Theodor van Eupen

He was killed by Polish partisans near Jędrzejów in mid December 1944, ambushed on the road. He jumped out of the car and ran on foot as far as Lipówka village where he crawled under a pile of hay. The partisans machine-gunned his hiding place and learned who he was only from the documents they found on his corpse.

The next day, the corpse and 3 other Germans killed in the ambush were recovered from the lake by a specially arrived German unit and transported to Lipówka and then to Jędrzejów, where he was to be buried on December 13, 1944. According to Norbert Michta, the Germans then selected 13 people from among the local population to be shot. However, the Nazis managed to convince that the attack was the work of Russian paratroopers unknown to people, and W. Ważniewski, on the basis of Reports and German documents, reports that they took nine village leaders from nearby villages hostage, but after four days they released them[2].

Eupen was in charge of Treblinka I officially from 15 November 1941 (date of the camp's founding by Warsaw SS Governor Dr. Ludwig Fischer), until its closing on 23 July 1944. He worked closely with the SS and police commandanture in Warsaw during the deportation of Jews to the gas chambers of Treblinka II in early 1943, in order to have the slave labour brought to him from the Warsaw Ghetto for necessary replacements. He claimed to have been a German-Dutch aristocrat and liked to have his wife and two little sons visit him in occupied Poland. Eupen was feared even by his own SS subordinates penalized by being sent to the Eastern Front for even the smallest infractions. He arranged to have a garden built by his house with a pond and water fowl.

Theodor van Eupen (24 April 1907 – 11 December 1944) was a member of the SS of Nazi Germany. A Holocaust perpetrator, he served as the commandant of the Treblinka I forced-labour camp (Arbeitslager) in occupied Poland during its entire course of operation. Unlike the parallel Treblinka extermination camp (Treblinka II) subordinate to the Operation Reinhard authorities in Berlin, Treblinka I was controlled by the SS and Police Leader in Warsaw. The labour camp was liquidated on 23 July 1944, ahead of the Soviet advance. By then, more than half of its cumulative number of some 20,000 inmates had died from summary executions, hunger, disease and mistreatment. The regular workforce consisted of 1,000–2,000 prisoners, terrorized by staff of about a dozen SS-men and 100 Wachmänner guards.