page_title: Trawniki men
section_title: Known names of Trawnikis serving at death camps
hierarchical_section_title: Trawniki men / Known names of Trawnikis serving at death camps
caption_attribution_description: English: This spring 1943 photo shows a group of auxiliary guards at the Nazi death camp Sobibor in German-occupied Poland. A Holocaust historian said researchers concluded that John Demjanjuk, the retired Ohio auto worker who was tried in Germany for his alleged time as a Sobibor guard, is presumably depicted in this photo.
context_page_description: Trawniki men were Central and Eastern European collaborators recruited from prisoner-of-war camps set up by Nazi Germany for Soviet Red Army soldiers captured in the border regions during Operation Barbarossa launched in June 1941. Thousands of these volunteers served in the General Government territory of German-occupied Poland until the end of World War II. Trawnikis belonged to a category of Hiwis, Nazi auxiliary forces recruited from native subjects.
  Between September 1941 and September 1942, the German SS and police trained 2,500 Trawniki men known as Hiwi Wachmänner at the special training camp at Trawniki outside of Lublin; for the total of 5,082 men on active duty before the end of 1944. Trawnikimänner were organized by Streibel into two SS Sonderdienst battalions. Some 1,000 Hiwis are known to have run away during field operations. Although the majority of Trawniki men or Hiwis came from among the prisoners of war, there were also Volksdeutsche from Eastern Europe among them, valued because of their ability to speak Russian, Ukrainian and other languages of the occupied territories.
context_section_description: The notoriety of crimes committed by Trawnikis at the extermination camps of Belzec [Be], Sobibor [So], and Treblinka [Tr] during Operation Reinhard, have led to many specific names being publicized in postwar literature and by museums of the Holocaust, based on Jewish and Polish survivor-testimonies, memoirs, and archives. The long list of at least 234 names of camp guards written out phonetically can be attributed to more than a dozen sources in which they appear. They often feature arbitrary spellings in English and Polish translation (or transliteration from Cyrillic) based on memory alone, by which the perpetrators could not be legally identified. The following are the most notable of them, confirmed by the courts, and arranged in alphabetical order.
  John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian who joined the Trawniki men and served as a guard at Sobibor. Demnjanjuk immigrated to the United States, but was deported to Israel to stand trial as "Ivan the Terrible" in 1986. Demjanjuk was convicted, but his conviction was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court after new evidence cast doubt on the identity of Demjanjuk and "Ivan the Terrible". In 2009, Demjanjuk was deported to Germany where he was convicted in 2011 for having been a guard at Sobibor.
  Fedor Federenko (Fedorenko) [Tr], the Soviet POW recruited from Stalag 319 at Chełm, guard at the Jewish ghetto in Lublin, sent to Warsaw and to Treblinka death camp in September 1942. After the war Federenko settled in the US; he was extradited to the Soviet Union in December 1984. His trial and execution were pronounced in July 1986.
  Josias Kumpf, a Yugoslav Volksdeutsche who took part in the murderous Aktion Erntefest at Trawniki, stripped of his US citizenship in 2005 and deported to Austria in March 2009. Escaped responsibility due to statute of limitations in that country.
  Samuel Kunz [Be], former Soviet POW trained at Trawniki, charged in Bonn, Germany in July 2010 with being a Belzec camp guard. Kunz died in November 2010 before his trial.
  Wasyl Lytwyn born 1921; ordered deported December 1995; repatriated to Ukraine.
  Ivan Mandycz born 1920; came to US in 1955; ordered deported 2005; Not deported because of age; died 2017
  Ivan Ivanovych Marchenko [Tr] in the Red Army since 1941, brought to Trawniki from POW camp in Chełm, a guard at the Jewish ghetto in Lublin and in Treblinka together with Nikolay Shalayev who was tasked with forcing Jews into the gas chambers; the "motorists" cranking up the gas engine when asked to "turn on the water", called by the Jews "Ivan the Terrible" (Ivan Grozny), Marchenko exhibited special savagery during the killing process; photographed with Ivan Tkachuk at Treblinka. In 1943 he was transferred to Trieste, and in 1944 fled to Yugoslavia. Fate unknown, never tried.
  Jakiw Palij, (August 16, 1923- January 10, 2019) a Hiwi guard who has deported in the U.S. in 1949 and claimed to had worked in his fathers farm, was stripped of his United States citizenship for having "made material misrepresentations in his application for a visa to immigrate to the United States".  Deported from United States on 21 August 2018 at the age of 95. He later died on January 10, 2019 at the age of 95. 
  Nikolay Shalayev, a Hilfswiger guard serving at Treblinka extermination camp. He was one of two Ukrainian guards (along with Ivan Marchenko) in charge of the motor that produced the exhaust fumes which were fed through pipes into the gas chambers during the killing process. Tried by the Soviets after the war for treason and sentenced to death.
  Jakob Reimer a.k.a. Jack Reimer, a Hiwi guard at Trawniki in 1944. Denaturalized in 2002; died in 2005 before he could be deported from the United States to Germany.
  Vladas Zajančkauskas, a Hiwi shooter deployed to participate in the annihilation of the Warsaw Ghetto; had his U.S. citizenship revoked in 2005 at the age of ninety-five.Died 2013.
caption: Picture of Trawniki guards at Sobibor, taken in 1943. Demjanjuk has been "inconclusively identified" as the guard in the middle front left.[30]
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