Ivan Marchenko

Ivan the Terrible (born c. 1911) is the nickname given to a notorious guard Ivan Marchenko, at the Treblinka extermination camp during the Holocaust. The moniker alluded to Ivan IV, also known as Ivan the Terrible, the infamous Tsar of Russia. "Ivan the Terrible" gained international recognition from the 1986 John Demjanjuk case. Already in 1944 a cruel guard named "Ivan", sharing the distinct duties and the extremely violent behavior with a guard named "Nicholas", is mentioned in survivor literature (Rok w Treblince by Jankiel Wiernik, translated into English as A Year in Treblinka in 1945); however, very little is known about Ivan Marchenko. John Demjanjuk was accused first of being Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka concentration camp, but in 2011 he was accused of war crimes as a different guard named Ivan Demjanjuk who served at the Sobibor extermination camp.

Treblinka was managed by 20 to 25 SS overseers (Germans and Austrians) and 80 to 120 Hiwi guards of various Soviet ethnicities, including Russian and the majority of Ukrainian Red army prisoners of war. They were assisted by a cadre of Jewish inmates known as Kapos, who were prisoner functionaries. The name Ivan was not an uncommon name in the camp. Ivan (also Iwan in Polish and German) is a common Ukrainian,Russian and Belarusian given name. Volksdeutsche were known to have Slavic given names. An example would be Ivan Klatt, a Volksdeutscher who served in the Sobibor extermination camp, as the Ukrainian guard leader. According to Rajchman six men called Ivan worked at Treblinka. The vast majority of Hiwi guards who were trained at the Trawniki concentration camp facility had to contend with the language barrier. However, there were a number of Volksdeutsche among them, valued because they spoke German, Ukrainian, Russian and other languages. They could also understand basic Yiddish. The German and Austrian SS command, local Poles, and Jewish inmates often referred to guards as Ukrainians not only because of their ethnicity, or because they originated from Ukraine, but because they spoke Ukrainian between themselves. Most of the squad commanders however were Volksdeutsche.

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