 The camp was operated by 20 – 25 German and Austrian members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände and 80 – 120 Wachmänner ("watchmen") guards who had been trained at a special SS facility in the Trawniki concentration camp near Lublin, Poland; all Wachmänner guards were trained at Trawniki. The guards were mainly ethnic German Volksdeutsche from the east and Ukrainians, with some Russians, Tatars, Moldovans, Latvians, and Central Asians, all of whom had served in the Red Army. They were enlisted by Karl Streibel, the commander of the Trawniki camp, from the prisoner of war (POW) camps for Soviet soldiers. The degree to which their recruitment was voluntary remains disputed; while conditions in the Soviet POW camps were dreadful, some Soviet POWs collaborated with the Germans even before cold, hunger, and disease began devastating the POW camps in mid-September 1941.
