In the fall of 1941, Nazi Germany implemented a plan under the code name Operation Reinhardt to systematically murder two million Jews living in the so-called General Government of German-occupied Poland. The operation marked the deadliest face of Nazi Germany's intention to commit genocide against the Jewish people. In the end, approximately 1.5 million Jews were murdered under this operation in three killing centers: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
One of the most infamous perpetrators of this secret plan became known for his cruelty as "Ivan the Terrible." His name was Ivan Marchenko.
Ivan Marchenko was born on March 2, 1911, in the Ukrainian village of Salijova, then part of the Russian Empire. Before the start of the Second World War, he married and became a father of three children. To support his family, he worked as a miner in the village.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Britain and France stood by their guarantee of Poland's border and declared war on Germany two days later. Poland, however, found itself fighting a two-front war when the Soviet Union invaded from the east on September 17.
The Polish government fled the country the same day. After heavy shelling and bombing, Warsaw officially surrendered to the Germans on September 28, 1939. In accordance with a secret protocol to their non-aggression pact, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland on September 29. The last resistance of Polish units ended on October 6.
Less than two years later, on June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union under the code name Operation Barbarossa. Three army units counting more than three million German soldiers attacked across a broad front stretching from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. They were supported by an additional 650,000 troops from Germany's allies.
In the first six weeks after the German attack, the Soviet Union saw catastrophic military losses. 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 May 27, 1941, and was captured by the Germans on July 10 of the same year.
Some 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 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. Marchenko, however, was not killed.
Instead, he was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Helm, Poland. In October 1941, he was selected for the Trawniki camp, where the Nazis trained prisoners of war to work as SS guards. SS and police officials inducted and trained 2,500 auxiliary police guards at the 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, 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 Reinhardt killing centers at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. German SS and police authorities deployed them in deportation operations from both large and small ghettos in German-occupied Poland, and as escorts for transport trains from ghettos to the killing centers. Among the ghettos in which Trawniki-trained guards were deployed were Warsaw, Lublin, and Krakow.
By February 1942, Ivan Marchenko was rounding up Jews in Lublin for the death camps. In May 1942, he was sent to the Treblinka extermination camp, which was constructed in the summer of 1942. It was the third killing center after Belzec and Sobibor established by Operation Reinhardt authorities.
Deportations to Treblinka came mainly from the ghettos of the Warsaw and Radom districts in the General Government and continued until the spring of 1943. Most prominent among the deportations were approximately 7,000 Jews transported from the Warsaw Ghetto after its liquidation following the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.
Holocaust survivor Josef 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 added, and broke down crying. He later 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.
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. A 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 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 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 chambers 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 were stretched out 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 toward the people selected to die. At each gas chamber there were five or six Germans besides the motorists and their dogs. The 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, Yahil Reichmann, a survivor of Treblinka, testified that when guards didn't expect a new shipment of prisoners to arrive 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 and everything was one solid mass. He shuddered 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 minutes 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, groups of Jews forced to work in the crematorium, carried them to the camouflaged area, which was disguised as a small clinic using a Red Cross flag. There, SS Corporal Willaments 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 his 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 the window with a smile on his face to see how the asphyxiation process was coming along.
Marchenko was an expert in killing people with a water pipe. After the war, his former colleague testified that 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 were then nailed to the walls. In addition, he used to gouge out the victims' eyes.
At Treblinka, Ivan the Terrible also had a dog that would tear off parts of human bodies on command. Marchenko would call to his dog, which was trained to snap off genitals, and then point at someone. The dog would tear off the sexual organ and the blood would flow all over the place.
Another survivor of Treblinka, Penis 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. 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, 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. 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. On August 2, 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 the 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 acting upon orders from Odilo Globocnik. 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 the site.
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. He later traveled to prison 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. He joined up with the 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. This led the Supreme Court of Israel to acquit Demjanjuk in 1993 because of reasonable doubt. There were no tears shed for Ivan Marchenko.