"Ivan the Terrible" - The Most Sadistic Nazi Guard at Treblinka Death Camp - Ivan Marchenko

Ivan Marchenko was born on the 2nd of March 1911, in the Ukrainian village of Serhijowga then part of the Russian Empire. Tge Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. 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.
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