Auschwitz or Treblinka – Which Was the Most BRUTAL Nazi Concentration Camp?

There is a photograph taken in the summer of 1944 on the ramp at Birkenau. The photograph was taken by a member of the SS with a camera that should not have been there. And for decades no one knew exactly who had taken it or why. In the image there is a crowd of people, thousands of people who have just stepped down from the trains. They are standing in groups.

Children cling to adults. Some people carry suitcases. There is an elderly woman in the foreground looking directly at the camera. Although it is impossible to know whether she sees the photographer or is simply looking ahead toward the camp stretching out to her left. In the background the outlines of SS officers can be seen directing the crowd in different directions.

 Somewhere within what is happening in that image most of the visible people are less than two hours away from their own deaths. The photograph exists. Historians have studied it. The elderly woman in the foreground was never identified. In the summer of 1942 a freight train took between two and four days to travel from Warsaw to the eastern border of the Reich.

 During those days the people inside the cars had no water, no ventilation, nowhere to defecate. In July temperatures exceeded 40° inside the wooden freight cars sealed with barbed wire. Many died before arriving. Those who survived the journey stumbled out on their own legs, dehydrated, crushed by the weight of those who had died standing beside them, still unaware that this journey [music] had been the longest part of their lives.

 Because what came afterward lasted on average less than two hours. Two camps, two machines of death built with different logic, different purpose, and different design. One became the global symbol of the Holocaust. The other killed more people in less time, more directly, and for decades remained almost unknown outside specialized circles.

 Auschwitz and Treblinka are not equivalent or comparable in moral terms. Nothing that happened there allows for that kind of hierarchy. But they are comparable in terms of mechanism, scale, speed, and method. And that comparison reveals something history books rarely articulate with enough clarity. That within the Nazi system of extermination, >> [music] >> there existed two distinct philosophies of annihilation, each carried to its most lethal extreme.

 To understand how both camps came to exist, one must first understand that they were not born at the same time or for the same purpose. One was built upon [music] the structure of a pre-existing Polish labor camp and grew in layers, accumulating functions until it became something its own designers had not fully imagined at the beginning.

The other was built from scratch, in secret, in the middle of the forest, with a single purpose so specific that it did not even [music] have barracks for permanent prisoners. One was a bureaucratic empire with tens of thousands of detainees at the same time. The other was a factory of pure extermination that, in its most active weeks, killed more people than lived in many medium-sized European cities.

 The second was Treblinka. [music] To understand what each of those camps was in its most concrete dimension, one must begin with the ground, with the physical terrain, with what had been there before and what was built on top of it, with what materials, with whose labor, and with what declared purpose before the authorities who signed the construction permits.

 The first was Auschwitz. The camp was established in May 1940 in a former Polish army barracks complex on the outskirts of Oświęcim, an industrial city in Upper Silesia that Germany had annexed the previous year. The choice of location was not originally ideological. The buildings already existed. The place was relatively isolated.

 It had basic infrastructure, and it was well connected by rail. Rudolf Höss, who would be the camp commandant for most of its existence, recalled years later that when he arrived to inspect site, he saw deteriorated barracks, swamps around them, and a region plagued by mosquitoes. That was not a problem. It was exactly what they needed.

 The first prisoners arrived in June 1940. They were Poles, political prisoners, intellectuals, priests, and members of the resistance. At that stage, the camp was a concentration camp in the most classical sense of the term. A place where the regime interned people considered dangerous or undesirable, where forced labor under brutal conditions functioned as a form of control, punishment, and economic exploitation.

 Deaths were systematic, but they were not yet the central objective. The objective was to break, terrorize, extract labor, and keep the enemies of the Reich imprisoned. What distinguished Auschwitz, even in that early phase, was the particular cruelty with which the SS administered daily life. The system of prisoner functionaries, the so-called kapos, was implemented from the beginning.

Detainees who received certain privileges in exchange for supervising and disciplining the rest. Many of them carried out that role with a violence equal to or greater than that of the guards themselves. Beatings were routine. Arbitrary executions were frequent. Work in the drainage swamps around the camp killed prisoners within weeks.

 Hunger was calculated. The rations were designed so that the body would consume its own muscle mass within a predetermined period. In 1941, two things would permanently change the nature of the camp. But before those changes, it is necessary to pause for a moment on what already existed. It is necessary to understand the rhythm of an ordinary day in Auschwitz I, in 1940 and early 1941, before the camp became what it would become.

Because that daily rhythm was the foundation on which everything else was built. It was a rhythm designed to degrade. The day began at 4:30 in the morning in summer and at 5:00 in winter. A siren. The prisoners had 15 minutes to get up, use the latrines, each building had an assigned time, and exceeding that time could mean a beating and fall into formation.

The morning roll call, the appel, was one of the most effective tools of control in the system. All prisoners had to stand perfectly aligned without moving for as long as it took the SS to count them. If the count did not match, if someone had died during the night and the body had not been properly reported, if one number did not add up, the formation continued.

 Some roll calls lasted for hours. There was one in the winter of 1940 after a prisoner escaped that lasted 19 hours in sub-zero temperatures. 12 prisoners died of cold during that roll call standing at attention. After the morning appel came work. The work details marched out toward their assigned posts with the music of the camp orchestra playing in rhythm to keep the pace.

 The orchestra was not an element of humanization. It was a mechanism of control. The rhythm of the march determined the speed of the column. And the SS man supervising the gate could count exactly how many prisoners left and how many returned. If the numbers did not match at the evening appel, the consequences fell on the entire work detail.

 The work was deliberately unproductive in many cases. Groups of prisoners moved tons of earth from one point to another and then moved it back. They carried rocks in their arms and walked in circles. The objective was not work, but exhaustion, humiliation, and the systematic reduction of the prisoner to a body that could only obey.

The SS and the kapos supervising them could strike at any moment and without needing a reason. Any prisoner they considered too slow, too fast, too upright, or too hunched over. Arbitrariness was part of the design. The unpredictability of violence kept the prisoner in a state of constant alert that consumed an enormous amount of cognitive and emotional energy.

Food was the other vector of destruction. Breakfast was half a liter of chicory coffee or herbal tea. Lunch, served at work, was 1 liter of soup made from nettles, beet leaves, or scraps of rotten vegetables. Dinner, upon returning to the camp, was between 200 and 300 grams of bread with a small amount of margarine or jam.

The total caloric value of that diet was between 1,300 and 1,700 calories per day. An adult physical laborer needs between 2,500 and 3,000 calories to maintain body weight. The difference between what the body needed and what it received was covered by burning muscle mass and body fat. Within 3 to 4 months, the average prisoner had lost between 1/3 and 1/2 of his body weight and was on the verge of starvation.

 The first transformation was the decision to build a massive satellite camp 3 km from the original compound. Birkenau, which the Germans called Auschwitz II, began construction in October 1941 on swampy, poorly drained ground that would turn living conditions into something qualitatively different from what Auschwitz I already was. Birkenau was designed to hold 150,000 people.

 In the end, it came to have more than 300 sections divided by gender, origin, and function with barracks originally built as army stables. Each of those barracks, designed for 52 horses, held more than 400 people at its worst moments. The second transformation came with the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. With it came tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war who were sent to Auschwitz.

Their mortality rate in the first months was almost total. Of the 10,000 Soviet soldiers sent to the camp between the summer and autumn of that year, Virtually all were dead before winter. It was with these prisoners that in September 1941, the first test of the mass use of Zyklon B was carried out. A hydrogen cyanide-based pesticide [music] normally used to disinfect barracks.

Commandant Höss was on an inspection that day. He described the test as technically satisfactory. The prisoners took several minutes to die. The gas caused convulsions. Some took longer than expected. Höss took note and ordered adjustments. It was at that moment that Auschwitz ceased to be a concentration camp in the conventional sense and began to become something for which there was no historical precedent.

 The Wannsee Conference, held in January 1942, did not invent the final solution. By then, Jews were already being killed in mass in several parts of the East. What it did was formalize and coordinate the process on a continental scale. And within that coordinated process, Auschwitz received a specific function no other camp inside Reich territory had held until then.

The systematic elimination of the Jews of Western Europe. Birkenau was the place where that function became architecture. The gas chambers of Birkenau were not built all at once. They were the result of an incremental engineering process in which each iteration attempted to solve the operational problems of the previous one.

The first facilities used for mass gassing in Auschwitz were two farmhouses requisitioned from Polish peasants near Birkenau, known internally as the Red House and the White House. They were provisional solutions. Their walls were sealed with cement, their windows bricked up, and the bodies had to be removed manually and buried in nearby mass graves.

The process was slow, physically exhausting for the Sonderkommandos, the detainees forced to operate the facility, and it created problems of scale that SS engineers openly recognized. The solution came in the form of four large crematoria with integrated chambers that began operating between March and June 1943.

Krematoria II, III, and IV and V at Birkenau were the result of months of joint design work between the SS and the construction firm Topf und Söhne, based in Erfurt, which manufactured the cremation ovens and whose engineers regularly traveled to the camp to supervise installation and make technical adjustments.

 The letters those engineers sent to the camp, many of them recovered after the war, have the routine tone of any business correspondence, delivery deadlines, technical specifications, and invoices for additional work. Each of the large krematoria combined in a single building an undressing room, a gas chamber, and the ovens. The process was designed so that the victims would descend a ramp into the basement, undress in a room where signs in several languages told them to remember the number of their clothes hook so they could retrieve their

clothing after the bath, pass into the hermetically sealed space the guards called the shower room, where openings in the ceiling allowed Zyklon B capsules to be thrown in from above, and die within 10 to 20 minutes depending on the concentration of the gas and the number of people inside. The Sonderkommandos waiting outside then had to open the ventilated doors, remove the bodies, extract gold teeth, cut the women’s hair, which was used to manufacture industrial fabric, and transfer the bodies to the ovens.

On normal operating days, the four krematoria at Birkenau could incinerate several thousand people. But the capacity of the ovens was lower than the capacity of the gas chambers. When mass transports arrived, the trains from Hungary in the spring and summer of 1944 brought more than 400,000 people in less than 2 months.

 The krematoria could not keep up, and the bodies had to be burned in open pits dug behind the buildings. The Sonderkommandos worked 12-hour shifts beside those pits with fire and smoke only centimeters away. Some later described it as a state of mental anesthesia that took them years to leave behind, if they ever did. Auschwitz, however, was not only a factory of death.

It was simultaneously a system of economic exploitation that eventual death did not interrupt, but in a certain way financed. The prisoners who passed the selection on the ramp, the division between those who would go directly to the gas chambers and those who would be assigned to forced labor, were tattooed, photographed, classified, and turned into manpower for the dozens of industries that had established production plants around the camp.

 IG Farben built its Buna synthetic rubber plant a few kilometers from Birkenau and employed tens of thousands of prisoners under conditions that killed the average worker within weeks. The surrounding coal mines, the ammunition factories, the metal workshops, the entire economic complex of Auschwitz operated on the basis of a workforce that was simultaneously a resource to exploit and a problem to eliminate.

 This duality is what makes Auschwitz structurally different from Treblinka. The logistics that made both camps function were the same at their core, the railways. Without the Reichsbahn, the German railway system, extermination on a continental scale would not have been possible. The trains that carried victims to the camps were not special trains designed for that purpose.

 They were ordinary freight trains of the European railway system temporarily requisitioned from their usual uses, the transport of coal, livestock, industrial goods, and reassigned to section IVB4 of the RSHA, Adolf Eichmann’s office, which coordinated deportation transports from across occupied Europe. Eichmann was a high-ranking bureaucrat who never fired a weapon in a concentration camp and never entered a gas chamber.

 His function was logistical coordination, negotiating with the various railway agencies of the occupied countries, assigning wagons, >> [music] >> calculating capacities, and organizing schedules. His letters and internal memoranda speak of transport units and special cargo. When the Italian railways could not provide enough wagons for the Jewish deportees of northern Italy in 1943, Eichmann wrote to the Ministry of Transport to request more capacity in the same way a logistics manager at any company would write to resolve a

bottleneck in the supply chain. He was captured in Argentina by Mossad in 1960, tried in Jerusalem in 1961, and executed in 1962. During his trial, he repeatedly insisted that he had not killed anyone, that he had merely organized transports. Hannah Arendt, who covered the trial for the New Yorker, called what Eichmann represented the banality of evil, a phrase that has been debated and misunderstood for decades, but which pointed to something real, the capacity of the bureaucratic system to turn extermination into paperwork. The

railway workers who drove the trains, in many cases, knew or could deduce where they were taking the people. The conditions inside the wagons, the screams, the smell, the bodies that were sometimes already dead when the doors were opened, left little room for sincere ignorance. But the system was organized so that each person saw only his own segment of the chain.

 The ticket clerk who registered the transport saw numbers on a form. The train driver saw rails and signals. The guard escorting the train sometimes did not know, or said he did not know, the final destination. Responsibility was fractured into such small pieces that none seemed unbearable on its own.

 Treblinka was something else entirely. The camp was built in the summer of 1942 in a forest about 100 km northeast of Warsaw near a small village of the same name. There was already a pre-existing facility in the area, Treblinkai, a penal labor camp that had operated since 1941. Treblinka II, the extermination camp, was built 1 and 1/2 km away.

 was built 1 and 1/2 km away, and its design had nothing to do with its neighbor. While Treblinka I had barracks, administrative facilities, and the full infrastructure of a conventional labor camp, a 200 by 400 m installation surrounded by barbed wire and camouflage trees with a single operational function. The appointed commandant was Franz Stangl, an Austrian policeman who had previously worked in the T4 euthanasia program, where the Reich systematically eliminated people with physical and mental disabilities. Stangl knew how to

manage extermination facilities. He arrived at Treblinka in August 1942 with clear instructions. The camp had to be capable of processing the entire Jewish population of the Warsaw district, which the regime estimated at around 700,000 people. What Stangl found when he arrived was not operational.

 His predecessor, Irmfried Eberl, had attempted to launch the camp before it was technically ready, and the result had been chaos that even SS standards considered unacceptable. Unprocessed piles of bodies, trains stranded on the track with the dead still inside, prisoners escaping through the fence. Stangl was sent specifically to resolve that operational disaster.

 Within weeks, the camp was functioning with what its administrators considered efficiency. Eberl was removed and sent to other assignments. He was never tried for his crimes at Treblinka. He took his own life in a cell at the prison in Ulm in 1948, hours after being arrested by German authorities. He was the only commandant of Treblinka to escape any judicial process while alive.

 The logic of Treblinka was radical in its simplicity. The camp did not need a permanent prisoner population. It did not need factories, mines, or long-term forced labor. It needed to process the greatest number of people in the shortest possible time, and every element of its physical design was oriented toward that objective.

The arrival ramp had decorations deliberately designed to resemble a real railway station. There were timetable signs, a fake ticket office, and flower pots. The newly arrived had to believe, at least for a moment, that they were at a transit point. From the ramp, the process was linear and designed to leave no time for comprehension.

Men were separated from women and children in the first yard. They were ordered to undress. The women were taken to a barrack where their hair was cut before they continued. Then everyone was driven along a path about 100 m long that the guards and personnel called the Schlauch, the tube, flanked by barbed wire interwoven with branches to block visibility.

 At the end of the tube were the gas chambers. While the victims advanced through the tube, the Arbeitsjuden in the first sector of the camp collected and sorted the abandoned belongings. Each transport brought tons of objects, clothing, shoes, jewelry hidden in coat linings, medicine, photographs, documents, and children’s toys.

Everything passed through the area the guards called the Lager, the storage depot. There were prisoner brigades there that opened suitcases, sewed open coats in search of hidden jewelry, and separated valuable items from worthless ones. Money and precious metals went to the SS. Clothing was sent to Germany to be redistributed among the civilian population.

Jewelry, watches, and gold objects fed the SS accounts at the Reichsbank. Even the women’s hair had a market. It was used to manufacture industrial shoelaces and oakum for caulking ships. Treblinka the second materially processed its victims in three stages: the body, the belongings, and finally the physical remains of the body itself, which were incinerated.

 While the ground bones were mixed with sand and ash and scattered across the camp to hide any trace that could be calculated. The first gas chambers at Treblinka did not use Zyklon B. They used carbon monoxide generated by diesel engines. In the first configuration of the camp, there were three small chambers where the gas arrived through pipes from the engine.

Death was slower than with Zyklon B, and the process had limited capacity. In the autumn of 1942, when the pace of the transports increased, the SS ordered the construction of a larger new chamber building. The brick building that replaced the first facilities had 10 chambers with a combined capacity of several thousand people at once.

Death took between 20 and 40 minutes. What makes Treblinka statistically different from any other extermination facility is the temporal density of its activity. Between July 1942 and August 1943, the camp operated for 13 months. During that period, estimates based on railway transport documents and survivor testimonies, place the number of dead between 700,000 and 900,000 people.

 The figure most commonly used by historians is approximately 800,000. On some days in July and August 1942, when trains from the Warsaw Ghetto arrived in continuous convoys, the camp processed between 10,000 and 15,000 people in 24 hours. That is equivalent to one person every 6 seconds. To understand what that rhythm meant in operational it is necessary to understand how the camp functioned at those moments of maximum activity.

The transports arrived in groups of 50 to 60 wagons. Each wagon carried between 100 and 120 people. The camp staff had to unload everyone, drive them through the process of undressing and selecting valuables, move them through the tube, and load the chambers in the shortest possible time, because the next train was already waiting on the outer track.

The Ukrainian auxiliary guards beat those who walked too slowly. Treblinka Sonderkommandos, called Arbeit Juden, waited on the other side of the chambers to remove the bodies and carry them to the massive pits in the northern sector of the camp. On the worst days of that summer, the camp could be smelled from several kilometers away.

The Polish residents of nearby villages could see it. Some spoke about it. No one with authority [music] stopped it. The contrast with Auschwitz in structural terms is absolute. Auschwitz had between 90,000 and 100,000 registered prisoners at the moments of its highest population. Treblinka did not have prisoners in the conventional sense.

It had a small group of forced laborers, between 400 and 700 at different times, who kept the camp running and were periodically murdered and replaced. There was no selection for labor, no tattoos, no individual records of the victims. The vast majority of people who arrived at Treblinka were not registered in any document.

 They simply disappeared. That documentary invisibility is part of why Treblinka took decades to occupy the place it deserves in the historical memory of the Holocaust. Auschwitz left behind tons of documentation, hundreds of thousands of prisoner files, photographs, construction plans, and administrative correspondence.

Treblinka was built to leave no trace. The communities that disappeared in Treblinka did not leave only the bodies of their [music] dead. They left a void of everything that would have continued had they lived. The Warsaw Ghetto, with nearly 400,000 people at its highest density, was before the war one of the richest Jewish cultural communities in Europe.

Theaters, newspapers in Yiddish, Talmudic academies, political movements of every tendency, an intellectual life of a density that in many respects rivaled that of the great cities of Western Europe. Operation Reinhard did not only kill people. It destroyed the system of cultural transmission of generations.

It killed the teachers, the rabbis, the writers, the editors, the musicians, the doctors, the artisans. It killed the children who would have grown up to become all of that. The result is not only a list of the dead. It is silence where a world had been. Włocławek, Lublin, Radom, Częstochowa, Białystok. Each of those cities had a Jewish community of tens of thousands of people.

 Many of those communities were sent to Treblinka or to the other camps of Operation Reinhardt. The train records show departure dates and number of wagons. They do not show names because no one recorded the names. In Treblinka, the person was not processed as an individual, but as part of a volume. The dehumanization was complete even in documentary terms.

When the SS decided to close the camp in the autumn of 1943, after a prisoner revolt in August that caused significant damage to the facilities, they ordered it completely dismantled. All buildings demolished, the corpses in the pits dug up and burned, trees planted over the ground, and a farm built on top. A Ukrainian guard was installed as a farmer to complete the illusion.

 When Soviet journalists arrived at the site in 1944, they found a farm. It was only through the testimony of the few survivors, around 67 people known to have escaped and survived the war, that the internal functioning of Treblinka could be reconstructed. One of the most detailed testimonies was that of Samuel Rajman, who appeared before the Nuremberg tribunal.

 Another was that of Chil Rajman, whose manuscript, written in Yiddish immediately after the war, was not published in full until 2009. Both describe a camp where speed was the only constant, where the personnel oscillated between bureaucratic routine and episodes of gratuitous violence, and where the line between the Arbeitshäftlinge and were so thin that crossing it could happen at any moment for any reason or for no reason at all.

The violence in Treblinka had a different quality from the violence in Auschwitz. Not in terms of intensity, but in terms of context. In Auschwitz, violence functioned within a system that also had a productive logic. Prisoners had to be kept sufficiently alive to work, which created a kind of calculated minimum threshold of subsistence.

Brutal, but recognizable as calculation. In Treblinka, that threshold did not exist because there was no production to sustain. Violence there was completely arbitrary in its object. Commandant Kurt Franz, who succeeded Stangl, walked through the camp with a dog named Barry, trained to attack prisoners’ genitals at his signal.

 It was a form of entertainment. Guards bet among themselves on who could kill the largest number of people with a single blow of a shovel. Summary executions for the most trivial reasons, moving too slowly, looking in the wrong direction, having hair that was too long, were so frequent that the Arbeitsschoden had incorporated them into the normal texture of the day.

 Stangl, interviewed by journalist Gitta Sereny in Düsseldorf prison in 1971 while serving a life sentence, said that the way to endure what he did was to think of the victims not as human beings, but as cargo. It was the language of a railway man. The trains arrived with cargo. The cargo was unloaded. The cargo was processed. That semantic dissociation, he said, was what allowed the SS men to keep functioning without psychologically collapsing.

Stangl expressed no remorse during the interviews. He described his work with the professional distance of someone speaking about logistics. He died of heart failure 19 hours after Sereny finished the final interview. In Auschwitz, the experience of the SS personnel was qualitatively different because the camp itself was qualitatively different.

 The bureaucracy was denser, the hierarchy more complex, and the constant presence of tens of thousands of living prisoners created a dynamic that Treblinka did not have. SS doctors in Auschwitz carried out selections on the ramp several times a week, pointing with their thumbs to the right or to the left as men, women, and children passed before them. Dr.

Josef Mengele carried out those selections with a meticulousness that his colleagues sometimes described as enthusiasm, but Mengele was not only a selector. He was also a scientific researcher who used prisoners as experimental material. The experiments in Auschwitz are one of the elements that most clearly separate the camp from any other Nazi facility, including Treblinka.

Mengele specialized in twins, whom he searched for among the newly arrived on the ramp with an attention that sometimes confused families. Being chosen by Mengele could seem, at first, like a sign of survival. The twins received better rations, slept in separate barracks, and underwent regular medical examinations, but those examinations included injections of pathogens to compare the response of the two organisms, surgeries without anesthesia, organ removal, and attempts to change eye color by injecting chemicals directly into the

pupils. Many died during the experiments. Those who survived his experiments were often killed afterwards so that Mengele could perform comparative autopsies. Other SS doctors in Auschwitz worked on experiments involving hypothermia, mass sterilization, and tolerance to extreme altitude. Dr. Carl Clauberg experimented with sterilization by x-rays on women in Block 10.

Eduard Wirths, the chief camp physician, supervised experiments on cervical cancer. Taken together, these investigations had no real scientific value. The methodology was invalid, the samples were contaminated by camp conditions, and the results would never have been publishable in any serious academic context.

 What they produced was suffering in industrial quantities and data that served no purpose. Treblinka had nothing like that. There were no laboratories, no research doctors, no experiments. There was a single operational question, speed. The only technical [music] problem the camp continually tried to solve was how to increase output, how to reduce bottlenecks, how to eliminate inefficiencies in the process.

 When the diesel engines powering the gas chambers broke down, the camp came to a halt. On those days, trains kept arriving and people remained in the wagons for hours or days while technicians repaired the engine. Some survivors described waiting like that for two or three days without water, without moving, listening to the sounds of the camp, but still not understanding with certainty what they meant.

 This deliberate uncertainty was part of the design. In both Auschwitz and Treblinka, deception was an operational tool. But its nature was different. In Auschwitz, deception acted upon time. The person stepping down from the train did not know whether they would die in the next few minutes or survive for weeks or months.

 Selection on the ramp created the theoretical possibility of life, which kept the process orderly and reduced resistance. In Treblinka, deception acted upon space. The person knew that something terrible was happening, but the camp’s design, the blocked lines of sight, the accelerated process, the noise, the constant blows prevented full comprehension from crystallizing before it was too late to act on it.

 Both forms of deception were operationally effective. Both broke down at times. In Auschwitz, there were multiple escape attempts, many failed and several successful. In October 1944, the Sonderkommandos of crematorium four in Birkenau rebelled with explosives they had obtained thanks to female prisoners employed at the Union munitions factory who had stolen tiny amounts of gunpowder over months and passed them hand-to-hand through a chain of people, any one of whom could have denounced the others at any moment under torture.

The four women prisoners who organized the transport of the explosives inside the camp were young women whose names are known. Rosa Robota, Ala Gertner, Regina Safir, and Estera Wajcblum. They were tortured until the camp was convinced they knew no more than they had said and then publicly hanged in January 1945, >> [music] >> weeks before the Red Army reached the camp.

 Robota managed to send a one-word message to her resistance contacts the night before her execution. Chazak. The Hebrew word means be strong. The revolt of Crematorium 4, though crushed within hours, produced the only significant material damage that Auschwitz prisoners inflicted on the infrastructure of extermination. The building was partially destroyed by the explosives.

Three SS members died in the first minutes. Others on the commandos from Crematoria 2 [music] and 3 tried to join the uprising when they heard the explosions. Some managed to cut the barbed wire and reach the cultivated fields bordering Birkenau. The German reserve troops deployed in the area systematically surrounded them in the hours that followed.

 451 Sonderkommandos were executed in the days after the revolt. Those who died fighting were, in many ways, the most fortunate. Though that phrase is obscene in any context other than Auschwitz. In October 1944, in Treblinka, the revolt came on August 2nd, 1943. A group of Arbeitseuten had been organizing it for months, aware that the camp was being dismantled and that their own executions were imminent.

 They managed to duplicate [music] a key to the arsenal, stole grenades and rifles, and opened fire simultaneously at several points in the camp in the early afternoon. The fire that broke out destroyed part of the facilities. Between 300 and 400 people crossed the fence. Most were hunted down in the surrounding fields in the following days. Fewer than 70 survived the war.

The revolt did not stop Treblinka’s operations immediately. There were additional transports after August 2nd, but it accelerated the decision to close the camp, which was already being considered because most of the Jews in the Warsaw area had been eliminated and the camp had fulfilled its initial function.

 The closure of Treblinka was a process of erasure. The closure of Auschwitz was a process of chaotic evacuation and partial destruction that could not be completed. When the SS received the order to evacuate Auschwitz in January 1945 in the face of the Soviet advance, they tried to demolish the crematoria of Birkenau [music] to eliminate the evidence.

 They had time to destroy some, but not all. The archives were partly burned, but enormous amounts of documentation survived because the bureaucracy of the camp was so vast that destroying it completely in the time available was impossible. The prisoners who could walk were forced to march westward in what became known as the death marches.

Columns of people in prisoner clothing advancing along snowy roads in January, without food or water, with guards shooting those who fell. Of the 67,000 prisoners who remained in the Auschwitz complex when the evacuation began, more than 15,000 died on those marches. >> [music] >> On January 27th, 1945, soldiers of the Soviet 60th Army arrived at the camp.

They found around 7,000 prisoners too sick or too weakened to be evacuated. They also found the warehouses. Tons of human hair in bales ready to be shipped to textile factories, mountains of eyeglasses, >> [music] >> dental prostheses, suitcases with the names of their owners still painted on the surface, and more than 100,000 pieces of children’s clothing.

 Treblinka no longer existed to be found. In its place, there was a farm and a field covered with grass. The question of which camp was more brutal contains the trap of assuming that brutality is a quality comparable on a linear scale, when in reality, it is a category that fractures into dimensions that do not convert well into one another.

 If brutality means speed of annihilation, Treblinka has no parallel in the history of the 20th century. No other place, at any other moment, killed so many people so quickly by such direct means. If brutality means the total surface of human suffering sustained over time, the accumulated pain of millions of people who lived weeks, months, or years under conditions designed to slowly destroy them before killing them, then Auschwitz represents something of a different magnitude and also, without precedent. Treblinka was more efficient.

Auschwitz was more total. Treblinka processed its victims in hours. Auschwitz subjected them to a regime of degradation, destructive labor, calculated hunger, cold, disease, and daily violence that could be prolonged indefinitely before death. The prisoner who arrived at Auschwitz and passed selection entered a system designed to extract every possible gram of work from him while consuming him.

Hunger in Auschwitz was not an accident of wartime scarcity. It was a deliberate policy. The rations were calculated to produce what SS doctors called the Muselmann, the prisoner in the terminal phase of malnutrition, who no longer responded to his surroundings, who walked with empty eyes, unable to react to physical pain, waiting for death without still being able to fear anything.

The testimonies of Auschwitz survivors are, among other things, >> [music] >> a documentation of what the human body can suffer and still continue functioning. Primo Levi described life in the camp with an almost clinical precision that makes his work harder to read, not easier. “Hunger,” he wrote, “is not what one feels after skipping a meal.

It is a permanent state that completely reorganizes mental life, makes every thought converge on food, destroys solidarity, and turns the prisoner into a being capable of stealing a piece of bread from his companions. Elie Wiesel, who arrived at Auschwitz in 1944, described seeing his father die in the final weeks of the camp and being unable to cry, not because he did not want to, but because he had reached a state in which the normal human emotional response had been consumed by the pure effort to survive. Treblinka did not

produce such testimonies because Treblinka produced almost no survivors. The experience of Treblinka, for the overwhelming majority of the people who arrived at that camp, lasted hours, not months. That does not make it less terrible. It makes it different, and the difference matters in understanding what each place was.

 Several thousand people survived Auschwitz. Many of them testified at Nuremberg, in the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in the 1960s, before historical commissions, and in published memoirs. That density of testimony built the public image of the Holocaust for decades. Auschwitz became the symbol of Nazi extermination, not only because it was the largest camp, or because it left more physical evidence, but because it left the most survivors capable of telling what had happened.

 Public memory is built on testimony, and testimony requires survivors. Treblinka left very few. The asymmetry between the scale of the crime and the scale of Treblinka’s memory is one of the most disturbing paradoxes in the history of the Holocaust. During the first years after the war, many historians and researchers of the period were not even clear on the order of magnitude of the deaths in Treblinka.

Estimates varied enormously. It was only with the work of historians such as Yitzhak Arad, whose monumental work on the camps of Operation Reinhard was published in 1987, that Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec began to receive the sustained academic attention they deserved. Operation Reinhard, whose code name came from Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Final Solution assassinated in Prague in May 1942, was the specific program for the extermination of the Jews of the General Government of Poland. Treblinka was the

largest camp in that program, but it was not the only one. Bełżec operated between March 1942 and December 1942 and killed approximately 450,000 people, almost all Jews from Galicia and Southern Poland, with so few survivors that for decades the history of that camp depended on a handful of testimonies.

 Sobibor operated between May 1942 and October 1943 and killed between 170,000 and 250,000 people. There was also a revolt there in October 1943, 11 days after which the SS decided to close the camp and erase it. The Sobibor revolt was organized by Alexander Pechersky, a Soviet Army officer of Jewish origin who had arrived at the camp in October 1943 with a transport of prisoners of war.

In 3 weeks, Pechersky organized a plan that involved killing SS officers in sequence during the camp’s busiest hour, using work tools such as axes and knives. The plan worked in part. Several SS officers were eliminated and more than 300 people crossed the barbed wire. Most were hunted down in the following days.

Pechersky survived the war, returned to the Soviet Union, and was ignored for decades by the Soviet regime, which had no interest in celebrating a Jewish hero. He was formally recognized by the government of Israel only in 2013 and received Israeli citizenship posthumously in 2016. He had died in 1990. Auschwitz was not part of Operation Reinhard.

 It was a different camp under a different chain of command and with a different logic. Operation Reinhard was administered by the SS in Lublin under Odilo Globocnik. Auschwitz answered directly to Heinrich Himmler and had a structure more integrated with the Reich’s economic apparatus. This bureaucratic distinction matters because it explains why the two systems were designed so differently.

Operation Reinhard was, in conception, a project of pure extermination with a defined end date. Auschwitz was a project of exploitation and extermination of indefinite duration that grew to absorb victims from all of Western Europe. Commando 1005, created in 1942 to destroy evidence of mass crimes in the East, worked in multiple locations of Operation Reinhard beginning in 1943.

It was a system within the system. Teams of forced prisoners, guarded by the SS, who exhumed mass graves, burned bodies on grates built from railway rails, and ground the bones to scatter them. The process was so repugnant that even members of the SS in the commando often got drunk before each shift. Aerial photographs of those operations, taken by Allied reconnaissance flights in 1944, remained in archives for decades without anyone analyzing them specifically in search of those pyres.

 The Allies knew about Auschwitz at least since 1942. The Witold Report, prepared by the Polish officer Witold Pilecki, who voluntarily infiltrated the camp in 1940, was transmitted to the Polish government in exile in London. The Allies knew about the gas chambers. They knew about the selections. They knew about the scale.

In the summer of 1944, when the trains from Hungary were arriving at Auschwitz in waves, Jewish representatives from Budapest and Geneva begged the Allies to bomb the railway lines leading to the camp or the crematoria themselves. The answer was that doing so would divert resources from priority military targets.

 The railway lines were not bombed. The crematoria were not bombed. The trains kept arriving. At the Nuremberg trials, Höss testified about the functioning of Auschwitz with the same technical distance that characterized the testimonies of other senior Nazi officials. He was the only commandant of an extermination camp to appear before that tribunal.

 He was hanged in April 1947 on the grounds of Auschwitz in front of block 11. The gallows still exist. Stangl was found in Brazil in 1967 by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Kurt Franz, the last commandant of Treblinka, known as the doll, was arrested in Germany in 1959. In his apartment, police found a photo album of the camp taken by Franz himself during its operation with the inscription on the cover, “The best years of my life.

” Franz was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Treblinka trial of 1965. He was released in 1993 for health reasons. He died in 1998 in his bed in Düsseldorf. Odilo Globocnik, the head of Operation Reinhard, was captured by the Allies in Austria in May 1945. He carried a cyanide capsule hidden in his mouth. He bit down on it when the soldiers who captured him began reading the charges against him.

He died within minutes. He was 44 years old. Christian Wirth, the man who designed the operational procedures of the Operation Reinhard camps and whom other SS officers nicknamed Christian the Terrible because of the ferocity with which he supervised operations, was killed by Yugoslav partisans in May 1944 while inspecting a facility in northern Italy. He was never tried.

 The archaeology of the Holocaust is a field of study that began to develop systematically only in the second half of the 20th century. The excavations on the grounds of Treblinka carried out by the team [music] of Caroline Sturdy Coles of Staffordshire University between 2010 and 2013, used ground-penetrating radar and other non-invasive techniques to map the subsurface without disturbing human remains in respect for Jewish traditions that prohibit the disturbance of graves.

The results showed subsurface anomalies consistent with the presence of mass graves, remains of building foundations, and other structures in exactly the places where survivor testimonies located them. The camp the SS had believed they had completely erased was still there, latent beneath the ground, recorded in the earth they had tried to redefine as field and farm.

 Today, the site of Treblinka is a memorial built in the 1960s on the exact location of the camp. There are thousands of irregular stones of different sizes placed across the terrain, some bearing the names of exterminated communities. At the center, there is a large symbolic stone marking the point where the gas chamber building stood.

 The surrounding ground is silent. There are trees, birds, and a parking lot with very few cars. The visitors who arrive at Treblinka are a tiny fraction of those who go to Auschwitz each year. Most tourists who follow the route of Holocaust sites in Poland go to Auschwitz, take the bus from Krakow in the morning, and return in the afternoon.

 Very few make the several hour detour from Warsaw to that silent forest where no buildings remain, no barracks remain. Nothing physical remains of what happened except the ground under one’s feet and those stones placed there by someone who knew that forgetting was another way of finishing the work. In Auschwitz, the buildings still stand.

The entrance arch with the inscription Arbeit macht frei, the brick blocks of Auschwitz I, the partial ruins of the Birkenau crematoria that the SS tried to blow up and did not fully manage to destroy, the wooden barracks of sectors BI and BII with their three-tier bunks, the restored electrified barbed wire, the guard towers, the administration building where Höss had his office 200 m from the gas chambers.

 More than 2 million people visit Auschwitz-Birkenau every year. The total death toll at Auschwitz, established by the International Commission of Historians convened in 1990, is approximately 1,100,000 people, of whom between 900,000 and 1 million were Jews. The others were Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and political prisoners of various nationalities.

The figures from the Warsaw Ghetto illustrate the speed of the destruction with a precision that is sometimes harder to process than the overall numbers. In July 1942, when the mass deportations from the ghetto to Treblinka began, there were approximately 350,000 people in the ghetto. In 52 days, between July 22nd and September 12th, 1942, the SS and the auxiliary Jewish police deported approximately 265,000 people to the camp.

 Another 35,000 were murdered inside the ghetto during that period. At the end of those weeks, the Warsaw Ghetto had gone from being the largest urban concentration of Jews in occupied Europe to a field of ruins with around 50,000 survivors living hidden in basements and bunkers built during the previous months. The Judenrat, the Jewish council the Germans had forced to administer the ghetto, received the order to provide a daily quota of people for the transports.

Adam Czerniaków, the chairman of the Judenrat, took his own life with a cyanide capsule on July 23rd, 1942, the day after the deportations began, when he was informed that the quota would include the children from the orphanage run by Janusz Korczak. Korczak, a doctor and educator who had repeatedly refused offers of rescue from his Polish friends, accompanied the children from his orphanage to the train on August 5th or 6th, 1942.

 The sources do not agree exactly on the date and was murdered with them in Treblinka. He did not separate himself from the children. Treblinka, between 750,000 and 900,000 people, almost all Jews. Bełżec, approximately 450,000. Sobibor, between 170,000 and 250,000. Operation Reinhard alone, the three camps together, killed more than 1,700,000 people in less than 2 years.

That figure is greater than the total population of several medium-sized European capitals. It killed more people than the Battle of Verdun, more than all the United States military dead in the Second World War, more than the Haiti earthquake of 2010. And the physical infrastructure that produced those deaths fit, in the case of Treblinka, inside a rectangle measuring 200 by 400 m, less than many football fields, the same space as any city block anywhere in the world where people buy bread in the morning and take

children to the park in the afternoon. The question of which was more brutal remains impossible to resolve simply because the answer depends on which aspect of brutality is being measured. Treblinka has the most terrifying temporal density, more people murdered per unit of time than in any other place in documented history.

Auschwitz has the most elaborate architecture of degradation, the most prolonged suffering, [music] the longest distance between arrival and death. Treblinka destroyed entire communities almost without leaving records. Auschwitz destroyed individual people whose suffering was largely documented, but there is something in which both camps converge completely, something that makes them identical in the only dimension that ultimately matters.

 In neither of them, neither in Treblinka nor in Auschwitz, neither in the camps of Operation Reinhard nor in the concentration and labor camps of the Reich did any of the victims choose to be there. None did anything that justified what happened to them. They arrived in trains because a bureaucracy had decided that [music] they had to die.

And they died because that bureaucracy functioned with an efficiency that even the states that created it still do not fully understand how it was possible. What remains hardest to understand, even 80 years later, is not the evil of the men who designed the camps. Extreme evil has a long history and is not difficult to document.

 What remains hardest to understand is the normality with which they functioned. The engineers of Topf und Söhne who traveled to Birkenau to inspect the ovens after having dinner with their families. The railway workers of the Reichsbahn who organized convoy schedules in the same way they organized coal train schedules.

 The doctor who selected who lived and who died on the ramp and then returned to his barrack to listen to classical music. The Ukrainian guard who finished his shift at the chambers at 6:00 in the evening and sat down to eat soup. That normality is what makes the history of Auschwitz and Treblinka not a closed chapter about a defeated regime.

 It is the clearest and most terrible demonstration of what institutional systems are capable of producing when the machinery operates with insufficient friction, when the distance between decision and consequence is large enough, and when the people who operate it find a way not to see what they are doing. The two camps were less than 1,000 km apart.

They operated simultaneously for almost 2 years. Together, they killed nearly 2 million people. One was built on the lie that work sets you free. The other was built on the lie that the train was arriving somewhere else. In the years that followed the war, the Yiddish language, the language of most of the victims of Operation Reinhard, lost more speakers than it had ever lost in any other period of its history.

 Not because the language was inferior or because its speakers abandoned it voluntarily. They simply disappeared. The communities that transmitted it from generation to generation had been murdered. Today, only a few hundred thousand native [music] Yiddish speakers remain in the world, almost all of them elderly people or ultra-Orthodox communities that preserve [music] it for religious reasons.

 Before the war, there were 11 million speakers. The books that existed in those libraries, the musical manuscripts, the letters, the cooking recipes, the family photographs, much of all that disappeared with the people. What survived did so fragmentarily, in the pockets of those who escaped, buried in cans beneath the floors of the ghettos, kept by Polish neighbors who sometimes returned it and sometimes did not.

 The archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, known as the Ringelblum Archive after the historian Emanuel Ringelblum who organized it before being murdered, was buried in metal milk cans beneath the floor of the ghetto. Two of the three parts of the archive were recovered after the war through excavations. The third part was never found.

 The tube of Treblinka was 100 m long. Survivors who saw it from the other side described it as being lined with flowers. Someone planted them. Someone watered them. Someone chose them.