page_title: Treblinka extermination camp
section_title: Treblinka I
hierarchical_section_title: Treblinka extermination camp / Background / Treblinka I
caption_attribution_description: English: Official announcement about the founding of Treblinka I Arbeitslager in General Government as the penal colony for social misfits (schidigende) written in German and Polish and signed by Governor Dr. Ludwig Fischer. Polski: „Dziennik Urzędowy dla Generalnego Gubernatorstwa” zawierający informację o powołaniu Karnego Obozu Pracy w Treblince, podpis: Gubernator Dr. Ludwig Fischer.
context_page_description: Treblinka was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was in a forest north-east of Warsaw, 4 kilometres south of the village of Treblinka in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship. The camp operated between 23 July 1942 and 19 October 1943 as part of Operation Reinhard, the deadliest phase of the Final Solution. During this time, it is estimated that between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were killed in its gas chambers, along with 2,000 Romani people. More Jews were killed at Treblinka than at any other Nazi extermination camp apart from Auschwitz-Birkenau.
  Managed by the German SS with asssistance from Trawniki guards – recruited from among Soviet POWs to serve with the Germans – the camp consisted of two separate units. Treblinka I was a forced-labour camp whose prisoners worked in the gravel pit or irrigation area and in the forest, where they cut wood to fuel the cremation pits. Between 1941 and 1944, more than half of its 20,000 inmates died from shootings, hunger, disease and mistreatment.
context_section_description: Opened on 1 September 1941 as a forced-labour camp (Arbeitslager), Treblinka I replaced an ad hoc company set up in June 1941 by Sturmbannführer Ernst Gramss. A new barracks and barbed wire fencing 2 metres (6 ft 7 in) tall were erected in late 1941. To obtain the workforce for Treblinka I, civilians were sent to the camp en masse for real or imagined offences, and sentenced to hard labour by the Gestapo office in Sokołów, which was headed by Gramss. The average length of a sentence was six months, but many prisoners had their sentences extended indefinitely. Twenty thousand people passed through Treblinka I during its three-year existence. About half of them died there from exhaustion, hunger and disease. Those who survived were released after serving their sentences; these were generally Poles from nearby villages.
  At any given time, Treblinka I had a workforce of 1,000–2,000 prisoners, most of whom worked 12- to 14-hour shifts in the large quarry and later also harvested wood from the nearby forest as fuel for the open-air crematoria in Treblinka II. There were German, Czech and French Jews among them, as well as Poles captured in łapankas, farmers unable to deliver food requisitions, hostages trapped by chance, and people who attempted to harbour Jews outside the Jewish ghettos or who performed restricted actions without permits. Beginning in July 1942, Jews and non-Jews were separated. Women mainly worked in the sorting barracks, where they repaired and cleaned military clothing delivered by freight trains, while most of the men worked at the gravel mine. There were no work uniforms, and inmates who lost their own shoes were forced to go barefoot or scavenge them from dead prisoners. Water was rationed, and punishments were regularly delivered at roll-calls. From December 1943 the inmates were no longer carrying any specific sentences. The camp operated officially until 23 July 1944, when the imminent arrival of Soviet forces led to its abandonment.
  During its entire operation, Treblinka I's commandant was Sturmbannführer Theodor van Eupen. He ran the camp with several SS men and almost 100 Hiwi guards. The quarry, spread over an area of 17 hectares (42 acres), supplied road construction material for German military use and was part of the strategic road-building programme in the war with the Soviet Union. It was equipped with a mechanical digger for shared use by both Treblinka I and II. Eupen worked closely with the SS and German police commanders in Warsaw during the deportation of Jews in early 1943 and had prisoners brought to him from the Warsaw Ghetto for the necessary replacements. According to Franciszek Ząbecki, the local station master, Eupen often killed prisoners by "taking shots at them, as if they were partridges". A widely feared overseer was Untersturmführer Franz Schwarz, who executed prisoners with a pickaxe or hammer.
caption: Official announcement of the founding of Treblinka I, the forced-labour camp
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