TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter II: The Development of the Idea of Treblinka as an Extermination Camp 65
and dragged them into the building. The service staff named this Ukrainian
‘Ivan the Terrible.’
Plan of the ‘Bath’: the bath consisted of 12 cabins. Each cabin measured
6 × 6 m. The height amounted to 2.5 m. They drove 600 people in
each cabin. They threw the children on their heads. The cabins had two
doors, which could be sealed hermetically. In the corner between ceiling
and wall two openings were connected with hoses. Behind the ‘bath’ stood
a machine. It pumped the air out of the chambers. The people suffocated
within 6 to 15 minutes. The second door was opened and the people were
dragged out. Their teeth were examined and golden teeth were ripped out.
From there the bodies were carried away on stretchers and were buried in
the ground. They weren’t buried any farther than 100 m away from the
‘bath.’ People were driven into the ‘bath’ three times a day. In this way
15,000 to 18,000 persons were destroyed each day. That’s how it went for
two months. Later, machines dug these bodies up and they were cremated
in ovens. There were no fewer than one million burned.
Later, the extermination process proceeded as follows: suffocation and
burning. They were incinerated in a specially manufactured oven, which
could hold up to 6,000 bodies. The oven was filled with corpses. Gasoline
or petroleum was poured over them and burned. The cremation lasted up
to an hour. […] Those who could not walk to the ‘bath’ – invalids, old
people – were sent to the ‘hospital’; they went there. They were placed at
the edge of a deep pit on the bottom of which was a pyre made up of human
beings. The victims were shot in the back of the neck, whereupon they fell
into the pit and burned. So it went, day after day.”
On August 22, 1944, the Pole Kazmierz Skarzy�ski gave the following
statement: 149
“Incarcerated Jews in the camp reported that many hundreds of prisoners
at a time were penned in hermetically sealed chambers and were asphyxiated
by pumping out the air. The people died very quickly – in 10 or
12 minutes. According to the stories of the Jews, the oven [sic] was a pit of
25 m in length, 20 m wide and 5-6 m deep, with a grate made out of train
rails on the bottom of the pit, which served as an air vent. The bodies were
piled on the rails and burned. The glow from the fire was visible at a distance
of 15 km. During the day a black smoke spread. In a strong wind, the
smell of burning was still perceptible 30 km from the camp.”
The air evacuation technique of killing also turns up in the first official Soviet
report concerning Treblinka I and II. It originates from August 24, 1944.
Regarding Treblinka it reports: 150
149 GARF, 7021-115-11, p. 16.
150 GARF, 7021-115-9, p. 108.