, over 10,000 Jews arrived from Hrubieszow county, 3,000 Jews from Biala Podlaska and 800 from Krasniczyn, Krasnystaw county. Altogether about 57,500 Jews arrived in Sobibor from identified localities in the Lublin district. But the actual number can be estimated at approximately 15,000 to 20,000 more. In addition, during these months 10,000 Jews arrived from Austria and Germany, 6,000 Jews from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and part of the 24,378 Jews from Slovakia who would be murdered in this camp by the end of 1942.

  During the first stage of the killing operations in Sobibor, which lasted three months, at least 90,000–100,000 Jews were murdered there (see Appendix A).

  At the end of July 1942, the large-scale deportation to Sobibor ceased because of the reconstruction work on the railway between Lublin and Chelm, which meant that no trains from the General Government could reach the camp. A few transports arrived in Sobibor at the beginning of August from the ghettos that were close to the camp and located east of the section of railway that was under construction. But, for the most part, during the next two months there was a lull in operations at Sobibor.

  11

  Treblinka: July 23 to August 28, 1942

  The trains with deportees destined for the death camp at Treblinka stopped at the Treblinka village station, some 4 km from the camp. The train, which was usually composed of close to sixty freight cars, was then divided into three sections, and each section was driven separately into the camp. Like in Belzec and Sobibor, from that point the train was driven by two German railway workers. In Treblinka they were Rudolf Emmerich and Wili Klinzman. The arrival of the first deportation transport from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka station was described by a Pole, Franciszek Zabecki:

  The first transport of “deportees” left Malkinia on July 23, 1942, in the morning hours. The train announced its approach not merely with a shriek of wheels as it crossed the Bug bridge, but with a volley of rifle and machine-gun fire from the security guards. The train entered the station. It was loaded with Jews from the Warsaw ghetto. . . . Four SS men from the new camp were waiting. They had arrived earlier by car and asked us how far from Treblinka the “special train with deportees” was. They had already received word of the train’s departure from Warsaw. . . . A smaller engine was already at the station, waiting to bring a section of the freight cars into the camp. Everything was planned and prepared in advance. The train was made up of sixty closed cars, crowded with people. These included the young and elderly, men and women, children and babies. The car doors were locked from the outside and the air apertures barred with barbed wire. On the car steps on both sides of the car and on the roof, a dozen or so SS soldiers stood or lay with machine guns at the ready. It was hot, and most of the people in the freight cars were in a faint. . . . As the train approached, an evil spirit seemed to take hold of the SS men who were waiting. They drew their pistols, returned them to their holsters, and whipped them out again, as if they wanted to shoot and kill. They came near the freight cars and tried to calm the noise and weeping; then they started yelling and cursing the Jews, all the while calling to the train workers, “Tempo, fast!” Then they returned to the camp to receive the deportees.1

  Road sign to Treblinka.

  The railway at Treblinka. The camp was to the left.

  As the train neared the death camp, the engine pushing the freight cars would issue a long whistle to warn of the deportees’ approach. This was a signal for the Ukrainians to take up their guard positions around the reception area and on the roofs of the buildings overlooking it. A group of SS and Ukrainians also took up positions on the platform. As the train moved onto the spur inside the camp, the gate was closed behind it. One of the deportees described the arrival into the camp:

  The train moved slowly through a strange, sad countryside. A moment later it came to a stop. The door opened noisily. The emptiness and sadness of the sandy countryside disappeared. Within seconds a strange fear seized us all. “Get out, out!” came the familiar shouts. People began to push. . . . We held one another’s hand and jumped down into the sand. . . . Everyone went toward the wall of crowded pine trees. Suddenly I had a strange thought. Those trees aren’t growing, they’re dead. They had made a fence, a tight fence that looked like a forest, made out of trees that were cut down. I looked at the fence and saw something else—barbed wire between the branches. I thought—concentration camp. That moment we went through a wide gate in the fence; in front of us was a square. . . . Several SS men with whips jumped at us. “Fast! Fast!” they yelled, and lashed with the whips. Women to the barrack, men form up in groups of six. . . . The confusion was tremendous, difficult to describe. We ran. . . .2

  The deportees were removed from the freight cars to the platform and shunted through a gate to a fenced-in square inside the camp. As they passed the gate, they were separated: men were directed to the right, women and children to the left. A large sign proclaimed in Polish and German:

  Jews of Warsaw, Attention!

  You are in a transit camp [Durchgangslager], from which you will be sent to a labor camp [Arbeitslager]. In order to avoid epidemics, you must present your clothing and belongings for immediate disinfection. Gold, money, foreign currency, and jewelry should be deposited with the cashiers in return for a receipt. They will be returned to you later when you present the receipt. Bodily cleanliness requires that everyone bathe before continuing the journey.3

  The women and children were sent to a barrack on the left side of the square, where they undressed before entering the “showers.” Their clothing
was wrapped by them into bundles and left aside. Valuables were deposited by them with the cashier at the end of the hut. The way in which the clothing was arranged and the valuables were deposited created the illusion that, after the “shower,” each one would retrieve her valuables and receive fresh clothing. The men were held outside until the women and children had been taken to the “showers.” Several dozen men were selected for the work of cleaning the freight cars and taking care of the clothes and baggage left behind by the victims.

  The women and children were forced to run naked along the “tube”—the narrow, fenced path that led to the gas chambers. Then the men were ordered to undress, deposit their valuables, and they, too, were taken to the gas chambers.

  After the murder of the Jews who had arrived that day, those men who had been selected for various jobs were rounded up and murdered—either in the gas chambers or by shooting at the burial ditches.

  During the first weeks of extermination activity at Treblinka, the Germans succeeded in their ruse of presenting Treblinka as a transit camp. The Jews who arrived at Treblinka were misled about the true nature of the camp. David Novodvorski, from Warsaw, who was taken to Treblinka and escaped during the first week of August 1942, related, after returning to the ghetto, that when his transport had first arrived in the camp, no one was suspicious. Only after two days did he discover its true purpose.4

  During this early period, before mid-August, 5,000 to 7,000 Jews arrived in Treblinka every day. Then the situation changed, the pace of transports increased, and there were days when 10,000 to 12,000 deportees arrived, including thousands who had died en route and others in a state of exhaustion. This state of affairs disrupted the “quiet welcome” designed to deceive the deportees into believing they had arrived at a transit station and that before continuing their journey to a labor camp they must be disinfected. Blows and shooting were needed to force those still alive but exhausted to descend from the freight cars and proceed to the square and the undressing barracks. Abraham Goldfarb, who arrived at the camp on August 25, relates: