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283
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1987
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Publié par
Date de parution
22 avril 1987
Nombre de lectures
1
EAN13
9780253113696
Langue
English
A Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 1987
" . . . Mr. Arad reports as a controlled and effective witness for the prosecution. . . . Mr. Arad's book, with its abundance of horrifying detail, reminds us of how far we have to go."—New York Times Book Review
" . . . some of the most gripping chapters I have ever read. . . . the authentic, exhaustive, definitive account of the least known death camps of the Nazi era." —Raul Hilberg
Arad, historian and principal prosecution witness at the Israeli trial of John Demjanjuk (accused of being Treblinka's infamous "Ivan the Terrible"), uses primary materials to reveal the complete story of these Nazi death camps.
PART ONE THE EXTERMINATION MACHINE
1. The Final Solution: From Shooting to Gas
2. Operation Reinhard: Organization and Manpower
3. Belzec: Construction and Experiments
4. Construction of Sobibor
5. Construction of Treblinka
6. Preparing for the Deportations
7. Expulsion from the Ghettos
8. The Trains of Death
9. Belzec: March 17 to June, 1942
10. Sobibor: May to July, 1942
11. Treblinka: July 23 to August 28, 1942
12. Reorganization in Treblinka
13. The Mission of Gerstein and Pfannenstiel
14. Jewish Working Prisoners
15. Women Prisoners
16. Improved Extermination Techniques and Installations
17. The Annihilation of the Jews in the General Government
18. Deportations from Bialystok General District and Ostland
19. Transports from Other European Countries
20. The Extermination of Gypsies
21. The Economic Plunder
22. Himmler's Visit to SObibor and Treblinka
23. The Erasure of the Crimes
PART TWO LIFE IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH
24 Portraits of the Perpetrators
25 The Prisoners' of Daily Life
26 The Prisoners and the Deportees
27 Faith and Religion
28 Diseases, Epidemics, and Suicide
29 Social Life
PART THREE ESCAPE AND RESISTANCE
30 The Cognizance and Reaction of the Victims in Occupied Poland
31 Escapes from the Trains and Spontaneous Acts of Resistance
32 Escapes from the Camps
33 The Underground in Teblinka
34 The Plan for the Uprising in Treblinka
35 August 2, 1943: The Uprising in Treblinka
36 Pursuit and Escape from Treblinka
37 Ideas and Organization for Resistance in Sobibor
38 The Underground in Sobibor
39 The Plan for Uprising in Sobibor
40 October 14, 1943: The Uprising in Sobibor
41 Pursuit and Escape from Sobibor
42 Survival amoung the Local Population
43 Reports about the Death Camps in Polish Wartime Publications
44 An Evaluation of the Uprisings and Their Results
45 Operation Erntefest
46 The Liquidation of the Camps and the Termination of Operation Reinhard
Epilogue
APPENDIX A The Deportation of the Jews from the General Government, Bialystok General District, and Ostland
APPENDIX B The Fate of the Perpetrators of Operation Reinhard
Bibliographic Key to the Notes
Notes
Index
Publié par
Date de parution
22 avril 1987
Nombre de lectures
1
EAN13
9780253113696
Langue
English
BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA
YITZHAK ARAD
BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA
THE OPERATION REINHARD DEATH CAMPS
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA
http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress
Telephone orders 800-842-6796
Fax orders 812-855-7931
E-mail orders iuporder@indiana.edu
This work was made possible by a grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.
First reprinted in paperback in 1999.
1987 by Yitzhak Arad
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Arad, Yitzhak, 1926-
Bibliography: p.
Includes index
1. Belzec (Poland : Concentration camp)
2. Sobibor (Poland : Concentration camp)
3. Treblinka (Poland : Concentration camp)
4. World War, 1939-1945-Prisoners and prisons, German.
5. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
I. Title.
D805.P7Z727 1987 940.54 72 4304384 85-45883
ISBN 0-253-34293-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-253-21305-3 (paper : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-253-34293-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-253-21305-1 (paper : alk. paper)
12 13 14 15 13 12 11 10
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
PART ONE THE EXTERMINATION MACHINE
1 The Final Solution : From Shooting to Gas
2 Operation Reinhard: Organization and Manpower
3 Belzec: Construction and Experiments
4 Construction of Sobibor
5 Construction of Treblinka
6 Preparing for the Deportations
7 Expulsion from the Ghettos
8 The Trains of Death
9 Belzec: March 17 to June, 1942
10 Sobibor: May to July, 1942
11 Treblinka: July 23 to August 28, 1942
12 Reorganization in Treblinka
13 The Mission of Gerstein and Pfannenstiel
14 Jewish Working Prisoners
15 Women Prisoners
16 Improved Extermination Techniques and Installations
17 The Annihilation of the Jews in the General Government
18 Deportations from Bialystok General District and Ostland
19 Transports from Other European Countries
20 The Extermination of Gypsies
21 The Economic Plunder
22 Himmler s Visit to Sobibor and Treblinka
23 The Erasure of the Crimes
PART TWO LIFE IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH
24 Portraits of the Perpetrators
25 The Prisoners Daily Life
26 The Prisoners and the Deportees
27 Faith and Religion
28 Diseases, Epidemics, and Suicide
29 Social Life
PART THREE ESCAPE AND RESISTANCE
30 The Cognizance and Reaction of the Victims in Occupied Poland
31 Escapes from the Trains and Spontaneous Acts of Resistance
32 Escapes from the Camps
33 The Underground in Treblinka
34 The Plan for the Uprising in Treblinka
35 August 2, 1943: The Uprising in Treblinka
36 Pursuit and Escape from Treblinka
37 Ideas and Organization for Resistance in Sobibor
38 The Underground in Sobibor
39 The Plan for the Uprising in Sobibor
40 October 14, 1943: The Uprising in Sobibor
41 Pursuit and Escape from Sobibor
42 Survival among the Local Population
43 Reports about the Death Camps in Polish Wartime Publications
44 An Evaluation of the Uprisings and Their Results
45 Operation Erntefest
46 The Liquidation of the Camps and the Termination of Operation Reinhard
Epilogue
APPENDIX A The Deportation of the Jews from the General Government, Bialystok General District, and Ostland
APPENDIX B The Fate of the Perpetrators of Operation Reinhard
Bibliographic Key to the Notes
Notes
Index
Preface
Concentration camps and death camps were an integral component of Nazi Germany s governing system and a tool for achieving its political aims. These camps were part of the so-called SS-State, headed by the Reichsf hrer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. The concentration camps were spread all over Nazi-occupied Europe. They served as places of detention and torture, centers of forced labor, and instruments for the physical elimination of those elements-Jews and non-Jews alike-whom Nazi Germany considered its political opponents. The death camps, all of them erected in Nazi-occupied Poland, served one purpose: the physical and total extermination of the Jewish people. The crimes, cruelties, and murders committed by Nazi Germany against the Jews reached their peak in these death camps, the last station for millions of men, women, and children whose only guilt was being Jewish.
There were five death camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Auschwitz-Birkenau was, simultaneously, also a concentration camp. This book is a study of the death camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, which were established to expedite Operation Reinhard -the extermination of the Jews who lived in the General Government of Poland. However, in addition to the Jews of Poland, Jews from Holland, France, Greece, Yugoslavia, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and the Soviet Union were also murdered in the three camps.
The book discusses primarily the tragic and cruel events that transpired within these camps; it relates the complete story-from the preparations for construction of the camps at the end of 1941 until their final razing in the autumn of 1943. The physical layout of the camps, the transports to the camps and the deaths they claimed, the process and technique of the extermination, the deeds of the SS men who commanded and activated the camps and of the Ukrainian guards, who made up the majority of the armed forces in the camps, are all fully described.
Moreover, the book tells the tale of the hundreds of thousands of victims who were brought for extermination-although their stay in the camps usually lasted no more than a few hours-from the time they disembarked onto the railway platform until their corpses were removed from the gas chambers, buried in mass graves, and later cremated.
In each camp, a few hundred Jews were removed from the transports to do the physical work involved in the extermination process, as well as some service jobs. Most survived for only a short time, from a few days to several months, and were ultimately murdered, as were those who were sent directly from the transports for extermination. The book describes the daily life and work of these Jews, their Underground organization, the revolts and escapes from the camps. The number of victims in each camp, grouped by location of residence on the eve of deportation, and the timetables for the transports and murder are also included.
Nazi criminals who served in these camps stood trial in West Germany. The trial of the SS men who had served in Belzec was held in Munich in January 1965. The primary defendant was Josef Oberhauser; there were six others. The trial of the SS men who had served in Sobibor was held in Hagen and lasted fifteen months, from September 1965 until December 1966. The leading defendant was Kurt Bolender; there were eleven others. The first Treblinka trial, at which ten of the SS men who served in the camp were brought to trial, among them Kurt Franz, the deputy commander, was held in D sseldorf between October 1964 and August 1965. The second Treblinka trial, at which Franz Stangl, the commander of the camp, was tried, was also held in D sseldorf, from September 1969 to December 1970. These verdicts appear as appendixes to this book.
At the time the paperback edition of this book was issued in 1999, the story of the Operation Reinhard death camps had not yet been finished or closed. In recent years the issue had come up repeatedly in denaturalization trials held in courts in the United States and Canada, mainly against Ukrainians, the so-called Trawniki men, who served as SS guards in the camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
This book is the fruition of extensive research by the author on the camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The primary sources were testimonies of survivors, German documents, Underground sources, testimonies by Poles and Germans, and German trial protocols. The research involved in the study of any topic concerning the Holocaust, and, above all, the extermination camps, is emotionally difficult for any historian, and especially for one who personally experienced those times. My parents, Chaya and Yisroel Moshe Rudnitski, died in Treblinka, and only luck and resourcefulness staved off the same fate from my sister Rachel and myself.
BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA
Introduction
The policy of Nazi Germany toward the Jews in the years 1933-1945-which has been termed in the historiography of the period the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe -was overtly aimed at exterminating the Jewish people. This policy was rooted in the racist Nazi ideology espoused and promulgated by Germany during the rule of Hitler.
In this Nazi ideology, the Aryan race is the superior race, the master race, and the German nation, which embodies this race, fulfills the role of master nation ; everything beautiful and useful in the world is the product of this race. On the opposite end of the racial continuum are the Jews, the root of all evil. All that is destructive and ugly in the world was introduced by them and from within them, and they embody all that is totally negative in humanity. The Jew is a sub-human, a germ that attempts to infect the pure German blood. An unending struggle transpires between these two races, and the outcome is to determine the fate of the world and humanity, for this is an uncompromising struggle for life or death. Only the destruction of t
