Trawniki

Trawniki is a village in eastern Poland, located in Lublin Voivodeship. It lies near the city of Lublin and is part of the region’s rural landscape. The name is most widely associated with a wartime site that developed near the village during World War II.

During the war, the German SS established a training camp near Trawniki to recruit and train auxiliary police and guards. The facility, commonly referred to as the Trawniki camp, trained thousands of men—primarily Soviet POWs and other Eastern European volunteers—to operate under German command. The trained auxiliaries, known as Trawniki men, were deployed to assist in security duties, mass shootings, and deportations in occupied Poland and other territories as part of the Nazi extermination and repression apparatus.

In the postwar period, the Trawniki camp became a focal point for historical research and legal proceedings related to Nazi crimes. It is memorialized in Holocaust historiography and through educational efforts that document the role of trained auxiliaries in the crimes of the Nazi regime. The term Trawniki today denotes both the village and the wartime facility that is central to studies of occupation, collaboration, and mass violence in World War II.