Trawniki concentration camp

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Trawniki concentration camp, in the village of Trawniki about 40 km southeast of Lublin in Poland, was an SS labour camp which provided forced labourers for a nearby industrial plant to work in appalling conditions with little food. The Trawniki camp was commanded initially by Hermann Hoefle, and later by Karl Streibl.

Initially established in July 1941 as a camp to hold Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, from June 1942 to May 1944 it served as a forced labor camp for Jews, initially under Operation Reinhard and from September 1943 as part of the Majdanek concentration camp system.

From September 1941 until July 1944, the camp was also utilized for training guards recruited from Soviet POWs, known as "Hiwi", for service with Nazi occupation forces in occupied Poland and neighbouring countries. SS and police officials inducted, processed, and trained 2,500 auxiliary police guards (Wachmänner, also known as Trawniki men) at Trawniki training camp between September 1941 and September 1942. The majority of the Hiwi as the Trawniki men were also known were Ukrainians, and Volksdeutche from Eastern Europe, through there were also Russians, Belarusians, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Tartars, Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis amongst them.. The "Trawniki" guards took part in Operation Reinhard, the Nazi plan for extermination of the Polish Jews, and/or served at extermination camps.

Key role of Trawniki men in Final Solution

Between 70 and 120 Trawniki Hiwi men were selected to act as the guard unit at each of the three Reinhard death camps and came under the jurisdiction of the relevant camp commandant. Almost all of the Trawniki guards were involved in shooting and beating Jews at some point in their careers. The Russian historian Sergei Kudryashov, who made a special study of the Trawniki guards reported that there was little sign of any attraction to National Socialism or anti-Semitism with the Trawniki men. Most of the Trawniki men volunteered in order to leave the POW camps and/or because of self-interest. Despite the generally apathetic views of the Trawniki guards, the vast majority faithfully carried out the SS's expectations of how to treat Jews, and that mistreatment of Jews was "systematic and without any particular cause". Many, though not all of the Trawniki men as part of their training executed Jews. Following the lead of the American historian Christopher Browning in his 1992 book Ordinary Men, Kudryashov argued that the Trawniki men were examples of how ordinary people could become willing killers.

Later careers of Trawniki personnel

In 1984 Feodor Fedorenko was extradited to the USSR where he was sentenced to death and executed in short order. In March 2009 Josias Kumpf an Austrian who served as a guard in Trawniki, was deported from the U.S. to Austria. In May 2009 John Demjanjuk was deported from the US to Germany. In July 2010 a former Soviet POW, Samuel Kunz, was charged with being a Belzec guard who had been trained at Trawniki. Kunz died in November 2010 before his trial.

Jakiw Palij, another guard, was stripped of his United States citizenship for having "made material misrepresentations in his application for a visa to immigrate to the United States" Another guard, Jaroslaw Bilaniuk, a friend of Palij, was placed into denaturalization proceedings, but it is not clear if those proceedings had concluded or if he was still a U.S. citizen at the time of his death in 2007.

See also: Vladas Zajanckauskas

See also

• Action 14f13
• John Demjanjuk

Bibliography

• Kudryashov, Sergei, "Ordinary Collaborators: The Case of the Travniki Guards," in Mark and Ljubica Erickson (eds), Russia War, Peace and Diplomacy Essays in Honour of John Erickson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), 226-239.
• Steinhart, Eric C., "The Chameleon of Trawniki: Jack Reimer, Soviet Volksdeutsche, and the Holocaust," Holocaust & Genocide Studies, 23,2 (2009), 239-262.

External links

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Trawniki
• In depth overview of the Trawniki Camp, Trawniki Staff, Photos. - All about Trawniki
• Belzec: Stepping Stone to Genocide, Sources of Manpower