Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps

by Yitzhak Arad

  The General Government and Bialystok General District

  The transports moved according to plan during November and early December 1942. Toward mid-December the deportation plan from the Bialystok General District, as well as from other parts of Poland, was disrupted due to a lack of rolling stock. German defeats on the Stalingrad front had necessitated a diversion of rolling stock for the military, and German railroad authorities announced a cessation of train allocations for transport of Jews between December 15, 1942, and January 15, 1943. SS Obergruppenführer Krüger, Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government, cabled Himmler on December 5, 1942:

  SS and Police chiefs are all informing me that due to transport cessation from 15.12.1942 to 15.1.1943 there is at present no possibility of transports for the purpose of evacuating Jews. This step most seriously endangers the plan for the deportation of Jews in its entirety. I entreat you to contact the central authorities of the Reich, the Wehrmacht Supreme Command (OKW), and the Transportation Ministry to obtain the placing of at least three pairs of trains at the disposal of this mission of highest importance. . . .2

  Krüger’s intercession was of little avail, and in practice no deportations were carried out from Bialystok General District to Treblinka during this period. When rolling stock was again provided and deportations from the Bialystok area were renewed, the number of cars was insufficient, and Himmler personally intervened with Dr. Theodor Ganzenmüller, Secretary of State of the German Transport Ministry. In his letter of January 23, 1943, Himmler writes:

  Now I wish to present another important question: a precondition for bringing peace and quiet to the General District of Bialystok and the Russian territories is the deportation of all those aiding the gangs or suspected of belonging to them. This also includes, over and above all else, deportation of the Jews, as well as the Jews from the West, because otherwise we will have to take into account a rise in the number of assaults from these territories as well. Here I need your help and your support. If I wish to finish things up quickly, I must have more trains for transports. I well know what dire straits the railroads are in and what demands are always being made on them. Nevertheless I am forced to appeal to you: help me and supply me the trains.

  Himmler.3

  The requested transportation was supplied as a result of the intervention, and the deportations from Bialystok General District continued.

  As with all the transports to Treblinka, the deportees were usually taken directly to the gas chambers. But at least from one of these transports a few hundred young men were selected and sent for work. From 1,600 Jews from the Grodno ghetto who arrived in Treblinka on February 14, 1943, 150 men were sent to Treblinka I labor camp. Some of them even succeeded in escaping from the camp.4

  Rumors about Treblinka and what was going on there reached the ghettos of Bialystok General District and, as a result, the deportation Aktionen became much more difficult to carry out (see chapters 30, 39). Dov Freiberg, who witnessed the arrival of these transports to Treblinka, wrote:

  There were transports, like those from the eastern areas, which were very strongly guarded by SS men and Ukrainians. In these trains there was no one car left undamaged. Each freight car looked like a battlefield and inside were more dead and wounded than living people. Some of the people were nude and white from the chlorine powder. . . . These people resisted, they refused to undress, they attacked the Germans with their fists. . . . Many were shot and many went to the gas chambers dressed. We worked late in the night to clean the area from the dead and wounded. . . .5

  The deportations from Bialystok General District to Treblinka, which started on October 15, 1942, continued until February 19, 1943. In these four months over 110,000 Jews were deported and annihilated in Treblinka, and thousands more were sent to Auschwitz. From the Bialystok ghetto 10,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka February 9–13, 1943. On February 19, 1943, at a conference held in Bialystok about the continuation of the deportations, the deputy commander of the Security Police announced that for economic reasons the Bialystok ghetto, with its 30,000 Jews, would be left intact until the end of the war. He said that it was expected that the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin would accede to this attitude of the local Security Police.6

  Nevertheless, in the summer of 1943, Himmler issued an order to Gauleiter Erich Koch, the head of the Bialystok General District, and to the local commander of the Security Police to liquidate the Bialystok ghetto and deport its inhabitants to the General Government. German civilian authorities in Bialystok, as well as the army authorities, again claimed that the Jews in Bialystok were vital to the war economy. But Himmler did not accept this argument. He ordered the immediate implementation of the deportation, and, as he no longer relied on the local German authorities, he entrusted the mission to the Operation Reinhard staff and the police forces subordinate to them. Globocnik personally came to Bialystok to coordinate the liquidation of the ghetto with the local German authorities.7

  The deportations were carried out on August 18–19, 1943. From Bialystok 7,600 Jews were sent to Treblinka. Some other transports were deported to Majdanek and Auschwitz. The final liquidation of the ghetto met with stiff resistance from the Jewish Underground, which fought back, and many Jews found their death inside the ghetto during this uprising. But the Bialystok ghetto, the last ghetto in the entire district, was finally liquidated. The total number of Jews from the General District of Bialystok who were deported and murdered in Treblinka came to about 118,000 (see Appendix A).

  Reichskommissariat Ostland

  Reichskommissariat Ostland embraced the areas of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the western parts of Belorussia, including the city of Minsk, which were occupied by the Germans after their invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The head of Ostland was the Reichskommissar, Hinrich Lohse. He was subordinate to Alfred Rosenberg, the minister of the “Eastern Occupied Territories.”

  The majority of the Jews in these territories were killed during the Aktionen of the mobile SS Einsatzgruppen which had operated there in the first months after the occupation, in the summer of 1941, and later by the civilian German administrative authorities in Ostland. The large-scale killing operations were carried out in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in the summer and autumn of 1941 and in Belorussia during 1942. The extermination actions were carried out by taking the Jews out to locations in the vicinity of the places in which they lived and shooting them there.

  After these Aktionen Jews remained only in the few ghettos that existed in the larger cities. The number of Jews who were in these ghettos at the beginning of the summer of 1943 was 72,000. They were concentrated in six ghettos, in the cities of Vilna, Kovno, Shavli, Riga, Minsk, and Lida. On June 21, 1943, Himmler issued an order to liquidate these ghettos. The able Jews who were needed for work were to be sent to concentration camps that would be erected in Ostland to service the war economy. According to Himmler’s order, the “non-essential” inhabitants of the Jewish ghettos were to be evacuated to the East. This term—“evacuation to the East”—meant that they would be sent for extermination.8 Three ghettos—Vilna, Minsk, and Lida—were liquidated, and the other three ghettos were turned into concentration camps. The “non-essential” Jews from these ghettos were sent to Sobibor.

  Regarding the deportation of 2,700 Jews from Lida to Sobibor, a German engineer, Otto Weisbecker, who was a Bauführer in the Todt Organization, testified at the Sobibor trial:

  As a building engineer I came to Lida and worked there on the railways. . . . In the ghetto, which was subordinated to the Gebietskommissar [district commissar], were 1,400 Jews. At the building site that I headed, 1,300 Jews and their families, who were accommodated in a camp, were engaged. . . . Approximately in the middle of 1943, the Security Police arrived in Lida. . . . All the Jews were then subordinated to the Security Police. One day, these Jews from the ghetto—men, women, and children, were loaded onto freight cars and under the direction of Haupttruppführer Bache from Or
ganization Todt they were transferred to Sobibor. The next day I received an order from the head of my department, the architect Hans W., to transfer our Jews to Lublin for a working mission. The Jews were loaded on the train that day, sixty people to a freight car. I was the commander of the transport, and I had at my disposal a police sergeant and nineteen Polish policemen. . . . In spite of the security measures, between twenty and twenty-five Jews escaped on the way. . . . A sentry in Sobibor told me that the transport would be liquidated in the morning. Next morning I came into the camp and was brought to the commander, who was in the breakfast barrack. . . . On the wall of this barrack was a big plan of the camp. I could see on it that the 1,400 Jews that Bache had brought the day before could not possibly be accommodated in the existing barracks. In reference to my question to the camp commander, where can he accommodate the Jews I had brought, he told me that of the 1,400 Jews of yesterday’s transport, nobody remained.9

  On the eve of the liquidation of the Minsk ghetto, in the summer of 1943, there were 6,000 to 8,000 Jews out of the 75,000 who had lived there at the beginning of the German occupation at the end of June 1941. About 500 of them, skilled workers, were kept in the SS labor camp on Shiroka Street, where an additional 100 Jewish prisoners of war from the Soviet army were employed. Before the deportation more Jews were brought from the ghetto to the Shiroka Street labor camp.

  On September 18, 1943, a transport with 2,000 Jews let Minsk for Sobibor. First Lieutenant Alexander (Sasha) Pechersky, a prisoner of war who was with this transport, wrote:

  On September 18, all the Jews were ordered to assemble in the courtyard. It was four o’clock in the morning, still dark. We stood in a line to get the 300 grams of bread we received for the journey. The courtyard was full of people, but no noise could be heard. Scared children kept close to their mothers. Commander Wat announced to us: “Soon you will be taken to the station. You are going to Germany; there you will work. Hitler has made it possible to grant life to each Jew who will work honestly. You are going with your families.” The women and children were taken to the station in trucks, the men by foot. . . . We were pushed—seventy people in a freight car. . . . On the fifth day of traveling, we arrived in the evening at an isolated station. A white sign bore the name: Sobibor. . . . We were kept in the closed freight cars overnight. On September 23, in the morning, a locomotive pushed the train into the camp. . . . Tired and hungry we left the cars. Oberscharführer Gomerski shouted: “Cabinetmakers and carpenters without families, forward.” Eighty men, most of them war prisoners, reported. We were rushed into a fenced area inside a barrack. . . . A Jew from the camp who returned from some work approached us. During the conversation I noticed grey smoke rising in the northwest direction and a sharp smell of burning hovering in the air. I asked: “What is burning there?” “They are burning the bodies of your friends who arrived with you,” the Jew answered. I was shocked. . . .10

  The Jews from Minsk, who had witnessed mass extermination in their ghetto, as tens of thousands of them were shot in the vicinity of the city from the beginning of German rule, knew nothing about the existence of death camps. The Minsk ghetto was a remote and isolated ghetto. As part of the Soviet Union, the Jews of Minsk had almost no connections with the Jews in the ghettos of Poland, and no messengers with information arrived there, as was the case among the ghettos in Poland itself. The very existence of the death camps and of Sobibor was a secret to them. They came to Sobibor and filed into the gas chambers without knowing what fate awaited them.11

  There is no clear evidence whether there were more transports from Minsk that reached Sobibor. Although Pechersky mentions in his diary transports that arrived in Sobibor on September 27 and October 11, 1943, he does not mention from where the victims came.12 It is, however, quite plausible that these transports indeed came from Minsk. We may estimate that about 6,000 to 8,000 Jews from the ghetto of Minsk, brought in three or four transports, were murdered in Sobibor.

  The liquidation of the Vilna ghetto took place on September 23–24, 1943. In the ghetto at that time were about 11,000 to 12,000 inhabitants left from the 57,000 Jews who had been in Vilna at the beginning of the German occupation. Most of these Jews were shot in Ponar, near Vilna, in the months of July through November, 1941. During the final liquidation, all the Jews were taken outside the ghetto to Rossa Square; there the men were separated from the women and children. The men and women who were able to work were selected and sent to concentration camps—men to Estonia and women to Latvia. About 4,300 to 5,000 elderly women and children were sent to Sobibor in the last days of September 1943.13

  There were no survivors from this transport, so no direct testimony exists about their arrival in Sobibor. Leon Feldhendler, who escaped from Sobibor, mentions in his testimony “transports which arrived from Minsk and Vilna.”14 The assumption that the last Vilna Jews were sent to Sobibor is also based on the fact that all the other Jews who were deported from Ostland to the General Government, i.e., those from Lida and Minsk, reached Sobibor. They definitely did not reach any other death camp. The lists of transports that arrived in Auschwitz and Majdanek exist, and this transport is not mentioned in either. As Belzec and Treblinka were no longer in operation at that time, this leaves Sobibor as the only camp where the transport from Vilna could have been brought and annihilated without a trace. The number of Jews from Ostland who were annihilated in Sobibor in the second half of September 1943 was about 13,700.

  19

  Transports from Other

  European Countries

  Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were established for the implementation of Operation Reinhard, that is, for the purpose of exterminating the Jews of the General Government in Poland. There were, however, Jews from other European countries who were also sent to these camps for extermination—Jews from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Holland, France, Greece, the Soviet Union (Ostland), and Yugoslavia.

  The deception perpetrated on these Jews regarding their destination and the fate awaiting them there was complete. They were convinced they were traveling to labor camps or would be employed on agricultural farms in the East. Part of these transports were in passenger cars, and, in some cases, Jews even had to buy tickets with their own money. During the journey the conductors would occasionally check the tickets and tear off the stubs. When the train stopped at way stations, the Jewish passengers were occasionally permitted to walk around the platform and buy drinks at food stands. Franciszek Zabecki writes that he witnessed how a Jew riding in one of these trains got off at a station to go to a food stand and while he was still standing on the platform the transport started off without him. He turned to the railroad officials at the station, presented his ticket, and asked the location of the industrial plants to which the others were being taken, so that he might join them.1

  Germany and Austria

  Tens of thousands of Jews from Germany and Austria were deported to the Lublin district at the end of 1939/beginning of 1940, and, on a smaller scale, in the years following. After the Wannsee Conference, Eichmann’s office, early in March 1942, ordered that most of the deportation trains from the Third Reich be rerouted from the ghettos of Minsk and Riga in Ostland to ghettos and camps in the Lublin district.2 This change coincided with the opening of the death camp of Belzec in mid-March 1942, and the building of Sobibor and Treblinka. Tens of thousands of Jews from the Third Reich arrived in the Lublin district from April 1942, and from there they were later sent to the death camps of Operation Reinhard.

  On March 27, Goebbels wrote in his diary about these deportations: “The ghettos which 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.”3

  According to the evidence given at the Sobibor/Bolender trial, at least 10,000 Jews from Germany and Austria found their death in Sobibor in the months of April, May, and June, 1942.4 Some of the transports were sent directly to the death camp. A report dated June 2
0, 1942, from the commander of the Nr. 152 police precinct of Vienna, describes the deportation of a transport of Austrian Jews directly to Sobibor:

  The transport commando consisted of Lieutenant Fischman as commander, two sergeants and thirteen policemen of the “First Police Reserve Company East. . . .” The embarkation of the Jews to the freight cars of the allocated “Special Train” at the station of Aspang started at 12:00 hours under the command of SS Hauptsturmführer Brunner and SS Hauptscharführer Girzik from the [local] “Main Office for the Deportation of Jews” and went smoothly.

  At that time the transport commando assumed the guard duty. All together, 1,000 Jews were deported. . . .

  The DA-38 train left Vienna on June 14, 1942, at 19:08 and crossed Brno, Neisse, Oppeln, Czestochowa, Kielce, Radom, Deblin, Lublin, Chelm to Sobibor and not, as expected, to Izbica. The arrival in Sobibor was on June 17, 1942, at 8:15. At the station of Lublin, where we arrived on June 16, 1942, at 19:00 hours, SS Obersturmführer Pohl was waiting, and he ordered that fifty-one able Jews between the ages of fifteen and fifty disembark and be brought to a labor camp. . . . At that time he gave an order that the remaining 949 Jews were to be taken to Sobibor. The list [of the people], three freight cars [with food], and 100,000 zloty were handed over to the SS Obersturmführer Pohl in Lublin. At 23:00 we left Lublin for Sobibor. In the Jewish camp of Trawniki, 30 km before Lublin, we handed over the three freight cars with food and luggage to SS Scharführer Mayer-hofer.