Treblinka death camp
Rare Holocaust related German issued Ausweis.
The term Holocaust comes from the Greek and is related to the ancient times of making a burnt offering to the gods. The ancient Hebrews and other pagan cultures in the old days would offer sacrifices to the gods, that were consumed entirely by fire. This we can find reference to in the Old Testament as well. The term Holocaust, as it is customarily referred to in modern times would refer, first at the end of the 19th Century to the Christian Armenians killed by Muslims then later to the destruction of Europe’s Jews some 40 years later, in the 20th Century. The Hebrew wording for Holocaust is Shoah (שואה) and is widely accepted today in Israel and abroad as the massacre and destruction of close to 2/3 of Europe’s Jews from the period of 1941 to 1945, were Nazi Germany and it’s collaborators systematically, but not at first, worked together in the murder of about 6 million Jews in territory under Nazi or Axis control during World War II.
The Holocaust is seen today as an event that developed following the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in January of 1933 and that the destruction of Europe’s Jews did not come at first in the early years of Nazi Germany, but evolved in stages to its final outcome of the systematic murder of thousands upon thousands of men, women and children in special death camps erected for this purpose in 1942.
At first, the Jews were isolated from the general population in every place occupied by the Germans, be it first in Germany itself prior to 1939 then after war breaking out in September of that year, with abundant experience in persecution and isolation, they began to severe and separate the Jewish population from within the country they were living peacefully, well, not always, before occupation. The physical separation of the Jews in closed strictly supervised isolated locations within the large cities is called ghettoization, and this was the first step taken against the Jews. Other stages included in the physical removal of the Jews from the local population were the actual killing, the murder or massacre of entire populations by special death squads known as Einsatzgruppen towards the 3rd year of the war, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941 (Barbarossa). A better understanding can be found in this link here on the subject.
The article here will not be depicting a passport issued but of a German ID card that was prepared and used by a local in occupied Poland. What makes this item very special and horrifically unique is the location and time it was used at, making it a vital important contribution to the evidence that has been already accumulated in the past 70 plus years documenting the events that too place during the darkest moment of mankind in WWII.
The document here falls into the period of WWII were the Germans set out to destroy occupied Poland’s Jewish population in the General Government, and known as Operation Reinhard, a vital point in the Final Solution to the Jewish problem in Europe, as termed by the Nazis. In this period of time several death camps, killing factories, were erected:
In these locations about 2 million Jews were gassed to death, majority of them being sent from occupied Poland and other sections of Western Europe.
The document in the article here is connected to the Treblinka Death Camp:
One of the earliest of the first 3 main death camps mentioned above, it began to operate, at first, as a forced labor camp known as Treblinka I, on September 1st 1941. It’s deadliest form and purpose as a killing facility using gas in the “processing” of killing its victims was in 1942, when it began to develop into an actual death camp being operational in July, about 3 months after its construction. July 23rd saw the first shipments of Jews being sent from the Warsaw Ghetto, the first major transport known as Grossaktion Warsaw (added an image of a postcard sent from the ghetto to the Soviet Union).
Treblinka was located about 80km north-west from the former Polish capital Warsaw and about 4km from a small little train station of Malkinia. This is the place were Polish resistance fighter, part of the underground Armia Krajowa and Malkinia station master Franciszek Ząbecki sent vital information on the activities in the neighboring camp to the Polish underground in order to alert the world of what was taking place (have added an image of his German issued Railway ID (source: Wikipedia)). The train station was also a small border-control station for trains coming in with regular passengers from the East – see image taken from a German passport.
German Ausweis number 65 was issued by the central General Government’s fuel supply for non-German employees of the Ostbahn (Brennstoffversorgung der nichtdeutschen Bediensteten der Ostbahn) – the German railways operating in occupied Poland during the war – on November 11th 1941. The document here was issued to Marian Brzezicki who according to the typed text was an employee at the coal distribution point at Malkinia. This would mean that he was in charge of making sure the trains arriving to and leaving from the death camp would be adequately supplied with coal, ensuring they ran in time and did not run out of “fuel” when delivering their cargo! The document was extended every 2-3 months until September of 1942, already into the period of the deportations from Warsaw, and most likely we can assume, that he was aware, at some point already, of the activities taking place only 4km down the road…
Smaller image source: Wikipedia.
Thank you for reading “Our Passports”.
Andy
Is the reverse of the postcard available?