Dr. Irmfried Eberl (b. 1910), former medical director of the euthanasia institutes in Brandenburg and Bernburg, was the first commandant of the Treblinka II “death camp” from the beginning of the camp’s operation in July 1942 to the end of August the same year, when reportedly he was fired due to incompetence and replaced by the former commandant of Sobibór, Franz Paul Stangl.

In his short book from 2006, Michael Grabher traces Eberl’s life from his upbringing and early medical career to his suicide in Austrian custody on February 16, 1948. Except for medical records and some post-war trial material, the author quotes from Eberl’s correspondence – including personal letters sent to his first wife, Ruth (who died during the war) – which has been preserved, at least in part, in the Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden (HHStaW) under the file designation “631a 1631″. The bulk of the brief volume is devoted to Eberl’s activity at the euthanasia institutes (mostly administrative) with only a short chapter concerning the months spent as commandant of Treblinka. Perhaps not suprisingly, a large part of this chapter is taken up by a general description of the supposed genesis and purpose of Treblinka and the other Reinhardt camps, much of it derived from Yitzhak Arad’s standard work Belzec, Sobibor Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, which in turn is more or less exclusively based on post-war eyewitness testimony. (Read more…)