Treblinka II was a Nazi German extermination camp in occupied Poland during World War II. Between July 1942 and October 1943, around 850,000 people were killed there, more than 800,000 of whom were Jews,including several thousand Gypsies and 2,000 Romani people. The camp was closed after a revolt during which a few Germans were killed and a small number of prisoners escaped. The nearby Treblinka I was a forced labour camp and administrative complex in support of the death camp.
Treblinka II was designed purely for the extermination of people: its killing area measuring 600 by 400 metres. It was the 3rd extermination centre in the Operation Reinhard Action. Operation Reinhard was overseen by SS-Obergruppenführer Odilo Globocnik in occupied Poland as Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler’s deputy. Unlike other Nazi concentration camps, Operation Reinhard camps reported directly to Himmler’s office (the RSHA) in Berlin. Himmler kept the control of the program close to him but delegated the work to Globocnik. Operation Reinhard used the euthanasia program (Action T4) for site selection, construction and the training of personnel.
Before Operation Reinhard over half a million Jews had been killed by the Einsatzgruppen, mobile SS units whose sole purpose was to murder Jews, Poles and commissars in territories conquered by the German army. It became evident, however, that they could not handle the millions of Jews that they had concentrated in the ghettos of occupied countries. So Treblinka, along with the other Operation Reinhard camps were especially designed for the rapid elimination of the Jews in ghettos. Treblinka was ready on July 24, 1942, when the shipping of Jews began: “According to the SS Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop report, a total of approximately 310,000 Jews were transported in freight trains from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka during the period from July 22 to October 3, 1942.