Liquidation of the camp

Treblinka II - Liquidation of the camp

After the uprising in the camp, Stangl was transferred to a unit fighting partisans in Italy. Wirth and Globocnik covered up the rebellion in Treblinka and the collective escape of the prisoners. They did not submit an official report on the issue in Berlin. In mid-August or at the end of August 1943, Kurt Franz took over the management of the camp. At that time, several transports from the Białystok ghetto arrived at the camp ramp. The deportees were gassed in chambers intact during the uprising. The transports that were accepted on the ramp at that time had only 10 wagons each. The last transport arrived on 23 August 1943 and consisted of 39 wagons. All the deportees were Jews from Białystok.

The liquidation of the seriously damaged camp and its complete razing to the ground lasted until 17 November 1943. 25-30 prisoners from the last unit – Restkommando, who lived in two railway wagons, were shot. Jews were taken in small groups to the edge of the forest, where Franz, Bredow and Mentz shot them with arrows into the occipital bone. Ukrainian watchmen burned their bodies on a small grate built specifically for this purpose.

The grounds where human ashes were buried was ploughed and planted with lupine. The camp bakery was rebuilt into a house for a Ukrainian family whose task was to protect the ground, which now resembled a farm. The farmhouse was built from the bricks of the demolished gas chambers. In the second half of July 1944, before the arrival of the Red Army, the family set fire to the house with farm buildings and evacuated towards Warsaw.