Trawniki concentration camp#History of Trawniki

The Nazi camp at Trawniki was first established in July 1941 to hold prisoners of war captured in Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The new barracks behind the barbed-wire fence were erected by the prisoners themselves. In 1942 the camp was enlarged to include the SS-Arbeitslager meant for the Polish Jews from across General Government. Within a year, under the management of Gauleiter Odilo Globocnik, the camp included a number of forced labour workshops such as the fur processing plant (Pelzverarbeitungswerk), the brush factory (Bürstenfabrik), the bristles finishing (Borstenzurichterei), and the new branch of Das Torfwerk in Dorohucza.{{cite web |url=http://www.trawniki.hg.pl/traw/zydzi.html |title=Żydzi w Trawnikach |trans-title=The Jews of Trawniki village |publisher=Trawniki official website |work=The camp history |access-date=July 12, 2014 |author=Mgr Stanisław Jabłoński (1927–2002) |language=pl}}{{cite web |url=http://www.trawniki.hg.pl/traw/uciecz.html |title=Ucieczki z obozu |trans-title=Escapes from the concentration camp |publisher=Trawniki official website |work=The camp history |access-date=July 12, 2014 |author=Mgr Stanisław Jabłoński (1927–2002) |language=pl}}

The Jews who worked there from June 1942 to May 1944 as slave labour for the German war effort were brought in from the Warsaw Ghetto as well as selected transit ghettos across Europe (Germany, Austria, Slovakia) under Operation Reinhard, and from September 1943 as part of the Majdanek concentration camp system of subcamps such as the Poniatowa concentration camp and several others.{{cite web | url=http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007397 | title=Trawniki | publisher=United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | author=Holocaust Encyclopedia | access-date=July 12, 2014 | format=permission granted to be reused, in whole or in part, on Wikipedia; OTRS ticket no. 2007071910012533 | quote=Text from USHMM has been released under the GFDL.}}

File:Karl Streibel KL Trawniki.jpgs at the camp training plaza (some still wearing their Soviet Budenovkas), inspected by Karl Streibel (centre)]]

{{see also|Trawniki men}}

From September 1941 until July 1944, the facility served as the full-fledged training base with dining rooms and sleeping quarters for the new Schutzmannschaften recruited from POW camps for service with Nazi Germany in the General Government territory. Karl Streibel, the camp commander, and his officers used to induce Ukrainian, Latvian and Lithuanian men already familiar with firearms to take the initiative of their own free will.{{sfn|Browning|1998|p=52}} The total of 5,082 men were prepared at Trawniki for duty in German Sonderdienst battalions before the end of 1944 – across from the forlorn Jewish camp separated by an inner fence.{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=M7KbsHLnbwgC&q=Hamburg%2C++Karl++Streibel&pg=PA331 | title=Police Auxiliaries for Operation Reinhard by Peter R. Black | publisher=Enigma Books | work=Secret Intelligence and the Holocaust | year=2006 | access-date=July 12, 2014 | editor=David Bankir | pages=331–348 | isbn=192963160X | format=Google Books}}{{rp|366}}

Although the majority of Trawniki men (or Hiwis) came from among the willing prisoners of war of Ukrainian ethnicity,{{cite book |author=Markus Eikel |chapter=The local administration under German occupation in central and eastern Ukraine, 1941–1944 |at=110–122 in PDF |title=The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives |quote=Ukraine differs from other parts of the Nazi-occupied eastern territories because the local administrators were able to form the Ukrainian Hilfsverwaltung in support of the extermination policies in 1941 and 1942, providing assistance for the deportations to camps in 1942 and 1943. |publisher=Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum |year=2013 |url=http://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20130500-holocaust-in-ukraine.pdf}} there were also Volksdeutsche from Eastern Europe among them, valued because of their ability to speak Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and other languages of the occupied territories.Gregory Procknow, [https://books.google.com/books?id=iVnCbDAKTe4C&dq=Treblinka+guards+were+Volksdeutsche&pg=PA35 Recruiting and Training Genocidal Soldiers], Francis & Bernard Publishing, 2011, {{ISBN|0986837407}} (page 35).[https://archive.org/details/belzecsobibortre00yitz/page/21 Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps] by Yitzhak Arad, Indiana University Press, 1987, {{ISBN|0253342937}} (page 21) They became the only squad commanders. Trawniki men took major part in Operation Reinhard, the Nazi plan to exterminate Polish and foreign Jews. They served at extermination camps, and played an important role in the annihilation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (see the Stroop Report) and the Białystok Ghetto Uprising among other ghetto insurgencies.Arad, Yitzak (1987). Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps by Yitzhak Arad, Indiana University Press, {{ISBN|0253342937}}, page 22.Sergei Kudryashov, "Ordinary Collaborators: The Case of the Travniki Guards" (in) Russia War, Peace and Diplomacy Essays in Honour of John Erickson edited by Mark and Ljubica Erickson, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004; pages 226–227 & 234-235.

{{main|Operation Harvest Festival}}

{{multiple image | direction = vertical | width = 220

| image1 =

| caption1 = One of many mass graves of the German Operation Harvest Festival, 1943

| image2 = General Government camps of Lublin Reservation.png

| caption2 = Majdanek subcamps on the map of General Government territory of occupied Poland with Zakopane at Kreis Neumarkt am Dohnst (extreme southwest) and Trawniki in the centre }}

Towards the end of October, the entire slave-labour workforce of KL Lublin/Majdanek including Jewish prisoners of the Trawniki concentration camp were ordered to begin the construction of trenches that would become mass graves. Although the trenches were supposedly for defense against air raids, and their zigzag shape granted some plausibility to this lie, the prisoners guessed their true purpose.{{cite book |last=Browning |first=Christopher R. |author-link=Christopher Browning |publisher=HarperCollins|location=New York |title=Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland |orig-year=1992 |year=2017 |isbn=978-0-06-230303-5}}^:232{{cite book |last1=Silberklang |first1=David |title=Gates of Tears: The Holocaust in the Lublin District |date=2013 |publisher=Yad Vashem |location=Jerusalem |isbn=978-965-308-464-3 |language=en|title-link=Gates of Tears: the Holocaust in the Lublin District }}^:403–404{{cite book |last1=Mędykowski |first1=Witold Wojciech |title=Macht Arbeit Frei?: German Economic Policy and Forced Labor of Jews in the General Government, 1939–1943 |date=2018 |publisher=Academic Studies Press |location=Boston |isbn=9781618115966 |doi=10.2307/j.ctv75d8v5.13 |jstor=j.ctv75d8v5.13 }}^:285–286 The massacres, later assumed to have been revenge for German defeat at Stalingrad, were set by Christian Wirth for November 3, 1943, under the codename Operation Harvest Festival,{{cite web |url=http://history1900s.about.com/cs/persecution/a/erntefest.htm |title=Aktion Erntefest |publisher=About.com Education |work=20th Century History |access-date=July 15, 2014 |author=Jennifer Rosenberg |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161227225342/http://history1900s.about.com/cs/persecution/a/erntefest.htm |archive-date=December 27, 2016 }} simultaneously at Majdanek, Trawniki, Poniatowa, Budzyn, Kraśnik, Puławy and Lipowa subcamps.{{cite web |url=http://www.deathcamps.org/occupation/erntefest.html |title=Erntefest |publisher=ARC |work=Occupation of the East |year=2004 | access-date=July 14, 2014 |author=ARC}} The bodies of Jews shot in the pits by Trawniki men aided by Battalion 101 were later incinerated by a Sonderkommando from Milejów, who were executed on site upon the completion of their task by the end of 1943.

Operation Harvest Festival, with approximately 43,000 victims, was the single largest German massacre of Jews in the entire war. It surpassed the notorious massacre of more than 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar outside Kiev by 10,000 victims.{{sfn|Browning|1998|pp=135-136}} The Trawniki training camp was dismantled in July 1944 because of the approaching front line. The last 1,000 Hiwis forming the SS Battalion Streibel led by Karl Streibel himself,{{cite web | url=http://www.sopos.org/aufsaetze/4bdfd55e42f57/1.phtml | title=Der Alibiprozeß | publisher=Ossietzky 9/2010 | work=Den Aufsatz kommentieren | year=2010 | access-date=July 12, 2014 | author=Ralph Hartmann | url-status=dead | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131202222254/http://www.sopos.org/aufsaetze/4bdfd55e42f57/1.phtml | archive-date=December 2, 2013 }} were transported west to work at the still functioning death camps. The Soviets entered the completely empty facility on July 23, 1944. After the war, they captured and prosecuted hundreds, possibly as many as one thousand Hiwis who returned home to USSR. Most were sentenced to Gulags, and released under the Khrushchev amnesty of 1955.{{cite web | url=http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007397 | title=Trawniki | publisher=USHMM | author=Holocaust Encyclopedia | access-date=July 12, 2014 | format=ibidem}}

The number of Hiwis tried in the West was very small by comparison. Six defendants were acquitted on all charges and set free by a West German court in Hamburg in 1976 including commandant Streibel.{{cite encyclopedia | url=http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007394 | title=Trawniki: Chronology | publisher=United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC | encyclopedia=Holocaust Encyclopedia | date=May 11, 2012 | access-date=July 12, 2014 | author=USHMM}} The Trawniki men apprehended in Soviet Union were charged with treason (not the shootings) and therefore were guilty of enlistment from the start of judicial proceedings.{{cite web |url=http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-very-ordinary-henchman-demjanjuk-trial-to-break-legal-ground-in-germany-a-635526-2.html |title=A Very Ordinary Henchman |publisher=Spiegel International |work=Germany > The Holocaust |date=July 10, 2009 |access-date=July 12, 2014 |author=Georg Bönisch, Jan Friedmann and Cordula Meyer}} In the U.S. some 16 former Hiwi guards were denaturalized, some of whom were very old.

In January 1943 the SS Germanische Leitstelle in occupied Zakopane in the heartland of the Tatra mountains embarked on a recruitment drive with an idea of forming a brand new Waffen-SS highlander division. Some 200 young Goralenvolk signed up, while offered unlimited supply of alcohol. They boarded a passenger train to Trawniki, but most left the train in Maków Podhalański once already sober. Only twelve men arrived in Trawniki. At the first opportunity they got into a major fistfight with the Ukrainians, causing havoc. They were arrested and sent away. The whole idea was abandoned as impossible by SS-Obergruppenführer Krüger in occupied Kraków by an official letter of April 5, 1943.{{cite web |title=Jak zrobić z górali esesmanów? Legion Góralski Waffen SS |trans-title=How to make highlanders into SS men. The story of Goralenvolk Legion |publisher=Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak sp. z o.o. |work=Ciekawostki historyczne |author=Rafał Kuzak |date=12 September 2012 |url=http://ciekawostkihistoryczne.pl/2012/09/12/jak-zrobic-z-gorali-esesmanow-legion-goralski-waffen-ss/ |at=[http://ciekawostkihistoryczne.pl/2012/09/12/jak-zrobic-z-gorali-esesmanow-legion-goralski-waffen-ss/2/ (page two)]}} The failure probably contributed to his dismissal on November 9, 1943, by Governor General Hans Frank.{{cite journal |last=Thompson |first=Larry V. |year=1967 |title=Nazi Administrative Conflict. The Struggle for Executive Power in the General Government of Poland 1939–1943 |journal=Dissertation |publisher=University of Wisconsin |oclc=3417584 |page=260}} Krüger committed suicide in upper Austria two years later.{{cite book |last=Lester |first=David |title=Suicide and the Holocaust |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=R1nkj-xSzYgC&pg=PA11 |access-date=March 3, 2016 |year=2005 |publisher=Nova Publishers |isbn=978-1-59454-427-9 |chapter=Who Committed Suicide? |pages=11–12}}

{{Reflist}}

• {{citation | url=http://hampshirehigh.com/exchange2012/docs/BROWNING-Ordinary%20Men.%20Reserve%20Police%20Battalion%20101%20and%20the%20Final%20Solution%20in%20Poland%20(1992).pdf | last=Browning | first=Christopher R. | author-link=Christopher Browning | orig-year=1992 |year=1998 | title=Arrival in Poland | publisher=Penguin Books | work=Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland | access-date=July 12, 2014 | pages=1–298 | format=PDF file, direct download 7.91 MB complete |archive-date=19 October 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131019043400/http://hampshirehigh.com/exchange2012/docs/BROWNING-Ordinary%20Men.%20Reserve%20Police%20Battalion%20101%20and%20the%20Final%20Solution%20in%20Poland%20(1992).pdf}}
• Kudryashov, Sergei, "Ordinary Collaborators: The Case of the Travniki Guards," in Mark and Ljubica Erickson (eds), Russia War, Peace and Diplomacy Essays in Honour of John Erickson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), 226–239.
• {{cite journal |last= Steinhart |first= Eric C. |title= The Chameleon of Trawniki: Jack Reimer, Soviet Volksdeutsche, and the Holocaust |pages= 239–262 |journal=Holocaust and Genocide Studies |volume= 23 |number= 2 |year= 2009 |doi= 10.1093/hgs/dcp032 |via= Project MUSE 90 |url= http://muse.jhu.edu/article/315456 |access-date=31 January 2021 |ref=none}} [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/holocaust_and_genocide_studies/v023/23.2.steinhart.htm Project MUSE 90 (abstract; paid access)]
• Witold Mędykowski, "Obóz pracy dla Żydów w Trawnikach," ''Wojciech Lenarczyk, Dariusz Libionka (eds.), Erntefest 3–4 listopada 1943. Zapomniany epizod Zagłady" (Lublin: Państwowe Muzeum na Majdanku, 2009), 183–210. {{ISBN|9788392518754}}.
• {{cite book | url=http://www.polacyizydzi.pl/dam-im-imie-na-wieki.pdf |title=Treblinka. Załoga obozu |publisher=Drohiczyńskie Towarzystwo Naukowe. Kuria Diecezjalna w Drohiczynie |work=Dam im imię na wieki 'Iz 56,5' (Will give them names for ever) |year=2011 |access-date=July 12, 2014 |author=Edward Kopówka, Paweł Rytel-Andrianik |page=87 |isbn=978-83-7257-496-1 |format=PDF file, direct download 15.1 MB |trans-title=Treblinka concentration camp staff |quote=Archiwum Państwowe w Siedlcach (APS), Akta Gminy Prostyń (AGP), t. 104, "Budowa i odbudowa, 1946–1947".}}
• {{cite web |url=http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/Trawniki/TRAWNIKI%20STAFF.html |title=Trawniki Staff Page. Alphabetical Listing |publisher=H.E.A.R.T |work=Aktion Reinhard |year=2007 |access-date=July 12, 2014 |author=S.J. |quote=Source: Yitzhak Arad, Thomas (Toivi) Blatt, Alexander Donat, Rudolf Reder, Tom Teicholz, Samuel Willenberg, Richard Glazar; museums and private collections.}}
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - [http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007397 Trawniki]
• In depth overview of the Trawniki Camp, Trawniki Staff, Photos. - [http://www.holocaustresearchproject.net/ar/Trawniki/trawniki.html All about Trawniki ]
• [http://www.jewishgen.org/Yizkor/belzec1/bel040.html Belzec: Stepping Stone to Genocide, Sources of Manpower]
• {{cite web | url=https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-1st-circuit/1531166.html |title=Vladas Zajanckauskas |publisher=United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit |work=Petitioner |date=July 13, 2010 |access-date=July 12, 2014 |author=Circuit Judge}}
• {{cite web |url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17414127 |title=Nazi camp guard Demjanjuk dies |date=March 17, 2012 |access-date=July 12, 2014 |work=BBC News}}
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• Semotiuk, Andrij A. (Kyiv Post, Mar 21, 2012). [http://www.kyivpost.com/news/opinion/op_ed/detail/124648/ "In Memory of John Demjanjuk."] Retrieved Apr 24, 2012.
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• {{cite news |last=Kilgannon |first=Corey |title=Accused Nazi Guard Speaks Out, Denying He Had Role in Atrocities |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/21/nyregion/accused-nazi-guard-speaks-out-denying-he-had-role-in-atrocities.html?scp=1&sq=Jakiw%20Palij&st=cse |access-date=July 12, 2014 |newspaper=New York Times |date=November 1, 2003}}
• [http://www.umoloda.kiev.ua/number/202/116/7174 Report on Palij (in Ukrainian)] "Яків Палій." Україна Молода, June 17, 2004. Retrieved May 1, 2013.

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