Treblinka extermination camp

Auschwitz became the greatest human extermination centre of all time, or when he points out with the satisfaction of the successful planner that the gas chambers of his own camp had a capacity ten times greater than those of Treblinka.
~ Joachim C. Fest, The Face of the Third Reich, page 285.

Treblinka extermination camp (pronounced [tre'bljinka]) was an extermination camp built by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was located near the village of Treblinka (now in Masovian Voivodeship) north-east of Warsaw. The camp operated officially between 23 July 1942 and 19 October 1943 as part of Operation Reinhard, the most deadly phase of the Final Solution. During this period, 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.

Quotes

• Though it was the most efficient, Auschwitz was not necessarily the cruellest of the Nazi death camps. The first people to be gassed by the Third Reich were, as we have seen, German mental patients; they had been asphyxiated with pure carbon monoxide gas. This method was then exported to Eastern Europe, but using exhaust fumes, first in specially converted vans, then in static gas chambers equipped with large diesel engines. This was how people were killed at Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec, the camps set up to implement the 'Action Reinhard' in the autumn of 1941. Compared with inhaling Zyklon B, which killed most victims within five to ten minutes, this was a slow way to die. Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, regarded his own methods as 'humane' compared with those of his counterpart at the last of these camps, the notoriously sadistic Christian Wirth.
  • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 507

• Some of the one-sided perfectionist pride of the expert comes out in Höss's statement: "By the will of the Reichsführer of the SS [Heinrich Himmler], Auschwitz became the greatest human extermination centre of all time," or when he points out with the satisfaction of the successful planner that the gas chambers of his own camp had a capacity ten times greater than those of Treblinka.
  • Joachim C. Fest, The Face of the Third Reich, p. 285.

• Just as we went by, they were opening the gas-chamber doors, and people fell out like potatoes. . . . Each day one hundred Jews were chosen to drag the corpses to the mass graves. In the evening the Ukrainians drove those Jews into the gas chambers or shot them. Every day! . . . More people kept coming, always more, whom we hadn't the facilities to kill. . . . The gas chambers couldn't handle the load.
  • Franz Suchomel, SS officer (Unterscharführer), on his first impressions of the Treblinka extermination camp. (This quote was taken from interviews in the documentary film Shoah.)

• How is one to explain that neither Hitler nor Himmler was ever excommunicated by the church? That Pius XII never thought it necessary, not to say indispensable, to condemn Auschwitz and Treblinka? That among the S.S. a large proportion were believers who remained faithful to their Christian ties to the end? That there were killers who went to confession between massacres? And that they all came from Christian families and had received a Christian education?
  • Elie Wiesel A Jew Today (1978).

See also

• Auschwitz concentration camp
• Gas chamber