The Third Reich at War, 1939-1945

by Richard J. Evans

Following the uprising, the remaining buildings at Treblinka were demolished, the land was grassed over and planted with flowers and trees, and the bricks from the gas chambers were used to build a small farm, designed to be lived in by a Ukrainian who promised to tell visitors that he had been there for decades.260 But local Polish people knew what had been there, and in the summer of 1944 rumours spread that Jews had been buried there without having had their gold teeth removed, and that their clothing, full of jewellery and valuables, had been buried with them. For many months, large numbers of peasants and farm workers scoured the area, looking for buried treasure. When a member of the Polish state war crimes commission visited the site of Treblinka on 7 November 1945 she found ‘masses of all kinds of pilferers and robbers with spades and shovels in their hands . . . digging and searching and raking and straining the sand. They removed decaying limbs from the dust [and] bones and garbage that were thrown there.’ The macabre treasure-hunt ended only when the Polish government set up official memorials on the camp sites and posted guards around them.