Treblinka

Treblinka II was one of the three killing centres of "Aktion Reinhardt". It was built in summer 1942 in the Warsaw District near the village of Wólka Okrąglik, about a mile south of an existing forced-labour camp (Treblinka I, opened in November 1941) and close to the Małkinia–Siedlce railway line. Between 25 and 35 German SS and police officers ran the camp, assisted by some 90 to 150 auxiliary guards trained at Trawniki.

The first transport, carrying about 7,400 Jews from Warsaw, arrived on 23 July 1942. Deportees were driven through a fenced, camouflaged passage – the "tube" – into gas chambers disguised as showers and murdered with carbon monoxide exhaust from a diesel engine. From late July to mid-September 1942 alone, 241,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were deported to Treblinka according to the Treblinka Museum (USHMM gives about 265,000); transports also came from many other ghettos in occupied Poland and from Germany, Austria, the Czech lands, Slovakia, Belgium, France, Greece, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.

On 2 August 1943 prisoners rose up; more than 300 escaped, though about two-thirds of them were caught and killed. The camp was dismantled in the autumn of 1943. The Treblinka Museum takes 800,000 as the basis for the number of victims and notes that 713,555 people are documented as murdered by the end of 1942; USHMM estimates that about 925,000 Jews were murdered there, as well as an unknown number of Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war.

From Berlin

No deportation train is recorded as going directly from Berlin to Treblinka: the Bundesarchiv chronology, the Berlin lists of statistik-des-holocaust.de and the Berlin list based on Gottwaldt and Schulle contain none. Many Berlin Jews were nevertheless murdered there, by two routes. People deported from Berlin to the Warsaw ghetto in April 1942 who were still alive in July were, like most ghetto residents, deported to Treblinka during the mass deportations of summer 1942.

The second route led through Theresienstadt. Between 19 September and 22 October 1942 ten trains took about 18,000 people from Theresienstadt to Treblinka; eight of these transports carried mainly elderly Jews from Germany and Austria, and USHMM knows of no survivors from them. Among the victims were elderly Berliners sent to Theresienstadt in the "Alterstransporte" of summer 1942 – for example Emma Freystadt, born in 1872, deported from Anhalter Bahnhof on 9 July 1942 and sent on from Theresienstadt to Treblinka on 19 September 1942, and Siegfried Meyer, deported to Theresienstadt on 17 August 1942 and taken to Treblinka on the same day as she was.

No transport went directly from Berlin to this place.