Irmfried Eberl (8 September 1910 – 16 February 1948) was an Austrian psychiatrist and medical director of the euthanasia institutes in Brandenburg and Bernburg, who helped set up and was the first commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp where he worked as SS-Obersturmführer from 11 July 1942 until his dismissal on 26 August 1942.

[1][2][3] Despite not being formally ordered to take part, psychiatrists such as Eberl were at the center of each stage of justifying, planning and carrying out the mass murder of those with mental disorders, and constituted the connection to the later annihilation of Jews and other "undesirables" in the Holocaust.

This did not last long, as the Nazi leadership made the decision to use the Action T-4 personnel to murder much larger numbers of people in Poland, using variations of the methods used in the T-4 killings.

Eberl's poor management of the camp soon proved to be disastrous in the opinion of his colleague Willi Mentz; although historians point out that the number of transports that were coming in also reflected the high command's wildly unrealistic expectations of Treblinka's ability to "process" these prisoners.

[8][9]Eberl was dismissed from Treblinka on 26 August 1942, for incompetence in disposing of the bodies of the thousands of people who had been killed,[10] and was replaced by Franz Stangl, who was previously the commandant of Sobibor extermination camp.

Eberl was also relieved of his duty because he was not killing people in an efficient and timely enough manner, and because he was not properly concealing the mass murder from locals.

Eberl was apparently part of a ring at the camp that was stealing the possessions of the people whom they had murdered and sending them back to cohorts at Hitler's Chancellery in Berlin.

I waded in notes, currency, precious stones, jewelry, clothes...The smell was indescribable; the hundreds, no, the thousands of bodies everywhere, decomposing, putrefying.

Across the square in the woods, just a few hundred yards away on the other side of the barbed-wire fence and all around the perimeter of the camp, there were tents and open fires with groups of Ukrainian guards and girls – whores from Warsaw I found out later – weaving, drunk, dancing, singing, playing music – Dr Eberl, the Kommandant showed me around the camp, there was shooting everywhere...[12]Eberl was sent back to Bernburg Euthanasia Centre for a short spell afterwards.