The Fall of 1941, German-occupied Poland. Under the codename „Operation
Reinhard„ Nazi Germany implements a plan to systematically murder 2 million Jews
residing in the so-called General Government. This action marks the deadliest phase of Nazi
Germany’s intention to commit genocide against the Jewish people and in the end,
approximately 1.5 million Jews will be murdered under this operation in three
killing centers - Bełżec, Sobibor, and Treblinka - which are opened in order
to achieve the goals of the operation. One of the most infamous perpetrators of
this secret German plan responsible for torturing men, women, children,
and babies before pushing them into the gas chamber at the Treblinka death camp becomes
a man who for his cruelty will become known as “Ivan the Terrible”. His name is Ivan Marchenko.
Ivan Marchenko was born on the 2nd of March 1911, in the Ukrainian village of
Serhijowga then part of the Russian Empire. Before the start of the Second World War,
Marchenko got married and became a father of three children.
To support his family, he worked as the miner in the village.
The Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded
Poland. Britain and France stood by their guarantee of Poland's border and declared
war on Germany 2 days later. However, Poland found itself fighting a two front war when
the Soviet Union invaded the country from the east on the 17th of September. The
Polish government fled the country that same day and after heavy shelling and bombing,
Warsaw officially surrendered to the Germans on the 28th of September 1939. In accordance with
the secret protocol to their non-aggression pact, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland on
the 29th of September and the last resistance of Polish units ended on the 6th of October.
Less than 2 years later on the 22nd of June, 1941, Nazi Germany, under the codename
Operation Barbarossa, invades the Soviet Union, its ally in the war against Poland.
Three army groups counting more than 3 million German soldiers attacked the
Soviet Union across a broad front stretching from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black
Sea in the south. The soldiers were supported by additional 650,000 troops from Germany’s allies.
In the first six weeks after the German attack the Soviet Union
saw catastrophic military losses and the German armies eventually captured
some 5,7 million Soviet Red Army troops during the Second World War.
Among them was Ivan Marchenko who had entered the Red Army infantry on the 27th of May 1941
and was captured by the Germans on the 10th of July of the same year.
Some 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, or about 57 percent of those taken prisoner,
were dead by the end of the war. Second only to the Jews,
Soviet prisoners of war were the largest group of victims of Nazi racial policy.
However, Marchenko was not killed. Instead, he was sent to
a prisoner-of-war camp "A" in Chełm, Poland and in October 1941, he was selected for Trawniki
camp, where the Nazis trained prisoners-of-war to work as SS guards. SS and police officials
inducted, processed, and trained 2,500 auxiliary police guards known as Trawniki men at Trawniki
training camp between September 1941 and September 1942. Virtually all of
them had been Soviet prisoners of war. Deployment in the operations of the
"Final Solution" -which was the mass murder of Europe’s Jews - became a key function of the
Trawniki-trained guards. The Trawniki men provided the guard units for the Operation Reinhard killing
centers at Bełżec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. German SS and police authorities deployed the
Trawniki men in the deportation operations from both large and small ghettos in German-occupied
Poland and as escorts for the transport trains from ghettos to the killing centers. Among the
ghettos in which Trawniki-trained guards were deployed were also Warsaw, Lublin, and Krakow.
By February 1942, Ivan Marchenko was rounding up Jews in Lublin for the death camps.
In May of 1942, Marchenko was sent to Treblinka extermination camp which was
constructed in the summer of 1942. It was the third killing center,
after Bełżec and Sobibor, established by Operation Reinhard authorities.
Deportations to Treblinka came mainly from the ghettos of Warsaw and Radom districts in the
General Government and continued until the spring of 1943. Most prominent among the deportations
were the approximately 7,000 Jews transported from the Warsaw ghetto after its liquidation
following the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. A Holocaust survivor Josef Czarny, whose parents
died in the Warsaw Ghetto, remembered after the war how at the age of 16 he was transferred to
Treblinka where he spent 10 months: “When the Ukrainian Trawniki guards came to lock the door
they used a board to push in the mass of flesh. We were crushed, crammed together, absolutely stuck
together as one flesh. I remember some people going stark raving mad. They were drinking urine,
they actually did that,″ Czarny added, and broke down crying. He later continued: ″I remember
Hannah and Gita - two of my 3 sisters - crying out ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ but I couldn’t find them.″
While Josef survived Treblinka, his 3 sisters were murdered there immediately after arrival.
At Treblinka, the process of selection and murder was carefully planned and organized.
Incoming trains of about 50 or 60 cars bound for the killing center first stopped at the Malkinia
railway station. Twenty cars at a time were detached from the train and brought into the
killing center. The guards ordered the victims to disembark in the reception area, which contained
the railway siding and platform. One building erected on the platform was disguised as a railway
station, complete with a wooden clock, timetables, destination signs and even a fake ticket office.
German SS and police personnel announced that the deportees had arrived at a transit camp
and they were required to hand over all valuables. The reception area contained a
fenced-in "deportation square" with two barracks in which deportees—with men separated from women
and children—had to undress. It also contained large storerooms. This is where the possessions
relinquished by victims were sorted and stored before being shipped to Germany via Lublin.
A camouflaged, fenced-in path led from the reception area to the gas chamber,
located in the killing area. This was known as the “tube”. Victims were forced
to run naked along this path to the gas chambers, deceptively labeled as showers.
Once the chamber doors were sealed, a large diesel engine installed outside the building pumped in
carbon monoxide exhaust fumes. Within 25 minutes at the most, all lay stretched down dead or,
to be more accurate, were standing up dead since there was not an inch of free space
as one Holocaust survivor remembered. The dead bodies just leaned against each other.
During all this time, the Germans would compete with the Trawniki guards in
brutality towards the people selected to die. At each gas chamber there were 5 or 6 Germans
besides the motorists with their dogs. Motorists were the Trawniki guards who operated the gas
chambers. With clubs and lashes they drove the people into the corridor of the gas chambers.
After the war, Yehiel Reichman, a survivor of Treblinka testified: “When guards didn’t
expect a new shipment of prisoners to arrive for several days, they would seal victims
inside gas chambers to suffocate. The victims would die by themselves. When they opened the
chambers 48 hours later, all the bodies were black. Everything was one solid mass. I shudder
at how it was possible to have a two-legged animal capable of perpetrating such deeds. ″
At the beginning the Nazis claimed to be able to ‘process’ a train of around
3,000 people in about three hours, reducing this
to around 30 mins later on as they refined and mastered the horrors of mass genocide.
Victims who were too weak or ill to reach the gas chambers on their own were told they would receive
medical attention. Members of the Sonderkommando, which were groups of Jews forced to work in the
crematorium, carried them to a camouflaged area, which was disguised as a small clinic
using a Red Cross flag. There, SS Corporal Willi Mentz shot the victims in an open pit.
At Treblinka, Marchenko’s barbarism earned him the nickname "Ivan Grozny,"
Polish for "Ivan the Terrible”. As a motorist, while filling the
gas chambers he beat with a lash those condemned to death, shouting, ‘Faster, faster, the water
will get cold, others still have to go under the showers!’. While the motor was running he would
look through a window with a smile on his face to see how the asphyxiation process was coming along.
Marchenko was an expert in killing people with the water-pipe. After the war, his former colleague
testified how Marchenko, with one blow of the pipe, killed a physically strong man.
Ivan Marchenko was also a sexual deviant. With his sword he would stab women's
thighs and genitals on their way to the gas chambers and sometimes he also raped them.
He frequently used his sword to cut off the breasts of women as well as noses and ears.
The ears he would then nail to the walls. In addition, he used to gouge out victims eyes.
At Treblinka, Ivan the Terrible had a dog that would tear off parts of human bodies on command.
Marchenko would call to this dog, which was trained to snap off genitals, and point at someone
and the dog would tear off the sexual organ, and the blood would flow all over the place.
Another survivor of Treblinka, Pinhas Epstein later testified “Ivan took special pleasure in
slashing pregnant women with a sword and in splitting open skulls with an iron pipe. He
was insatiable. One day a young girl about 12 to 14 emerged alive from the gas chamber sobbing,
"I want my mother." Ivan turned to one of the Jewish workers and ordered him to rape
her. The worker refused and so he and the girl were taken to a burial pit and shot”.
On another occasion Marchenko was seen grabbing an infant from a naked woman
before she entered a gas chamber and ″smash its skull against the wall.″
In early 1943, Jewish inmates organized a resistance group. When camp operations
neared completion, the prisoners feared they would be killed and the camp dismantled. During
the late spring and summer of 1943, the resistance leaders decided to revolt and
on the 2nd of August 1943, prisoners quietly seized weapons from the camp armory. However,
after they were discovered before they could take over the camp, hundreds of prisoners stormed the
main gate in an attempt to escape. Many were killed by machine-gun fire but more than 300 did
escape—though two-thirds of them were eventually tracked down and killed by German SS and police,
as well as by military units. Surviving prisoners were forced to dismantle the camp. They were
supervised by German SS and police personnel, who were acting upon orders from Odilo Globocnik and
after completion of this job, the German SS and police authorities shot the prisoners.
By the time the Treblinka killing center was dismantled in the fall of 1943, the camp
personnel had murdered an estimated 925,000 Jews, as well as an unknown number of Poles,
Roma people, and Soviet prisoners of war. All traces of the camp’s existence were
destroyed. Lupine flowers were sown on the grounds, and an ethnic German farmer was
installed on the property to camouflage the reality of what had occurred at this site.
After returning to Trawniki camp in August 1943, Marchenko left for the city of Trieste,
Italy, where he guarded German warehouses at the port, guarded the Trieste prison
and took part in round-up of Italian citizens for forced labour in Germany.
Marchenko was last seen coming out of a brothel in the Adriatic city of Fiume in March 1945,
and joined up with Yugoslav partisans to escape advancing Allied forces.
He was never heard from again and in the end, he never faced justice for his crimes.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, John Demjanjuk,
a retired suburban Cleveland autoworker of Ukrainian descent, was accused of being
Ivan the Terrible. He was tried in Israel in 1988 and sentenced to death, but the
conviction was overturned after Soviet archives identified Ivan Marchenko as Ivan the Terrible,
leading the Supreme Court of Israel to acquit Demjanjuk in 1993 because of reasonable doubt.
There were no tears shed for Ivan Marchenko.
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