Trawniki (bei Lublin)

Trawniki, a village southeast of Lublin, was the site of an SS camp on the grounds of a disused sugar refinery. It existed from July 1941 to July 1944 under the SS leadership of the Lublin District headed by Odilo Globocnik and was commanded from October 1941 by Karl Streibel. The camp served several purposes in succession: a holding facility for Soviet civilians and prisoners of war; from September 1941 a training camp for auxiliary guards – the so-called "Trawniki men" or "Wachmänner", about 5,082 of whom were trained there; from June 1942 to September 1943 a forced-labour camp for Jews; and from September 1943 a subcamp of the Lublin/Majdanek concentration camp. Trawniki-trained guards formed the guard units of the "Aktion Reinhardt" killing centres at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.

In 1942 Trawniki was also a transit point to Belzec: after a selection in the nearby Piaski ghetto in early April 1942, several hundred Polish, German and Austrian Jews were brought to Trawniki and locked overnight in a barn-like building, where between 200 and 500 suffocated. According to Yad Vashem, Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia arrived in the camp from mid-1942, and some 20,000 Jews passed through it. After the Warsaw ghetto uprising, 17 transports brought 2,848 men, 2,397 women and 388 children from Warsaw to Trawniki in 1943; by May 1943 more than 6,000 Jewish forced labourers lived in the camp.

On 3 November 1943, in the massacre cynically code-named "Erntefest" ("Harvest Festival"), SS and police units shot at least 6,000 Jewish prisoners of Trawniki and Dorohucza, eliminating virtually the entire workforce (USHMM). Yad Vashem gives the number of Jews from Trawniki murdered in this operation as 10,000, out of some 43,000 victims of "Erntefest" as a whole.

From Berlin

None of the Berlin transport lists consulted names the Trawniki camp as a destination, but the name appears in the Berlin deportation records. The Gestapo transport lists for two Berlin transports were headed "nach Trawniki bei Lublin": that of 28 March 1942 (985 names) and that of 14 April 1942 (70 names). Trawniki railway station was the unloading point for the 28 March transport: the train arrived there on 30 March 1942 and the deportees were marched about 12 kilometres to the Piaski ghetto (see Piaski). The transport of 14 April 1942, which carried about 65–70 Berlin Jews together with Jews from Potsdam, Magdeburg and Anhalt, went to the Warsaw ghetto according to Yad Vashem and statistik-des-holocaust.de.

No transport went directly from Berlin to this place.