6.1.3 Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka

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From the course by University of California, Santa Cruz

The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry

124 ratings

University of California, Santa Cruz

The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry

124 ratings

The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry is an adaptation of an on-campus course that has been co-taught by Murray Baumgarten, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature (Literature Department), and Peter Kenez, Professor Emeritus (History Department), for over 20 years at UC Santa Cruz. In this course, you will explore the Holocaust from the overlapping perspectives of literature and history—through memoirs, historical documents, poetry, documentary footage, filmic representations, and novels. You will expand your knowledge of the literature of the Holocaust, Eastern and Western European Jewish communities, the origins and development of antisemitism, the establishment of labor and extermination camps, resistance movements, and the Holocaust as a problem for world history. There is more than one way to take this course: You can complete all of the activities (and earn a Verified Certificate) or only the activities that are most interesting to you. Whatever you choose to do, we encourage you to find a havruta (a study partner) in your community or in the Coursera community so that you can experience the course in a more interactive and meaningful way.

From the lesson

Establishment of the camps

In this module Profs. Baumgarten and Kenez discuss the establishment of labor and extermination camps, memorialization, Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men.

6.1.1 The heart of the matter10:56

6.1.2 From labor to extermination13:24

6.1.3 Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka11:28

6.1.4 The task of killing6:22

6.1.5 Auschwitz11:15

6.1.6 Who knew about the murders?8:36

Meet the Instructors

Murray Baumgarten
Distinguished Professor of English & Comparative Literature
Literature
Peter Kenez
Professor Emeritus
History

All right.

Then, in the late fall of 1941 and

in early 1942 three major camps were built,

first Belzec, and then Sobibor, and

then these two camps were ordered

in operation in the Spring of 1942.

The other one, the last one is Treblinka.

And these three camps together killed more people than Auschwitz.

The number here we are talking about, about a million and

a half people were murdered in these three camps.

These camps were different from Chelmno, inasmuch

as the work was done in stationary, facilities rather than in vans,

that there were actual gas chambers were built,

and therefore they were capable of dealing with much larger number of people.

They were much more efficient.

The remarkable thing about these camps was that

how few Germans you needed to carry out the job.

Auschwitz would be different, because Auschwitz was on a larger scale, and

Auschwitz was a labor camp also, and consequently,

there was a great deal of administration, an overseer and guards, and

Auschwitz required a larger number of German investment than these three camps.

These camps also used carbon monoxide for killing.

Now, the interesting,

by the way, this was called the Reinhardt program, the Reinhardt camps,

in honor of Reinhardt Heydrich, who was perhaps

the second most important figure in the history of the Holocaust after Hitler.

I will be talking about him next time, when I talk about Wannsee,

because it was he who presided over that meeting.

And he was assassinated in Prague in 1942, and so

it was in his honor that these camps were regarded as the Reinhardt Program,

but that's not terribly important.

What is interesting and what is important about these camps,

the human material, the Trawniki, I don't know,

maybe we should write on the program, Trawniki.

The reason we were called Trawniki is because there was a camp

where these people were trained.

Now when I say these people, they're auxiliaries.

We are talking about approximately 3,000 people who,

in the course of two or three years,

while these camps operated, provided the personnel.

These were auxiliaries.

These people were Ukrainians, Latvians,

Lithuanians, Estonians, and

they were found among other Soviet

prisoners of war, and they were asked to volunteer.

Now, life in Soviet prisoners of war camps were such

as I mentioned it before, something like 50% of the people died.

So volunteering to provide services at the extermination camp was a way to live.

Now, what are we to think of these people?

It is not clear, at the time when they volunteered,

that was perfectly clear to them what was expected.

Now, they must, that is,

that they would be actually responsible for pushing people into gas chambers.

On the other hand, in their training at this camp in Trawniki when

they received instructions, they also experimented by actually shooting people,

which may have given them a hint of what was expected of them.

By and large these people came from

the lower levels of native societies.

That is, by and large, they were not intellectual, so to speak.

Simple people with little education.

And they provided a great help for

the Germans, because this is one of the striking aspect of the Holocaust,

is that killing between 5.5 and 6 million people were carried

out with such little investment of German human material.

Now, I mean, don't forget, the war was going on, and the army needed men.

The German war industry needed laborers,

so this is a reoccurring problem for the Germans,

to find people to carry out their various tasks.

And, consequently, whenever they could, they found auxiliaries.

Again, it's interesting that the auxiliaries did not include Poles.

All the camps were in Poland, but the auxiliaries were not Polish.

And the reason for that is because the Germans had such low opinion of Poles.

So then, perhaps not surprising,

as these people provided the labor, provided

the task which was expected of them and for that they received privileges.

Privilege meaning that they had more to eat,

they had a much better chance of survival.

They became increasingly brutal.

It seems to me that when you perform such tasks,

this brutalizes you, brutalizes you in the sense that

you must hate those people that you are killing.

This is a kind of self-justification, because otherwise you would feel badly

about yourself that I am killing perfectly innocent people.

Now, why were these extermination camps set up?

First of all, because of their efficiency they were efficient in killing.

Second, because they saved on German material.

The task would be carried out with few people.

Many of them, most of them, are not even German.

And also, because it was easier on the perpetrators.

That is, there was considerable discussion about the German high command of

what it does to the good German soldiers actually to shoot people,

including children and women and old people, that this was bad for

them, and it's much easier to do them in gas chambers.

That is, the extermination camps were set up not to make

the Jews suffering any less, but to make

the suffering, so to speak, of the perpetrators less.

It was easier, it was less personal.

Well, the Trawniki again provides

us with interesting moral issues,

namely, were these people genuine volunteers?

Well, yes, they did volunteer, and they had the option of saying no,

I actually prefer to go back to the prisoner of war camp.

There's no reason to think that at the outset they were more antisemitic.

They did not choose to do what they were doing because they hated Jews so much.

Not quite, it should be a W and there is no C.

>> I'll rewrite it.

>> Something like that.

>> But you're a better speller of such.

>> About concentration camps and

extermination camps, yes.

That's better, that's good.

Well, so these were the people who was

really the face of extermination.

That is, the Demjanjuks of this world.

You remember the story of Demjanjuk, who came to the United States,

was an auto worker, then he was arrested because he was recognized.

He was called Ivan the Terrible.

His name was Ivan, that's why he was called Ivan the Terrible.

And they said that he worked at Treblinka,

and he was sent to Israel.

And in Israel he was freed because it turns

out that he was not performing his job in Sobibor.

Later on it turns out that actually he did perform the task

in Treblinka rather than in Sobibor, and so, well.

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