One of the most sadistic perpetrators of the Holocaust, a Soviet prisoner of war turned SS auxiliary guard known to survivors as “Ivan the Terrible,” personally tortured, mutilated and murdered thousands of Jewish men, women and children at the Treblinka extermination camp before vanishing without ever facing justice for his crimes.
Ivan Marchenko, born on March 2, 1911, in the Ukrainian village of Salijova, then part of the Russian Empire, has been identified by historians and Soviet archives as the man behind a litany of atrocities so extreme that even fellow camp personnel testified to his singular brutality during the deadliest phase of Nazi Germany’s genocidal campaign in occupied Poland.
Marchenko’s path to Treblinka began far from the killing fields. Before the Second World War he married, fathered three children and worked as a miner to support his family. He was drafted into the Red Army infantry on May 27, 1941, and captured by German forces on July 10 of that same year, just weeks after Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union across a front stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
Some 5. 7 million Soviet Red Army troops fell into German hands during the war, and roughly 3. 3 million of them, about 57 percent, were dead by the time the conflict ended.
Soviet prisoners of war were second only to Jews as the largest group of victims of Nazi racial policy. Marchenko, however, was not killed. He was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Chelm, Poland, and in October 1941 was selected for the Trawniki training camp, where the Nazis inducted Soviet prisoners into auxiliary police units.
Between September 1941 and September 1942, some 2,500 auxiliary guards were trained at Trawniki. Virtually all of them were Soviet prisoners of war. Their deployment became a key function of the so-called Final Solution, the mass murder of Europe’s Jews.
Trawniki-trained men supplied guard units for the Operation Reinhardt killing centers at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, and they were used in deportation operations from large and small ghettos across German-occupied Poland, including Warsaw, Lublin and Krakow, as well as escorts for transport trains bound for the death camps.
By February 1942, Marchenko was rounding up Jews in Lublin for the death camps. In May 1942 he was sent to Treblinka, the third killing center established under Operation Reinhardt after Belzec and Sobibor. Treblinka was constructed in the summer of 1942, and deportations there came mainly from the ghettos of the Warsaw and Radom districts, continuing until the spring of 1943.
Among the most prominent deportations were approximately 7,000 Jews transported from the Warsaw Ghetto after its liquidation following the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.
Operation Reinhardt itself was the deadliest face of Nazi Germany’s intention to commit genocide against the Jewish people. Launched in the fall of 1941 in German-occupied Poland, the operation aimed to systematically murder two million Jews residing in the so-called General Government. In the end, approximately 1.
5 million Jews were murdered under the operation across the three killing centers.
At Treblinka, the process of selection and murder was carefully planned and organized. Incoming trains of about 50 to 60 cars bound for the killing center first stopped at the Malkinia railway station, where 20 cars at a time were detached and brought inside. Guards ordered victims to disembark in a reception area containing the railway siding and a platform.
A building erected there 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 deportees had arrived at a transit camp and were required to hand over all valuables. The reception area contained a fenced-in deportation square with two barracks in which men were separated from women and children and forced to undress. It also contained large storerooms where 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 chambers in the killing area. It was known as “the tube.” Victims were forced to run naked along this path to 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 inside were dead.
One Holocaust survivor, Yosef Charney, 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,” he recalled.
“I remember some people going stark raving mad. They were drinking urine. They actually did that.”
Charney broke down crying as he continued: “I remember Hannah and Gita, two of my three sisters, crying out ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ but I couldn’t find them.” While Yosef survived Treblinka, his three sisters were murdered there.
As one survivor remembered of the gas chambers, the dead bodies “just leaned against each other” because there was not an inch of free space. At each gas chamber there were five or six Germans besides the motorists, along with their dogs. The motorists were the Trawniki guards who operated the gas chambers, driving people into the corridors with clubs and lashes.
After the war, Yechiel Reichmann, a survivor of Treblinka, testified that when guards did not expect a new shipment of prisoners for several days, they would seal victims inside the 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,” he said, shuddering 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 that to around 30 minutes later as they refined and mastered the horrors of mass genocide. Victims too weak or ill to reach the gas chambers on their own were told they would receive medical attention. Members of the Sonderkommando, groups of Jews forced to work in the crematorium, carried them to a camouflaged area disguised as a small clinic using a Red Cross flag.
There, SS Corporal Willi Mentz shot the victims into an open pit.
It was at Treblinka that Marchenko’s barbarism earned him the nickname “Ivan Grozny,” Polish for “Ivan the Terrible.” As a motorist filling the gas chambers, he beat those condemned to death with his lash, 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 the window with a smile on his face to see how the asphyxiation process was coming along.
Marchenko was, according to testimony, an expert in killing people with a water pipe. After the war, his former colleague testified that Marchenko killed a physically strong man with one blow of the pipe. He was also described as a sexual deviant who, with his sword, would stab women’s thighs and genitals on their way to the gas chambers, and sometimes raped them.
He frequently used his sword to cut off the breasts of women as well as noses and ears, which he nailed to the walls. He also gouged out victims’ eyes.
At Treblinka, “Ivan the Terrible” also had a dog trained to tear off parts of human bodies on command. Marchenko would call to the dog, which was trained to snap off genitals, then point at someone, and the dog would tear off the sexual organ as blood flowed all over the place.
Another survivor of Treblinka, Pinchas Epstein, later testified that Ivan took special pleasure in slashing pregnant women with a sword and in splitting open skulls with an iron pipe. “He was insatiable,” Epstein said. One day a young girl about 12 to 14 years old 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, 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 smashing its skull against the wall.
In early 1943, Jewish inmates organized a resistance group. As camp operations neared completion, prisoners feared they would be killed and the camp dismantled. During the late spring and summer of 1943, resistance leaders decided to revolt.
On August 2, 1943, prisoners quietly seized weapons from the camp armory, but 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 military units.
Surviving prisoners were forced to dismantle the camp under the supervision of German SS and police personnel acting on orders from Odilo Globocnik. After completion of the job, German authorities shot the prisoners. By the time the Treblinka killing center was dismantled in the fall of 1943, 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 there.
After returning to the Trawniki camp in August 1943, Marchenko left for the city of Trieste, Italy, where he guarded German warehouses at the port, garnered the Trawniki training and took part in the roundup of Italian citizens for forced labor in Germany. Marchenko was last seen coming out of a brothel in the Adriatic city of Fiume in March 1945, after which he 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 auto worker 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.
The identification of Marchenko as the man behind the atrocities at Treblinka closes one of the darkest chapters of the Holocaust, yet it also underscores a painful truth: one of the most prolific and sadistic killers of the Nazi genocide was never captured, never tried and never punished. There were no tears shed for Ivan Marchenko.