The Trawniki students received specialized training of no predetermined length of time. It could last several months or several weeks depending on the SS need for auxiliary guards. The training included: general guard procedures; German language lessons focusing on understanding basic commands in German; firearms instruction in the use and care of German-issued rifles, pistols, machine guns, submachine guns, and grenades; crowd control and roundup techniques; and German ideology. Like all military units, the recruits marched and sang (German songs).
The SS organized the trainees into platoons of from 35 to 40 men, and companies of from 90 to 120. Whenever possible, company commanders and platoon leaders were ethnic Germans. As an incentive, Streibel established a ranking system with appropriate pay increases from private (
Each Trawniki student got a rifle for use on training assignments, but their superior officers took the guns back at night. Just because the SS needed POW guards didn’t mean they trusted them. Platoon commanders, usually ethnic Germans, carried pistols.
An important part of Trawniki training included fieldwork during which students were evaluated. Trainees guarded local concentration and work camps for Jews. They went on Jew-hunting raids in local villages under the supervision of the German police. If they were sent on a shooting operation rather than a roundup, they were expected to fire and kill. Between three and four hundred Trawniki men, for example, took part in the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto from June to September 1942. And in August 1942 in Lomazy, Poland, fifty Trawniki men working with the German police were ordered to kill seventeen hundred Jews. With a vodka bottle in one hand and a gun in the other, they shot them all.
In some instances, individual trainees were ordered to shoot a Jew eyeball to eyeball as a test of grit and loyalty. “A German officer led our platoon into the woods,” a former Trawniki man explained after the war. “We were sent in groups of ten to stand next to groups of ten Jews. The Jews stood in a single line. We were then ordered to shoot a Jew.” There is no evidence to suggest, however, that each trainee
If Trawniki trainees needed Jews to practice on, they didn’t have far to go. Trawniki was a multi-use facility that included the guard training school, a concentration-work camp for Jews, and an F. W. Schultz and Company factory that made mattresses and furs, and repaired boots and uniforms for the German army. Each day, the SS rented out to the Schultz factory four to six thousand Jewish workers, at five zlotys a head for men and four for women. That was enough money to pay the salaries of the Trawniki men who guarded them.
Maintaining discipline in the ranks of the Trawniki men was a constant, vexing problem and grew worse as the Soviets began to defeat the Germans and push them west toward Poland. Between 1942 and 1945, at least one thousand (20 percent) Trawniki men deserted or tried to desert. Those who were caught were punished. If they offered armed resistance, they were court-martialed and executed. If they didn’t resist, they got a few weeks in the brig before rejoining their platoons. There were several guard mutinies at the camps. Stealing Jewish valuables from the storage bins was a common crime. So were curfew violations and AWOLs to local villages for vodka and women. Like typhus, drunkenness and theft were epidemic.
Most of the desertions occurred once it became clear that the Red Army was winning its war with Germany. The motives for fleeing were far from noble. Some feared being executed by the Germans as war crimes eyewitnesses or by the Soviets as traitors; for others, the dwindling number of new Jewish prisoners presented fewer opportunities to steal and simple boredom.
Although Trawniki men were called SS guards and were subject to court-martial for major infractions like deserting with armed resistance, or stealing gold and jewels from the storage rooms, or telling villagers what was going on inside the death camps, they were not members of the SS and, therefore, were
Although the SS executed guards who dipped into the heaps of cash and jewels stolen from the Jews, they closed their eyes to minor pilfering and trading food for valuables with the prisoners, thereby providing the Trawniki men additional sources of spending money. Families of the civilian Trawniki volunteers from Poland, Belorussia, and Ukraine could even apply for support benefits.
There was no graduation ceremony for the Trawniki men. When the SS thought a trainee was ready and needed, they posted him out as a private or
A Trawniki man could be assigned a cushy security job guarding an estate housing SS brass, an airplane factory, a bridge, or a warehouse filled with stolen Jewish property. He could be posted to any of the hundreds of local concentration or labor camps without gas chambers, or to a camp with gas chambers, like Majdanek. He could be assigned to ride shotgun on transport trains carrying Jews to Belzec, Sobibor, or Treblinka, or to help the SS process and gas the Jews taken there. Each death camp employed between ninety and 180 Trawniki men at any given time.
Once posted, the Trawniki man retained organizational ties to his alma mater, which had the authority to recall, retrain, and repost him as needed.
In late October 1943, Himmler got a bad case of jitters. The uprisings in Treblinka (August) and Sobibor (October) stunned him. Jews actually fighting back? He ordered both camps razed, all documents destroyed, and all buried corpses dug up and burned. Then, under the cynical name Operation Harvest Festival, Himmler ordered the SS in the Lublin district to exterminate every Jew still in a work camp and to ferret out those who were hiding and shoot them. The order included an estimated six thousand Jews at the Trawniki concentration-work camp.
The following summer, 1944, the German police and SS staff at Trawniki fled west in advance of the Red Army. The approximately eight hundred Trawniki men stationed at the camp at the time had a choice. They could either desert or follow the SS and regroup. To remain in the camp would be suicide. The Red Army would execute them before they could say “Joseph Stalin.”
A few Trawniki guards disappeared into the woods, but the vast majority followed their SS bosses and were reassigned to guard camps and facilities in the west, primarily at Flossenburg and Sachsenhausen. By the time the Red Army got to Trawniki in July 1944, the camp complex was a ghost town of barbed wire and empty barracks and offices. All the file cards with names, identity numbers, and postings had been destroyed by order of Commandant Streibel. Approximately twelve hundred (around 20 percent) of the personnel files survived the war.
The Trawniki story had a mixed ending. The British captured Major General Globocnik, but he crunched a cyanide capsule before they could jail him. In 1970, Karl Streibel and five other Trawniki SS officers went on trial in Hamburg. All were acquitted, claiming they were just following orders, had never killed or brutalized any civilian, and didn’t know what was going on down the tracks at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, even though transports crammed with Jews on the way to the death camps rolled by the camp nearly every day.
For their part, the Soviets tried and convicted as many as one thousand Trawniki men well into the 1960s. Some were executed. Others, like Ignat Danilchenko, were sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labor in a Siberian gulag.
In the final analysis, the Trawniki men had been indispensable to Operation Reinhard and its extermination processes and machinery. For the most part, they were good at their jobs. Supervised by fewer than two hundred SS officers, they helped rob and kill 1.7 million Polish Jews in less than three years (approximately two thousand a day).
In his letter recommending SS Captain Karl Streibel for a promotion to major, General Globocnik wrote:
