Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps Read online

  BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA

  YITZHAK ARAD

  BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA

  THE OPERATION REINHARD DEATH CAMPS

  INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Bloomington and Indianapolis

  This book is a publication of

  Indiana University Press

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  This work was made possible by a grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.

  First reprinted in paperback in 1999.

  © 1987 by Yitzhak Arad

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Arad, Yitzhak, 1926–

  Bibliography: p.

  Includes index

  1. Belzec (Poland : Concentration camp)

  2. Sobibor (Poland : Concentration camp)

  3. Treblinka (Poland : Concentration camp)

  4. World War, 1939–1945—Prisoners and prisons, German.

  5. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)

  I. Title.

  D805.P7Z727 1987 940.54'72'4304384 85-45883

  ISBN 0-253-34293-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 0-253-21305-3 (paper : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-253-34293-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-253-21305-1 (paper : alk. paper)

  12 13 14 15 13 12 11 10

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Introduction

  PART ONE THE EXTERMINATION MACHINE

  1 The “Final Solution”: From Shooting to Gas

  2 Operation Reinhard: Organization and Manpower

  3 Belzec: Construction and Experiments

  4 Construction of Sobibor

  5 Construction of Treblinka

  6 Preparing for the Deportations

  7 Expulsion from the Ghettos

  8 The Trains of Death

  9 Belzec: March 17 to June, 1942

  10 Sobibor: May to July, 1942

  11 Treblinka: July 23 to August 28, 1942

  12 Reorganization in Treblinka

  13 The Mission of Gerstein and Pfannenstiel

  14 Jewish Working Prisoners

  15 Women Prisoners

  16 Improved Extermination Techniques and Installations

  17 The Annihilation of the Jews in the General Government

  18 Deportations from Bialystok General District and Ostland

  19 Transports from Other European Countries

  20 The Extermination of Gypsies

  21 The Economic Plunder

  22 Himmler’s Visit to Sobibor and Treblinka

  23 The Erasure of the Crimes

  PART TWO LIFE IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH

  24 Portraits of the Perpetrators

  25 The Prisoners’ Daily Life

  26 The Prisoners and the Deportees

  27 Faith and Religion

  28 Diseases, Epidemics, and Suicide

  29 Social Life

  PART THREE ESCAPE AND RESISTANCE

  30 The Cognizance and Reaction of the Victims in Occupied Poland

  31 Escapes from the Trains and Spontaneous Acts of Resistance

  32 Escapes from the Camps

  33 The Underground in Treblinka

  34 The Plan for the Uprising in Treblinka

  35 August 2, 1943: The Uprising in Treblinka

  36 Pursuit and Escape from Treblinka

  37 Ideas and Organization for Resistance in Sobibor

  38 The Underground in Sobibor

  39 The Plan for the Uprising in Sobibor

  40 October 14, 1943: The Uprising in Sobibor

  41 Pursuit and Escape from Sobibor

  42 Survival among the Local Population

  43 Reports about the Death Camps in Polish Wartime Publications

  44 An Evaluation of the Uprisings and Their Results

  45 Operation Erntefest

  46 The Liquidation of the Camps and the Termination of Operation Reinhard

  Epilogue

  APPENDIX A The Deportation of the Jews from the General Government, Bialystok General District, and Ostland

  APPENDIX B The Fate of the Perpetrators of Operation Reinhard

  Bibliographic Key to the Notes

  Notes

  Index

  Preface

  Concentration camps and death camps were an integral component of Nazi Germany’s governing system and a tool for achieving its political aims. These camps were part of the so-called SS-State, headed by the Reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. The concentration camps were spread all over Nazi-occupied Europe. They served as places of detention and torture, centers of forced labor, and instruments for the physical elimination of those elements—Jews and non-Jews alike—whom Nazi Germany considered its political opponents. The death camps, all of them erected in Nazi-occupied Poland, served one purpose: the physical and total extermination of the Jewish people. The crimes, cruelties, and murders committed by Nazi Germany against the Jews reached their peak in these death camps, the last station for millions of men, women, and children whose only “guilt” was being Jewish.

  There were five death camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Auschwitz-Birkenau was, simultaneously, also a concentration camp. This book is a study of the death camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, which were established to expedite “Operation Reinhard”—the extermination of the Jews who lived in the General Government of Poland. However, in addition to the Jews of Poland, Jews from Holland, France, Greece, Yugoslavia, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and the Soviet Union were also murdered in the three camps.

  The book discusses primarily the tragic and cruel events that transpired within these camps; it relates the complete story—from the preparations for construction of the camps at the end of 1941 until their final razing in the autumn of 1943. The physical layout of the camps, the transports to the camps and the deaths they claimed, the process and technique of the extermination, the deeds of the SS men who commanded and activated the camps and of the Ukrainian guards, who made up the majority of the armed forces in the camps, are all fully described.

  Moreover, the book tells the tale of the hundreds of thousands of victims who were brought for extermination—although their stay in the camps usually lasted no more than a few hours—from the time they disembarked onto the railway platform until their corpses were removed from the gas chambers, buried in mass graves, and later cremated.

  In each camp, a few hundred Jews were removed from the transports to do the physical work involved in the extermination process, as well as some service jobs. Most survived for only a short time, from a few days to several months, and were ultimately murdered, as were those who were sent directly from the transports for extermination. The book describes the daily life and work of these Jews, thei
r Underground organization, the revolts and escapes from the camps. The number of victims in each camp, grouped by location of residence on the eve of deportation, and the timetables for the transports and murder are also included.

  Nazi criminals who served in these camps stood trial in West Germany. The trial of the SS men who had served in Belzec was held in Munich in January 1965. The primary defendant was Josef Oberhauser; there were six others. The trial of the SS men who had served in Sobibor was held in Hagen and lasted fifteen months, from September 1965 until December 1966. The leading defendant was Kurt Bolender; there were eleven others. The first Treblinka trial, at which ten of the SS men who served in the camp were brought to trial, among them Kurt Franz, the deputy commander, was held in Düsseldorf between October 1964 and August 1965. The second Treblinka trial, at which Franz Stangl, the commander of the camp, was tried, was also held in Düsseldorf, from September 1969 to December 1970. These verdicts appear as appendixes to this book.

  At the time the paperback edition of this book was issued in 1999, the story of the Operation Reinhard death camps had not yet been finished or closed. In recent years the issue had come up repeatedly in denaturalization trials held in courts in the United States and Canada, mainly against Ukrainians, the so-called Trawniki men, who served as SS guards in the camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

  This book is the fruition of extensive research by the author on the camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The primary sources were testimonies of survivors, German documents, Underground sources, testimonies by Poles and Germans, and German trial protocols. The research involved in the study of any topic concerning the Holocaust, and, above all, the extermination camps, is emotionally difficult for any historian, and especially for one who personally experienced those times. My parents, Chaya and Yisroel Moshe Rudnitski, died in Treblinka, and only luck and resourcefulness staved off the same fate from my sister Rachel and myself.

  BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA

  Introduction

  The policy of Nazi Germany toward the Jews in the years 1933–1945—which has been termed in the historiography of the period “the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe”—was overtly aimed at exterminating the Jewish people. This policy was rooted in the racist Nazi ideology espoused and promulgated by Germany during the rule of Hitler.

  In this Nazi ideology, the Aryan race is the superior race, the “master race,” and the German nation, which embodies this race, fulfills the role of “master nation”; everything beautiful and useful in the world is the product of this race. On the opposite end of the racial continuum are the Jews, the root of all evil. All that is destructive and ugly in the world was introduced by them and from within them, and they embody all that is totally negative in humanity. The Jew is a sub-human, a germ that attempts to infect the pure German blood. An unending struggle transpires between these two races, and the outcome is to determine the fate of the world and humanity, for this is an uncompromising struggle for life or death. Only the destruction of the Jewish people can ensure the victory of Nazi Germany in this battle for the future. This ideology led to the death camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

  Within this ideology, which propped up the anti-Jewish policy of Nazi Germany, and in its subsequent implementation, various stages can be discerned, but the general process constantly moved in the direction of growing extremism. From the time the Nazis came to power, on January 30, 1933, until the outbreak of World War II, their conscious policy was to force the Jews to leave Germany, to confiscate their property and award it to Aryans. In the course of implementing this policy, the Germans ostracized the Jews from German society, cut them off from the economy, rescinded their rights as citizens, and discriminated against them in all areas of life. A series of anti-Jewish laws, culminating in the “Nuremberg Laws,” which were promulgated on September 15, 1935, provided the legal basis for these anti-Jewish acts. This policy reached its peak on the night of November 9/10, 1938, Kristallnacht. On this night, the Nazis waged a pogrom on the Jews of Germany. Hundreds of synagogues, businesses, and Jewish institutions were set on fire; windows were smashed by the thousands. About one hundred Jews were killed, and thirty thousand were arrested and interned in concentration camps. In the aftermath, thousands of German and Austrian Jews left their homes in search of a refuge somewhere in the world. But the nations of the world did not open their gates to the German Jews, and many were forced to remain where they were, becoming increasingly subject to torture at the hands of the Nazis and to the ultimate fate that Hitler planned for them.

  Hitler was not satisfied with emigration, for his true aims were far more extreme. He was simply biding his time for the proper opportunity. On January 30, 1939, in a speech to the Reichstag, he announced:

  Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!

  Indeed, World War II provided Hitler with the opportunity to implement his plan. With the outbreak of war, on September 1, 1939, a new phase in the Nazi anti-Jewish policy began. The war and the resulting freedom from the constraints of peace and international obligations enabled Nazi Germany to take an extreme stand against the Jews. On September 21, 1939, three weeks after the outbreak of war with Poland, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, in charge of the Reich Security Main Office, issued to the Einsatzgruppen commanders of the security police in the occupied areas of Poland an order in which he directed the concentration of the Jews in ghettos “in cities that are railroad crossways or at least near railroad tracks.” This concentration of the Jews was, according to Heydrich, the “first condition to realizing the final aim,” which was to be kept a “total secret.” Heydrich did not clarify in this order the meaning of “the final aim,” but noted that its implementation “demanded more time.” There was no specific mention in the order of physical annihilation, but there was a clear emphasis that the concentration in the ghettos was a transitory phase toward “realizing the final aim,” which most certainly would be more extreme.

  The period between the outbreak of war and the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, was the transition from a policy of forced emigration to one of physical annihilation. At the beginning of this period, Germany occupied large sections of Poland, in which about two million Jews lived, as well as most of the western, southern, and northern European countries, in which millions more Jews lived. The Jews of Poland were subjected to pogroms, were forced to wear a yellow patch or white band, and were put to work at forced labor. Their property was confiscated and they were interned in ghettos, in which they were held under starvation conditions and in which disease and epidemics claimed thousands of victims. There was no end to the torture and persecution. Many were sent to labor and concentration camps, and, for the slightest infractions, hundreds were put to death. The Jews in the other European countries occupied by the Nazis or in satellite states were also subject to similar discrimination and persecution.

  Along with the preparations for the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941, the leaders of Nazi Germany began to devise a new policy toward the Jews. The aim was to bring the “final solution” to its last, final stage: the extermination of the entire Jewish people. It has not yet been determined whether this policy initially referred to all the Jews of Europe or at first was targeted on the Jews of the Soviet Union and, after the invasion, was enlarged to include the rest of European Jewry. As a result of this changed orientation—to destroy all the Jews in the areas of the Soviet Union that were about to be occupied—four Einsatzgruppen were formed under the command of Heydrich, to whom this mission of murder was committed. The attack on the Soviet Union therefore ushered in a new phase in the Nazi policy toward the Jews—the phase of physical annihilation—the result of which was six millio
n victims who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators throughout Europe.

  PART ONE

  THE EXTERMINATION MACHINE

  1

  The “Final Solution”: From Shooting to Gas

  The mass extermination of the Jews of occupied Europe by Nazi Germany began with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Four special SS formations called Einsatzgruppen, which were subordinate to Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), advanced with the forward units of the German army. Their specific task was to murder Jews and officials of the Communist Party and political commissars in the Red Army. With the help of local collaborators, the Einsatzgruppen rounded up the Jews in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union—men, women, children, and the elderly—drove them from their homes to locations in the vicinity of their towns and villages, and shot them dead.

  The locations selected for these killings were either natural ravines, antitank ditches, or pits specially dug for the purpose. The Jews were concentrated at assembly points and taken in groups to the killing sites. As a rule, the men were taken first, then the women, and finally the children. The victims were lined up either inside the ditch or at its edge; then they were shot. After one group had been killed, the next was brought over. In cities with a large Jewish population, the killing sometimes went on for days or even weeks.

  The commander of Einsatzkommando 3, which carried out the murder operation of Jews in Lithuania, wrote in his report:

  The implementation of such Aktionen was first of all an organizational problem. The decision to clear systematically each sub-district of Jews called for thorough preparation for each Aktion and the study of local conditions. The Jews had to be concentrated in one or more localities, and, in accordance with their numbers, a site had to be selected and pits dug. The marching distance from the concentration points to the pits averaged 4 to 5 kms. The Jews were brought to the place of execution in groups of 500, with a distance of at least 2 kms between groups. . . .1