Treblinka 1 and Treblinka 11

One of the readers of my blog mentioned the Treblinka II camp.

There may be some people reading my blog who do not know that there were TWO Treblinka camps.

I visited the site of the Treblinka I camp in 1998, accompanied by a tour guide. After we finished our tour, we met another tour guide who was preparing to take a group of young students to the site of the Treblinka II camp; he invited me and my guide to go along. My guide advised me not to go because it was a mile there and a mile back, which was quite a hike for a 70-year-old like me.

Treblinka was second only to Auschwitz in the number of Jews who were killed by the Nazis: between 700,000 and 900,000, compared to an estimated 1.1 million to 1.5 million at Auschwitz.

The Treblinka death camp was located 100 km (62 miles) northeast of Warsaw, near the railroad junction at the village of Malkinia Górna, which is 2.5 km (1.5 miles) from the train station in the tiny village of Treblinka.

Raul Hilberg stated in his three-volume book, “The Destruction of the European Jews,” that there were six Nazi extermination centers, including Treblinka. The other 5 extermination camps were at Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau, all of which are located in what is now Poland. The last two also functioned as forced labor camps (Zwangsarbeitslager), and were still operational shortly before being liberated by the Soviet Union towards the end of the war in 1944 and early 1945.

The camps at Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno had already been liquidated by the Germans before the Soviet soldiers arrived, and there was no remaining evidence of the extermination of millions of Jews. The combined total of the deaths at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor was 1.5 million, according to Raul Hilberg.

In June 1941, a forced labor camp for Jews and Polish political prisoners was set up near a gravel pit, a mile from where the Treblinka death camp would later be located. The labor camp became known as Treblinka I and the death camp, which opened in July 1942, was called Treblinka II or T-II.

There were no “selections” made at the three Operation Reinhard camps, nor at the Chelmno camp. All the Jews who were sent to these camps, with the exception of a few who escaped, were allegedly killed in gas chambers. There were no records kept of their deaths.

Bridge over the Bug river on the way to the Treblinka death camp

Treblinka and the other two Operation Reinhard camps, Sobibor and Belzec, were all located near the Bug river which formed the eastern border of German-occupied Poland. The Bug river is very shallow at Treblinka; it is what people from Missouri would call a “crick” or creek, compared to the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers. It is shallow enough to wade across in the Summer time, or to walk across when it is frozen in the Winter.

As this map shows, the territory on the other side of the Bug river was White Russia (Belarus) and the section of Poland that was given to the Soviet Union after the joint conquest of Poland by the Germans and the Soviet Union in September 1939. This part of Poland was formerly occupied by the Russians between 1772 and 1917; between 1835 and 1917, this area was included in the Pale of Settlement, a huge reservation where the Eastern European Jews were forced to live.

all roads lead to Bialystok, a city in Poland

When I went on my first trip to Poland in October 1998, I was surprised to find that the roads were very primitive and that there were no freeways, like in America. The first trip to a Holocaust camp, that I took in Poland, was to Treblinka.

My 1998 photo shows a line of stones that mark the border of the Treblinka camp

There were no direction signs, on the road to Treblinka, until we were almost there. My driver followed the signs that led to Bialystock, which I now know is the closest large city to the village of Treblinka, although it is many miles away.

Yesterday, one of the readers of my blog wrote the following in a comment:

“neither the Soviets nor the Poles uncovered even the slightest scrap of proof that Treblinka II operated as an extermination camp”

There were two camps, near the village called Treblinka, during World War II. One camp was where Jews were allegedly killed and the other camp, now called Treblinka II, was a work camp for Jews. The main Treblinka camp, where Jews were allegedly killed, is now a memorial site.

My 1988 photo of the entrance into the Treblinka main camp

I have to digress a bit now to tell you about my background. I was born in a small town in Missouri. The bed, in which my mother gave birth to me, was located a stone’s throw from the railroad tracks of a major railroad line.  Probably the first sound, that I ever heard after I came into this world, was the lonesome whistle of a train.

To understand the story of the Holocaust, one must first study the trains, along with the locations of the death camps.  For some strange reason, the so-called extermination camps were located “way out in the boondocks” as people in Missouri would say. And the Jews were taken to the death camps by trains, not by trucks. Didn’t the Nazis need those trains for their troops?

When railroad lines were built in the 19th century, the width of the tracks was standardized in America and western Europe, while the tracks in Russia and eastern Poland were a different gauge. The city of Bialystok is the end of the line for Western railroad tracks in Poland; this is as far east as trains can go without changing the wheels on the rail cars to fit the tracks in Russia.

In June 1941, the German Army invaded the Soviet Union. By the time that the Operation Reinhard camps were set up in 1942, German troops had advanced a thousand kilometers into Russia. Supposedly, the plan was to transport the Jews as far as the Bug river and kill them in gas chambers, then claim that they had been “transported to the East” into Russia.

There were no gas chambers in Bialystok, so the Jews in the Bialystok ghetto had to be transported west to Treblinka in order to kill them. Every Holocaust story that you will ever read, and every story that you won’t read, says that the Jews were transported to the East.

What else could the Nazis have done at Treblinka? Maybe put a pontoon bridge across the Bug river in order to send the Jews into the former Soviet territory? But if the plan was to send all the Jews into Russia, why not just send them from Bialystok, instead of Treblinka?

When Germany began offering reparations to the Jews for their suffering in the Holocaust, there were many Jews who claimed reparations, but were rejected because they had come to Germany from Russia, after the war. According to the True Believer version of the Holocaust, these Jews were allegedly dead, so they could not claim reparations from Germany.

For a few years now, there have been ads on TV asking for donations for the Holocaust survivors in Russia. There is no mention of how these survivors got there, but the scene in the ad, that shows the tattoo on the arm of one of the Holocaust survivors in Russia, has recently been deleted from the ad.

Jews in Warsaw leaving for the Treblinka death camp

I don’t believe in the Holocaust story because it is not the way that a German person would have done it. Instead of building death camps out in the boondocks, a German person would have put the gas chambers in major cities like Warsaw. Why go to all the trouble and expense of transporting the Jews to some God forsaken place out in the boondocks?

My 1998 photo of the village of Poniatowo, on the road to Treblinka in the rain

From Warsaw, the route to Treblinka starts with the crossing of the river Vistula, then a turn onto Highway 18 northeast towards Bialystok, the only large town in the Bialystok province, which is located in the most remote northeast corner of Poland.

It is in the Bialystok province that bison still roam, and one can see the last remaining primeval forest and wetlands on the European continent. This area could truly be called the “Wild East” of Poland.

As you can see in the photograph above, taken in October 1998, the road as it nears the Treblinka camp becomes a one-lane blacktop, badly in need of repair.

Treblinka is two kilometers from the Bug River which, during World War II, formed the border between the Nazi occupied General Government of Poland and the zone occupied by the Soviet Union from September 1939 until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

Two other Action Reinhard death camps, Sobibor and Belzec, were also located very close to the Bug river which was the border between the General Government and the Soviet zone of Poland.

My 1998 photo of the bridge over the Bug river on the way to Treblinka

The Soviet zone was the territory that had formerly belonged to Russia between 1772 and 1918. Known as the “Pale of Settlement” between 1835 and 1917, this was the area where all Russian Jews were forced to live until after they were liberated by the Communist Revolution in 1917.

Treblinka was located on the railroad line running from Ostrów Mazowiecki to Siedlce; at Malkinia junction, this line intersected the major railway line which ran from Warsaw to Bialystok.

Now do you understand my complaint about all this? It is not the way a German person would have done it!

 

Monuments at Treblinka prevent digging for evidence

Stones with names of towns and villages, where the victims came from, are seen on the grounds of the former German Nazi Death Camp Treblinka (AP Photo/Alik Keplicz)

The following quote is from the news story which includes the photo shown above:

“Stones bear the names of hometowns and villages of Jews at the site of the Treblinka death camp in northeast Poland. About 875,000 European Jews were killed at Treblinka in a one-year span at the height of World War II. (Alik Keplicz, Associated Press file)”

According to Holocaust True Believers, Treblinka was an extermination camp where Jews were brought from Warsaw, and many small towns and villages in Poland, to be killed in gas chambers.  Allegedly, their bodies were burned and the ashes were buried inside the camp.  Years later, the alleged burial site was covered with stones, bearing the names of numerous places from which the Jews had been brought to Treblinka to be killed.

Holocaust deniers believe that Treblinka was a transit camp, where Jews were given a shower before being sent, to the east, across the Bug river into parts unknown.

Unfortunately, we will never know the truth, for sure, because the ground has been covered by stones in honor of the victims, so that no digging for evidence can be done.

Stones with names of towns from whence victims were brought to Treblinka

Stone monument at Treblinka surrounded by smaller stones which prevent digging

The photograph above shows the back side of the memorial tombstone at Treblinka. When the death camp was in operation, there was a narrow dirt path through a “tube” covered with tree branches which led to the gas chamber building in this spot. Notice the Menorah at the top of the tombstone.

Stone monument on the site of alleged gas chamber at Treblinka

Located on a knoll, at the top of a gentle slope, on the site of the former Treblinka extermination camp, is a large circular area with 17,000 stones of various sizes and colors set into concrete, which represents a symbolic cemetery, which is shown in my photos above.

When I visited Treblinka in October 1998, my private tour guide told me that 130 of the stones have the names of the cities or towns from which the victims were deported to the death camp. The guide told me that many relatives, of those who died here, come to the symbolic cemetery and are disappointed to find that their village is not named on any of the stones.

According to a pamphlet, which I purchased at the Visitor’s Center, “The great monument in Treblinka is a homage of the Polish people to those ashes lie under the concrete plates of the symbolic cemetery. It is one of the most tragic monuments of martyrdom in Poland.”

My tour guide informed me that the ashes of the 800,000 people, who were murdered at Treblinka, were dumped in this area and are now hidden underneath the concrete of the symbolic cemetery and under the grass and tiny flowers which cover the area.

One of the 17,000 symbolic stones represents the city of Kielce in central Poland, where 42 Jews were killed by a mob of Polish citizens in a pogrom on July 4, 1946, long after the Nazi occupation had ended.

Today Kielce is a modern industrial city with a population of 210,000, located between Warsaw and Krakow. In 1939, the Jewish population in the city was around 25,000, although until the early 1800s, Jews had been barred from living in the city. After the 1946 pogrom, many of the 300,000 Polish Holocaust survivors fled Poland and settled in other countries.

In 1968 there was more violence against the Jews in Poland, and almost all of the survivors were forced to leave.

Since my visit to Treblinka in 1998, I have learned that some tour guides now tell visitors that the number of 17,000 stones in the symbolic cemetery represents the highest number of Jews that were gassed in a single day when the camp was in operation. Others say that the number 17,000 represents the number of Jewish communities that were destroyed in the Holocaust.

According to the pamphlet which I obtained from the Visitor’s Center, the Treblinka memorial site was built between 1959 and 1963. In February 1960, the Warsaw Regional Council selected the designs of Polish sculptor Franciszek Duszenko and Polish architect Adam Haupt for the memorial stone and the Symbolic Cemetery.

According to the Warsaw Regional Council, the design of the symbolic cemetery would create a field of jagged stones that suggest a cemetery consisting of 17,000 stones with 700 of the stones inscribed with the names of the Jewish villages and communities in Poland that were obliterated by the Holocaust.

Symbolic cemetery at Treblinka has simulated burning pit in foreground

Treblinka stone commemorating victims from Sandomierz

Stone in honor of victims sent from Warsaw

The 800,000 bodies, which had allegedly been buried previously at Treblinka, were later dug up and then cremated on the orders of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, after he had visited the camp in 1943, according to Martin Gilbert. This project allegedly required three months of intense labor by 1,000 Jewish workers who were forced to perform this grisly task in an attempt to destroy the evidence of alleged mass murder at Treblinka.

Monument at Treblinka recreates burning pits where the bodies of Jews were burned

According to my tour guide, on my trip to Treblinka in 1998, the first gas chambers at Treblinka used carbon monoxide. The 10 new gas chambers used the poison gas known as Zyklon-B, according to the pamphlet which I purchased at the Visitor’s Center.

According to the True Believer version of history, Treblinka did not have delousing chambers; all the clothing taken from the prisoners was sent to the Majdanek camp to be disinfected with Zyklon-B before being sent to Germany. What? The Nazis couldn’t spare some of the Zyklon-B, used at Treblinka, to delouse the clothing?

A short distance farther up the slope, to the east of the gas chambers at Treblinka, was located the “cremation pyres” according to a map in the camp pamphlet which I purchased at Treblinka.

Strangely, none of the three Operation Reinhard extermination camps had a crematorium for burning the bodies of the 1.5 million Jews who were killed in these camps. Of the other five extermination camps which were in operation during the same period (Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau), only Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, which also functioned as forced labor camps, had crematoria with ovens for burning the bodies.

It is hard for me to believe that the Nazis did such poor prior planning of the extermination of the Jews in the death camps.

One of the 40 prisoners who escaped from Treblinka, and lived to tell about it, was Abraham Bomba, a Jew who was born in 1913 in Germany, but raised in Czestochowa, Poland. Bomba was one of the 1,000 Jews who lived in the barracks in a separate section of the Treblinka II camp and worked for the Germans who ran the death camp. Bomba was a barber and his job was cutting the hair of the victims inside the gas chamber, just before they were gassed. In 1990, he told about his experience in the camp in a video-taped interview for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The quote below is from the transcript of his interview:

“And now I want to tell you, I want to tell you about the thing…the gas chamber. It was, they ask me already about this thing. The gas chamber, how it looked. Very simple. Was all concrete. There was no window. There was nothing in it. Beside, on top of you, there was wires, and it looked like, you know, the water going to come out from it. Had two doors. Steel doors. From one side and from the other side. The people went in to the gas chamber from the one side. Like myself, I was in it, doing the job as a barber. When it was full the gas chamber–the size of it was…I would say 18 by 18, or 18 by 17, I didn’t measure that time, just a look like I would say I look here the room around, I wouldn’t say exactly how big it is. And they pushed in as many as they could. It was not allowed to have the people standing up with their hands down because there is not enough room, but when people raised their hand like that there was more room to each other. And on top of that they throw in kids, 2, 3, 4 years old kids, on top of them. And we came out. The whole thing it took I would say between five and seven minute. The door opened up, not from the side they went in but the side from the other side and from the other side the…the group…people working in Treblinka number 2, which their job was only about dead people. They took out the corpses. Some of them dead and some of them still alive. They dragged them to the ditches, and over there they covered them. Big ditches, and they covered them. That was the beginning of Treblinka.”

After each gassing, the Jewish workers at Treblinka had to clean up in preparation for the next batch of victims, according to Abraham Bomba. The clothing that had been taken off by the victims had to be removed and put into piles for sorting before being sent on the next empty transport train to Lublin. Everything was done with great efficiency in this assembly-line murder camp, and nothing was wasted. All of the clothes and valuables, taken from the Jews when they arrived at Treblinka, were sent to the Majdanek camp in a suburb of Lublin where everything was disinfected before being sent to Germany and given to civilians.

In his 1990 interview at the USHMM, Bomba described what happened next. Below is a quote from the transcript of his interview:

“People went in through the gate. Now we know what the gate was, it was the way to the gas chamber and we have never see them again. That was the first hour we came in. After that, we, the people, 18 or 16 people…more people came in from the…working people, they worked already before, in the gas chamber, we had a order to clean up the place. Clean up the place–is not something you can take and clean. It was horrible. But in five, ten minutes this place had to look spotless. And it looked spotless. Like there was never nobody on the place, so the next transport when it comes in, they shouldn’t see what’s going on. We were cleaning up in the outside. Tell you what mean cleaning up: taking away all the clothes, to those places where the clothes were. Now, not only the clothes, all the papers, all the money, all the, the…whatever somebody had with him. And they had a lot of things with them. Pots and pans they had with them. Other things they had with them. We cleaned that up.”

 

The story of Treblinka…transit camp or extermination center

My 1998 photo of the tiny village of Treblinka near the Treblinka camp, taken during a light rain

Today, I  received an e-mail from Bradley Smith, telling me about the History Channel running  “Hitler’s Killing Machine” which is the story of Treblinka.

You can read all about Treblinka on my website, starting at

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Poland/Treblinka/introduction.html

I  visited Treblinka with a private tour guide in 1998 and I  have since written several blog posts about Treblinka, which you can read at

https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/archaeologists-discover-tiles-from-the-walls-of-the-gas-chamber-at-treblinka-the-end-of-holocaust-denial/

https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/was-treblinka-really-a-transit-camp/

https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/tag/treblinka-death-camp/

I have a whole section about Treblinka on my website:  http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Poland/Treblinka/

You can read below what I wrote about Treblinka after my visit to the camp in 1998:

The road to Treblinka which is way out in the boondocks

As you get near the village of Treblinka, there is a line of beautiful chestnut trees alongside the road on the right. You see old men walking along the road, carrying bundles of sticks on their backs. There are farm families digging potatoes and burning the dried potato vines in the fields.

Occasionally, you see a stork’s nest on a roof near the chimney, or a large ant hill at the edge of a forest, surrounded by a tiny log fence for protection.

There are old wooden Catholic churches and white cottages with thatched roofs along the road. Telephone poles are topped with glass insulators, the kind you see for sale in antique stores in America.

The farther you travel down this road, the farther you seem to go back in time.

Near Malkinia Junction, the road has ancient concrete barriers to prevent cars from leaving the road, and quaint old railroad crossing signs. From this junction, a branch railroad line runs south from the Ostbahn (Eastern Railroad line) to the village of Treblinka where there was a small train station in the 1940ies.

Finally, you get to a narrow archway over the road, the purpose of which is to keep vehicles larger than 2.5 tons from proceeding beyond this point. [The arch is shown in the photograph at the top of this page] .

One lane railroad bridge on the road to Treblinka

Just before you get to the Treblinka camp, you must cross a one-lane railroad bridge that was formerly used by both trains and cars, but is now used [in 1998] only by cars and pedestrians.

According to Martin Gilbert in his book “Holocaust Journey,” this bridge was rebuilt some time after 1959; the bridge had been destroyed during World War II. The reconstructed bridge is shown in my 1998 photograph below.

My 1998 photo of the one lane bridge over the Bug river, on the way to Treblinka

The surface of the bridge is made of wood and the train tracks are not level, which would cause any train using the bridge to list to one side. The tracks of the railroad lines in Germany and Poland were then, and still are today, a different width, or gauge, than the tracks across the eastern border of the Bialystok District in what used to be the Soviet Union, and is now the country of Byelorussia or Belarus, formerly called White Russia.

According to my tour guide, today [in 1998] trains from Germany or Poland must stop at the Bialystok eastern border and change to wider wheels which can run on the different gauge tracks in Russia.

In 1941, it was necessary for the German invading army to extend the standard European gauge tracks into Russia, as they advanced. The poor condition of the roads in Poland and Russia hampered the advancing Germany troops when their vehicles would become mired in three feet of mud. Three kilometers from Treblinka was located the main railroad line into Russia, through the Bialystok province.

After the joint conquest of Poland by the Germans and the Russians in September 1939, the river Bug (pronounced Boog) became the border between the German-occupied General Government of Poland and the Russian zone of occupation; then Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 and conquered the strip of eastern Poland that was being occupied by the Russians. Treblinka is located in the former General Government.

On January 20, 1942, a conference was held in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, where plans were made for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Three extermination camps, called the Operation Reinhard Camps were planned at this conference. Treblinka was the last of the Operation Reinhard camps to be set up; the other two were Sobibor and Belzec.

All three of the Operation Reinhard camps were located on the western side of the Bug river. There is a bend in the river near Treblinka, which required a bridge over the river in order to get to the village of Treblinka, although the village is located on the western side of the border between the former General Government and the Russian zone of occupation.

Hardly more than a creek, the Bug is shallow enough in some places so that one can wade across it, and according to historian Martin Gilbert, some refugees, from both sides, did wade across.

The movie “Europa, Europa” has a scene in which Jewish refugees are shown walking toward the Russian sector, trying to escape the Nazis in September 1939 by crossing the Bug river on rafts.

End of quote from my website, written in 1998.

As a result of my 1998 trip to Treblinka, on which I was the only tourist there, I believe that Treblinka was a transit camp and that there were no gas chambers there.

The gas chambers at Sobibór, according to Wikipedia

A reader of my blog made a comment in which a link to this page on Wikipedia was included.

This quote is from Wikipedia:

Jews from Poland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, as well as the Soviet prisoners of war, were transported to Sobibór by rail and suffocated in gas chambers fed by the exhaust of large petrol engines. Up to 200,000 people were murdered at Sobibór,[3] and possibly more.

The source [3] for this information is Raul Hilberg, who  spent one whole afternoon at the main Auschwitz camp before writing his famous  book. He couldn’t be bothered with going to see Sobibór, which is way out in the boondocks in Poland.

Few people ever go to Sobibór, and why should they, when they can  just read Wikipedia.

I’ve never been to Sobibór myself, but I did do some research on it a few years ago. I wrote about Sobibór on this page of my scrapbookpages.com website: http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Poland/Sobibor/Tour01.html

Begin quote:

The Sobibór camp was on the eastern edge of German-occupied Poland, five kilometers west of the Bug river. The Bug river was as far as trains from western Europe could go without changing the wheels to fit the train tracks in the Soviet Union, which were a different gauge. On the other side of the Bug river from Sobibór was Ukraine, which had belonged to the Soviet Union until it was taken by the Germans shortly after their invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The unsuspecting victims who arrived at Sobibór were told that they would be sent to work camps in Ukraine after they had taken a shower, but instead, the Jews were immediately killed in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.

Sobibór was one of the three Aktion Reinhard camps which were set up following the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 when “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe” was planned. The head of Aktion Reinhard (Operation Reinhard) was SS-Brigadeführer Odilio Globocnik, who had previously been the Gauleiter of Vienna, Austria. Globocnik and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler both committed suicide after being captured by the British.

The other two Aktion Reinhard camps were Belzec and Treblinka. The first Commandant at Belzec was Christian Wirth, who was also the Inspector of the Aktion Reinhard camps. Belzec and Treblinka were also very near the Bug river which formed the eastern border between German-occupied Poland and the Soviet Union. Across the Bug river from Treblinka was Belorussia (White Russia) which is now called Belarus.

According to the figures given by the Nazis at the Wannsee Conference, there were approximately 5 million Jews in the Soviet Union in January 1942, including 2,994,684 in Ukraine and 446,484 in Belorussia. There were another 2,284,000 Jews in the area of German-occupied Poland known as the General Government. At the Conference, the Nazis claimed that they were planning to resettle some of the Jews who were living in the General Government into Ukraine, an area of the Soviet Union which Germany controlled at that time.

The Nazis claimed that the Aktion Reinhard camps were transit camps for the “evacuation of the Jews to the East,” a euphemism for the genocide of the Jews. Unlike the death camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek, the three Aktion Reinhard camps did not have ovens to cremate the bodies. The Jews were not registered upon arrival at the Aktion Reinhard camps and no death records were kept.

End quote

Does it seem suspicious to you that the Germans went to all this trouble to transport Jews to Sobibór to be gassed when there were no real gas chambers there?  I’m talking about the type of gas chambers that used Zyklon-B. At the time that I wrote about Sobibór on my website, It was believed that the Jews had been gassed in gas chambers that used Zyklon-B.

Recently, the location of more gas chambers at Sobibór has been found. I blogged about this in this previous blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2014/09/19/new-evidence-of-gas-chambers-found-at-the-sobibor-camp-in-poland/

Why not just send all the Jews to Auschwitz, which was the largest railroad hub in Europe? Trains could go from anywhere in Europe to Auschwitz without changing  trains.

There were at least 5 gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

It’s  all about the Bug river, folks. I wrote about it on this previous blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/malkinia-junction-where-the-trains-to-treblinka-stopped/#more-15471

Malkinia Junction, where the trains to Treblinka stopped

Treblinka is a tiny village in northeastern Poland, near the location of a Nazi extermination camp with the same name. During World War II, a railway line, called the Malkinia-Siedlce line, ran directly east from Warsaw to Malkinia Junction.  The Treblinka extermination camp was located 4 km or 2.5 miles southeast of the Malkinia Junction.  The Germans built a spur line from the junction into the Treblinka camp and train cars were backed into the camp, 20 cars at a time.

Jews from Warsaw were sent to Treblinka

German soldiers standing at the Malkinia station

Why did the Nazis choose such a remote spot to kill the Jews?  Was it because they wanted to keep their genocide of the Jews a secret?  The Majdanek camp, which had a number of gas chambers, was on a major road, just outside the city of Lublin. The main Auschwitz camp, which had a gas chamber, was located in a suburb of a town of 13,000 people. The Dachau gas chamber was 10 miles from Munich.  No, it wasn’t the need for secrecy; it was the railroads that determined the location of the Treblinka extermination camp.