The supervisory and execution staff is very small. The murder site is
commanded by an SS-man with the rank of gendarmerie captain (surname
Bauer?).⁹⁵⁸ The German personnel, consisting of SS-men, are terrified of their
“boss”. Whenever they spot him from afar they begin to hurry the working
Jews and the victims on their way to death with even more eagerness. There
is a total of ten Germans and the number of Ukrainians is thirty.
The German crew members change from time to time. Sometimes
SS-men from various towns in the “General Government”, where they work
at the “resettlement”, come to the camp.
Aside from the German–Ukrainian Lagerschutz there is also the Jewish
auxiliary service, some of whose members are employed on the square where
clothes of the murdered are sorted (Lumpensortierungsplatz), while others work
as gravediggers, emptying the execution chambers and burying the dead. The
remainder attend to the newly arrived on the arrival square. Team leaders,
whom the Germans call kapos, lead the individual groups of the Jewish auxiliary
service. They are better nourished, [27] and for distinction they have
yellow triangular patches on the knees of their trousers. The number of people
in the Jewish auxiliary service changes almost every day. It is very unusual
for a Jew to last more than two weeks in this service due to the inhumane
treatment by the Germans. The Jews are incessantly maltreated and whipped.
Corporal punishments (25 blows) are frequent and the weakened, no longer
able to work, are shot. The boss himself usually takes care of that. Every day
after lunch there is a roll call for those unable to work. When the German
asks who no longer feels able to work, a few step out of the row and notify
the commander about their inability, asking him, as if for mercy, to shoot
them. The executions are conducted at a special site, where the victim has
to stand upright at the edge of the grave. The commander then shoots from
a revolver at the back of the individual’s head. The next victim has to approach
and push the murdered man’s body into the pit only to share his successors’
fate a few moments later. These young Jews are so overworked that all their
will to resist is suppressed and the German terror is so terrible that it forces
them to swiftly give up their life to avoid further inhumane torture. In early
September the Treblinka commandant murdered 500 young Jews in one day,
958 The first commandant of Treblinka II was Irmfried Eberl, followed by Franz Stangl from
August 1942 to August 1943 and Kurt Franz from August to November 1943.
