The Trawniki Forced Labour Camp

The SS and Police Leader’s office in Lublin formally established the SS forced labour camp at Trawniki in spring 1943. A Jewish forced labour camp, however, had already existed in the village for approximately two years. It was created in autumn 1941 at roughly the same time as the neighbouring SS training camp. The two institutions were closely connected: they stood beside one another, shared the same commandant, and the auxiliary guards trained at the SS camp were deployed to supervise Jewish prisoners in the labour camp.

These guards, generally known as Trawniki men, were mainly former non-commissioned officers and rank-and-file soldiers of the Red Army who had fallen into German captivity following the invasion of the Soviet Union. The Germans recruited them as auxiliary forces. The SS training camp was subordinate to Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader in the Lublin District. Its establishment followed an order issued by Heinrich Himmler on 25 July 1941, which called for police cooperation with ethnic Germans, Latvians, Lithuanians and, above all, Ukrainians.

At times, two battalions with an intended strength of approximately 1,000 men were stationed at Trawniki. Altogether, around 5,000 auxiliaries passed through the training camp. After their instruction, the Germans deployed them in forced labour camps, during ghetto liquidation operations and at the killing centres of Operation Reinhard: Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka.

Development of the Jewish Forced Labour Camp

During its initial phase, the Jewish labour camp held several hundred people from nearby ghettos, including Piaski and Chełm. They were forced to work in the camp and surrounding area. A major increase in the prisoner population began in March 1942, when the Bełżec killing centre became operational. Part of the property stolen from Jews murdered during Operation Reinhard was transported to the material depot at Trawniki, where prisoners had to sort, process and prepare it for further use.

The Germans increasingly sent Jewish deportees from Germany, Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Trawniki. The living conditions were catastrophic. Many prisoners died from hunger, illness and exhaustion. Others were eventually deported from Trawniki to Bełżec and murdered.

The camp expanded rapidly again towards the end of 1942. A brush factory was transferred from the transit ghetto at Międzyrzec Podlaski to Trawniki, together with its entire Jewish workforce of approximately 800 people. Workshops operated by the Schultz company and their Jewish workers were then relocated from Warsaw. Trawniki became a branch of Ostindustrie GmbH, usually known as Osti, an SS-owned industrial enterprise created to exploit Jewish forced labour and property.

The transfer of the Schultz workshops took approximately two months and was completed on 6 June 1943. On 18 August 1943, the company reported that 6,350 Jewish prisoners were employed in its Trawniki enterprises.

In addition to Jews deported from Warsaw, prisoners arrived in early 1943 from the Netherlands, Białystok, Minsk and Smolensk. Some had first been deported to the Sobibór killing centre and selected for forced labour directly on the arrival platform. Instead of being immediately murdered, they were transported to Trawniki.

Approximately 1,000 prisoners were employed directly by the SS rather than in the Schultz production facilities. Many were transferred to Dorohucza, a satellite labour camp located about six kilometres from Trawniki. Osti established this camp in spring 1943 on marshy land. It functioned as a punitive camp where Jewish prisoners were forced to cut peat under extremely harsh and frequently lethal conditions.

The number of prisoners at Trawniki remained relatively stable until November 1943. It is therefore assumed that approximately 6,000 Jewish men, women and children from Trawniki were murdered during Operation Harvest Festival. Over the slightly more than two years of the camp’s existence, more than 20,000 Jewish prisoners passed through it.