Who was Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka?

There is much confusion regarding Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka Death Camp during the Holocaust. Treblinka Extermination Camp was managed by 20 to 25 S.S. overseers (Germans and Austrians) and 80 to 120 Hiwi guards of various Soviet ethnicities, including mostly Ukrainians. The name Ivan was not an uncommon name in the death camp. Ivan (also Iwan in Polish and German) is a common Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian given name.

Ivan the Terrible became notorious because of his extreme cruelty. He tortured his Jewish victims with pipes, a sword he carried, and whips, before they entered the gas chamber at Treblinka. His function at the camp was to operate the two tank engines that fed the gas chambers.

Treblinka, a death camp located relatively close to Warsaw, was the site where more Jews were murdered apart from Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Holocaust. While Treblinka I was a forced labor camp where Jewish prisoners were forced into slave labor, Treblinka II was a mass extermination center.

The Treblinka Uprising — a revolt of the prisoners — took place on August 2, 1943. After the uprising, Holocaust survivors from Treblinka began to talk about Ivan, including Chil Rajchman, who testified that Ivan was age 25, brown hair, hazel eyes, a square face, and a large scar down to his neck.

For many years, it was thought that John Demjanjuk, born Ivan Mykolaiovych Demjanjuk, was Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. Demjanjuk was born in 1920 and was a guard at Trawniki, like Ivan the Terrible, but was not at Treblinka. Instead, he was sationed mostly at Sobibor death camp and served as a guard there, and likely took part in many crimes at Sobibor.

Ivan Marchenko was born in 1911 — on March 2 — in Serhijowga, Dnyepro-petrowsk, Ukraine. There are several locations with this same town/village name:

Serhiivka - Dnipropetrovsk region , Kryvyi Rih district in Apostolov near Novohryhorivske ... current population: 214
Serhiyivka - Dnipropetrovsk region, Kryvyi Rih district, Devladiv on the banks of the Saksagan River ... current population: 759
Serhiivka - Dnipropetrovsk region, Solonyansky district, on right bank of river Sukha Sura ... current population: 141
Serhiyivka - Dnipropetrovsk region, Tomakiv district near Petrovka and river Topyla ... current population: 630
Serhiyivka - Dnipropetrovsk region, Yuriev district near the river Vyazivok and village of Novovyazivske ... current population: 606

Holocaust researcher Chris Webb has his card from Trawniki, which lists his parents as Iwan and Oksana, nee Berotjatka or Beretjatka. He was married to Katherina Krawtchenko, and they had three children. He served in the Russian Army and was captured by the Germans in October 1941.

Ivan Marchenko had been a POW at Chelm and was recruited for training by the Germans at Trawniki in October 1941. In May 1942 he was posted to the Lublin Ghetto as a guard before being transferred to Treblinka, where together with yet another Ukrainian, Nikolay Shalayev, he was responsible for operating the motor that produced the exhaust fumes which were fed into the gas chambers, and for supervising the killing process.

According to Webb, "Marchenko was infamous because of the evil deeds he committed, where he drove helpless and innocent Jewish men, women, and children into the gas chambers. Once crammed inside -- Marchenko and another Trawniki-man named Nikolay Shalayev -- turned on the engines that pumped carbon monoxide into the gas chambers to murder the people inside.

Click here to see some testimonies about Marchenko's activities during this period.

Where did Marchenko go after the war?

Marchenko was never tried for his part in murdering up to 1,000,000 Jews.

During 1943 he was transferred to Trieste, and in 1944 he fled to the partisans in Yugoslavia, from the City of Fiume.

The whereabouts of Marchenko after the war are not precisely known.

One source indicates that he made it to Argentina and changed his name to Jaroslav Chomyk. To achieve immigration, he used fake documents as well as a fake name. This source says that he lived in San Nicolas de los Arroyos and he was married to a woman with the last name Ponciano. This individual died between 1989 and 1995 in Buenos Aires. A photo of him is below.

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