TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter IV:
The Alleged Extermination Facilities
in Treblinka:
An Historical and Technical Analysis
1. Planning and Construction of the Eastern
‘Extermination Camps’
111
The planning and construction of the so-called ‘extermination camps’
Treblinka, Sobibór, and Be��ec, as reconstructed by the official historiography,
raises serious problems, which have remained unsolved to the present.
The chief problem consists in the absence of rational planning and in the unbelievably
primitive architectural and technical structure of these camps,
which stands in the strongest contrast to that of the others, especially of the socalled
‘extermination camp’ Auschwitz. Raul Hilberg is one of the very few
representatives of the orthodox historiography who have brought up the problem
and sought to solve it. He explains: 276
“Why three camps and not one? Why were they built one after the
other, first Belzec, then Sobibor, and lastly Treblinka? Why in the beginning
in each camp only three gas chambers, if they did not then suffice?
One could be inclined to answer that the planners did not know the entire
extent of their task, that they were groping their way toward the goal without
having it in sight. That is not totally unimaginable, but it is certainly
not the whole explanation and perhaps not even the most important. It was
a matter of, in short, a difficult administrative problem.
The Third Reich had neither a particular central authority nor its own
budgetary title for a ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.’ The construction
of the camps, the positions for guard staff, and the management of
transports all had to be financed in a complex manner. Auschwitz II and
Lublin, for example, were designated in the beginning as camps for prisoners
of war of the SS, and indeed not only for camouflage but for budgetary
reasons. Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, on the other hand, were plain and
simple killing camps. But they could not be operated that way under any
276 Raul Hilberg, “Die Aktion Reinhard,” in: Eberhard Jäckel, Jürgen Rohwer (eds.), Der Mord
an den Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1985, pp. 129f.