Holocaust Remembrance
Documenting the Mass Murder of Poland’s Jewish Population
During the summer of 1941, when victory over the Soviet Union seemed imminent, Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy made the decision to accelerate their “final solution” and exterminate all the Jews in the territories under their control, starting with those living in their General Government administrative area (Poland). This decision set into motion a sinister operation that spawned three death camps located in eastern Poland: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Unlike the infamous Auschwitz, which existed jointly as an extermination center and source of slave labor for the German war industry, these camps were small, hidden, and existed solely for the purpose of mass murder. Due to these factors, there were very few survivors as most victims were murdered within hours of arriving at the death camps. There were only two survivors of Belzec and a few handfuls from Treblinka and Sobibor out of an estimated 1.7 million victims who were murdered in the Operation Reinhard camps.[1]
In an effort to hide their crimes after the death camps had completed their murderous function the SS destroyed all structures, leveled the ground, and planted it over with trees. Orders given for the construction and operation of the camps were issued verbally and the SS destroyed most records relating to Operation Reinhard as the Soviets fought their way into Berlin in 1945. Thus, very few official Nazi records regarding the camps exist today. As a case in point, among the three million captured Nazi documents only three mention the Sobibor death camp.[2] Consequently what is known about Operation Reinhard was largely extrapolated from the testimony of survivors, local Polish witnesses, and the confessions of the perpetrators themselves. The historical literature produced regarding Operation Reinhard can be divided into two main groups: firstly, historical monographs on the overall operation, individual death camps, and biographical works on the perpetrators, and secondly the memoirs of survivors and other eyewitnesses, written in some cases before the end of the war. In this article we examine some of the principal historical works on the topic as well as various survivor memoirs and testimonials.
Historical Documentation
The most comprehensive and premier work on Operation Reinhard is Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad’s Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (1987). In it he chronicled the history of the operation from start to finish beginning with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the “Holocaust by bullets” perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen in the wake of Hitler’s advancing legions. He pointed out that the various difficulties and inefficiency of murdering people near their places of residence, as well as the negative psychological effects on those tasked with doing the killing, prompted Nazi leaders to look for more “efficient” ways of extermination. Operation Reinhard, he asserted, was the “solution” to these “problems.” Arad drew on the available official documents, perpetrator confessions, and survivor memoirs to reconstruct the timeline of events and expansion of the murder to Jews beyond the boundaries of the General Government.
While Arad’s book continues to be the seminal work on Operation Reinhard, a few excellent volumes have been produced on the individual camps themselves and events that occurred in them. Most of these deal with the Sobibor death camp and revolt for the simple reason that there were more Sobibor survivors, and therefore more eyewitnesses. Of the three Operation Reinhard death camps Sobibor was the smallest and the site of a the most successful revolt and mass escape from a Nazi death camp. Historian Richard Rashke’s Escape from Sobibor (1982) is the most well-known work on Sobibor and the subject of a highly acclaimed 1987 film by the same name that aired in England and on CBS in the United States. Over a period of several years Rashke spent considerable time interviewing every living Sobibor survivor and recounted the story of Sobibor through the eyes of those who lived it. The work includes a synopsis of the history of the Operation Reinhard death camps and then focuses on the experiences of Jewish victims under the Nazi regime, the horrors of the camp, the revolt, survival outside the camp, and the life of survivors after the war.
In contrast with Rashke who concentrated on the experience of Sobibor’s victims, Dutch-Jewish historian, and Holocaust survivor Jules Schelvis, who lost his wife and most of his family at Sobibor, produced a thorough history of the death camp. Upon arrival at Sobibor Schelvis was separated from his family and selected for work as a slave laborer, a rare exception in the Operation Reinhard death camps. He was shipped off and spent the rest of the war in various concentration camps in Poland and Germany. In his work Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp he also drew heavily upon numerous sources including many of the same survivor memoirs that were used by Rashke, as well as the confessions of SS perpetrators and surviving official records such as German Reichsbahn timetables for trains running between major cities and the camp. Using this information, he reconstructed a very accurate picture of the evolution of the death camp and its day-to-day operations. Also included are brief biographical sketches of Sobibor survivors and perpetrators.
While various works were written about Sobibor, very few were produced about Treblinka. There are the memoirs and testimony of the survivors of the death camp that are extremely detailed, however the most complete history of Treblinka is found in Arad’s Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. French-Jewish author, Jean François Steiner, also contributed to Treblinka historiography with one of the most acclaimed and controversial works on the death camp. His book, Treblinka (1967), was originally published in 1966 as a history of the camp. In it, Steiner shocked academics and historians with accusations that Jewish prisoners in the death camp helped the Nazis perpetrate the Holocaust by performing many of the tasks necessary for the destruction of their own people. Due to this criticism, he re-published his work as a historical novel. Despite this the book is a very accurate portrayal of life in Treblinka as experienced by those who lived it, and is based almost entirely on the eyewitness testimony of Treblinka survivors and SS perpetrators.
If there are few works on Treblinka, there are almost none on Belzec. Because there were only two survivors of the death camp, and the fact that the camp commandant Christian Wirth along with other perpetrators who may have provided testimony were killed by Italian partisans before the end of the war, historians have had to turn to other sources. These include the testimony of the Polish laborers who constructed the barracks, gas chambers, and other structures at Belzec. The single most detailed monograph on the death camp, Belzec: Stepping Stone to Genocide; Hitler's Answer to the Jewish Question (2008), was written by British Holocaust historian Robin O’Neil. In the work he cited the testimony of Polish workers and civilians living near the camp, perpetrator confessions, as well as the testimony of survivor Rudolf Reder, along with numerous other secondary sources to piece together the hell that was Belzec. Next to Treblinka and Sobibor comparatively little was known about Belzec. This is reflected in the fact that for decades there was no single work produced about the death camp other than the memoirs of survivor Rudolf Reder.
Eyewitness Testimony
One of the most valuable primary sources on Belzec and the Operation Reinhard deportations of Jews to death camps is the testimony of Jan Karski. Karski, an operative in the Polish resistance movement, visited the Warsaw Ghetto and documented the Nazi atrocities against the Jews there as well as the deportations that were underway to Treblinka. Members of the Jewish resistance informed him that at Treblinka all of the Jews were gassed upon arrival; they learned this from two men who had escaped from Treblinka and made their way back to the ghetto.[3] Based on the calculations of the Jewish resistance leaders hundreds of thousands had already been murdered.[4] Disguised as an Estonian guard Karski also witnessed the brutal deportation of 4,600 Jews to Belzec from a transit camp located at Izbica Lubelska, Poland.[5] He later made his way to England where he reported his findings in 1942 to the Polish government in exile as well as the American and British governments. Soon after he published his testimony in Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World (1944).
Like the testimony of Karski, the record left by eyewitnesses of the inner-workings of the Operation Reinhard death camps are very powerful - whether they are the confessions of the perpetrators or the survivors themselves. Perhaps the most disturbing and educational of these is found in Holocaust historian Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (1974). It is a biographical work on Franz Stangl, the first SS commandant of Sobibor and later of Treblinka.
Sereny spent several months interviewing Stangl at the Dusseldorf Prison where he was serving a life sentence after being convicted in 1970 of 900,000 counts of murder. During the interviews Stangl described in detail how the entire operation was conducted as well as the murder process within the individual camps. Initially, he maintained his stance that he was innocent simply because he was acting on orders, however as the interviews progressed it was obvious that he began to seriously reflect on his actions and role in the Holocaust. In Sereny’s final interview with Stangl he acknowledged his guilt in perpetrating mass murder for the first and last time:
He gripped the table with both hands as if he was holding on to it. “But I was there,” he said then, in a curiously dry and tired tone of resignation. These few sentences had taken almost half an hour to pronounce. “So yes,” he said finally, very quietly, “in reality I share the guilt.… Because my guilt … my guilt … only now in these talks … now that I have talked about it all for the first time.…” He stopped. He had pronounced the words “my guilt:” but more than the words, the finality of it was in the sagging of his body, and on his face.[6]
Stangl died of a heart attack nineteen hours after the conclusion of this interview.[7] His confessions are some of the most valuable as they not only expose the inner workings of the camps from the perspective of the perpetrators but also the psychology and mindset of the everyday men who became mass murderers.
The most powerful and riveting of all the literature on Operation Reinhard are the testimonies of the survivors themselves. Most survivor memoirs are those of the Jews who survived the Sobibor and Treblinka revolts or who managed to survive the war in the various SS run slave labor concentration camps within the General Government jurisdiction such as Majdanek. Jankeil Wiernik’s memoir, A Year in Treblinka, originally published in 1944 by the Polish-Jewish underground network in Poland after his escape from Treblinka is not only a primary source document, but the most thorough first-person description of the atrocities suffered by Jewish victims there.[8] 2,000 copies were produced in short booklet form and distributed all over Europe. They were translated into both English and Yiddish in New York by the American Representation of the General Jewish Workers Union of Poland and later into Hebrew.[9]
Wiernik arrived at Treblinka after being snatched up in an August 1942 SS raid in the Warsaw Ghetto and deported to the death camp. In the memoir he tells in excruciating detail the brutal treatment that Jews received during the deportation process and the suffering of people packed into the cattle cars in the summer heat without any water. Upon arrival at the camp, he was forced to work in the Jewish prisoner commando responsible for disposing of corpses. Later, after they discovered Wiernik was a master carpenter, the SS guards used him to build and maintain camp structures and procure lumber that fueled the massive fires used to cremate the remains of those murdered in Treblinka’s gas chambers. Having gained the confidence of the SS, Wiernik was able to move freely throughout the death camp and became a key figure in the resistance and eventual revolt in which the camp was effectively put out of commission. He was one of only a few to survive after the escape and went on to testify in various trials of Nazi war criminals. Wiernik fully recognized the need for the few survivors to tell the world what happened at Treblinka, which he explained in the introduction of his memoir:
The load is wearisome, very wearisome, but I must carry it for the time being. I want to and must carry it. I, who saw the doom of three generations, must keep on living for the sake of the future. The world must be told of the infamy of those barbarians, so that centuries and generations to come can execrate them. And, it is I who shall cause it to happen. No imagination, no matter how daring, could possibly conceive of anything like that which I have seen and lived through. Nor could any pen, no matter how facile, describe it properly.[10]
In spite of the emotional pain that it caused him Jankiel Wiernik spent the rest of his life speaking and sharing his experience in memory of the victims who died. His book and subsequent trial testimony have become the most widely cited survivor memoirs about Treblinka.
The video linked above is footage of the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial and includes Jankiel Wiernk’s eyewitness testimony which begins at the 6:15 mark. Using his unique knowledge of both the killing and living areas of Treblinka Wiernik created the first drawlings of the death camp layout. He later created an architect’s scale model of the Treblinka, images of which are shown in the trial footage. Also included in the hour-long video is the testimony of other Treblinka survivors.
Another equally powerful and poignant work is that of Rudolf Reder. Reder was one of only two Jewish victims to enter the Belzec death camp and survive – and the only one who lived long enough to tell about it after the war. The other Belzec survivor, Chaim Hirszman, was murdered shortly after the war in 1946 by anti-Semitic Polish partisans.[11] During the short existence of Belzec an estimated 600,000 people were slaughtered at what became the prototype for the other Operation Reinhard death camps.[12] Before the war Reder lived as a young man for a few years in the United States and then returned to Lvov in his native Poland where he started a soap factory. His wife and two children were first deported to Belzec where they were murdered, and he soon followed in a subsequent transport.
The book I Survived a Secret Nazi Extermination Camp is an English translation of Reder’s 1946 memoir Belzec and testimony in the 1960 Belzec trial of SS perpetrators. In his memoir he details the terrifying killing process which he was able to observe up close. Initially, like Wiernik, Reder was forced to assist in disposing of the corpses of victims. However, after the Germans learned that he spoke good German and was a good mechanic, he was kept busy in the camp maintaining machines, including the gas vehicle engine used to pump carbon monoxide into the gas chamber. Reder made his escape when he was taken with several SS men to town to get a load sheet metal and the man left to guard him fell asleep.[13] He survived the rest of the war in hiding with a Polish woman who had been his housekeeper. Reder’s testimony is unique in that unlike other Operation Reinhard death camp survivors he had very close access to the gas chambers and was able to examine the gas engine used to asphyxiate victims. In the camps most prisoners, aside from those who handled corpses, were not allowed to see the area where the murders took place much less examine the machinery used to kill. Prisoners forced to participate in the killing process were periodically murdered and replaced with people from new transports.
The entire operation was a top-secret effort with all death camp guards sworn to secrecy on pain of capital punishment.[14] Through these and other eyewitness accounts one can piece together a very accurate depiction of the conditions inside of the camps for the few Jews who were kept alive. By combining them with other surviving records historians have pieced together the sinister events that unfolded in Eastern Poland that were never intended to become known to the outside world. The evidence is clear and overwhelming.
May the world never forget.
End Notes
[1] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition, 2008), Kindle Location 5413.
[2] Richard Rashke, Escape from Sobibor: Revised and Updated Edition (Delphinium Books. Kindle Edition, 2012), i.
[3] Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World (Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2013), 442.
[4] Ibid. 2.
[5] Ibid. 379.
[6] Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, 1983), 364.
[7] Ibid. 365.
[8] Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Kindle Locations 5217-5220.
[9] Jankiel Wiernik, A Year in Treblinka (Normanby Press. Kindle Edition, 2014), Kindle Locations 43-48.
[10] Ibid. Kindle Locations 64-74.
[11] Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Kindle Locations 3705-3707.
[12] Robin O'Neil, Belzec: Stepping Stone to Genocide; Hitler's Answer to the Jewish Question (JewishGen, 2008), 2, accessed April 14, 2018, https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/belzec1/belzec1.html.
[13] Rudolf Reder and Mark Forstater, I Survived a Secret Nazi Extermination Camp (London: Psychology News Press, 2013), 38-39.
[14] Shoah, dir. Claude Lanzmann (France: Parafrance, 1985), DVD.