Belzec extermination camp
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Belzec was the first of the Nazi German extermination camps created for implementing Operation Reinhard during the Holocaust. Operating in 1942, the camp was situated in occupied Poland about half a mile south of the local railroad station Belzec in the Lublin district of the General Government. It originally began operation in early 1940 as a forced labor camp for Jews. It was liquidated in the fall of that year.
On 13 October, 1941, Heinrich Himmler gave SS and Police Leader Lublin, SS Brigadefuehrer Odilo Globocnik, two orders in a conference, which were closely connected with each other: to start germanizing the area around Zamosc and to start work on the first extermination camp in the General Government near Belzec. The site was chosen for three reasons: it was situated at the border between the districts Lublin and Galicia, thus indicating its purpose to serve as a killing site for the Jews of both districts; for reasons of transport it lay next to the railroad and the main road between Lublin and Lvov; the northern boundary of the planned death camp was the anti-tank ditch dug a year before by Jewish slave workers of the former forced labor camp. The ditch was originally excavated because of military reasons, now it was likely to serve as the first huge mass grave. Globocnik's construction expert SS Obersturmfuehrer Richard Thomalla commenced work in the first days of November, 1941, by help of Polish villagers and Globocnik's Trawniki men, later Jewish slave workers. The installation was finished by early March 1942.
The two commanders of the camp, Criminal Police officers Christian Wirth and Gottlieb Hering, had - like almost all of their staff - since 1940 been involved in the Nazi Euthanasia program, Wirth in the leading position as a supervisor of all six Euthanasia institutions in the Reich, Hering as the non-medical chief of Sonnenstein (Pirna, Saxony) and Hadamar. As a participant of the first T-4 test gassing of handicapped people at Brandenburg, Wirth had been a killing expert right from the beginning. For this reason he obviously was chosen to become the first leader of the first extermination camp in the General Government. It might have been his proposal to transfer the T-4 technology of killing by carbon monoxide gas in stationary gas chambers to Belzec, because the comparable technology of mobile gas vans used before since December 1941 in the extermination camp Chelmno (Kulmhof) had proven insufficient as to the planned number of victims. For economic and transport reasons, Wirth did not make use here of industrial bottled carbon monoxide as in T-4, but had the same gas supplied by a big lorry or tank petrol engine (almost all Soviet tanks ran on petrol, not on Diesel), whose extremely poisonous exhaust fumes were led by a system of pipes into the gas chambers. For very small transports of Jews and Gypsies over a short distance, a minimized version of the gas van technology was used in Belzec: T-4 man and first operator of the gas chambers, Lorenz Hackenholt, rebuilt an Opel-Blitz post office vehicle by help of a local craftsman into a small gas van. A member of the staff testified that the Jewish office girls were murdered in this car on the very last day of Belzec.
The wooden gas chambers were disguised as the barracks and showers of a labor camp, so that the victims would not realize the true purpose of the site, and the process was conducted as quickly as possible: people were forced to run from the trains to the gas chambers, leaving them no time to absorb where they were or to plan a revolt. Finally, a handful of Jews were selected to perform all the manual work involved with extermination (removing the bodies from the gas chambers, burying them, sorting and repairing the victims' clothing, etc.). The extermination process itself was conducted by Hackenholt, Ukrainian guards, and a Jewish aide. The Jewish Sonderkommandos were killed periodically and replaced by new arrivals, so that they would not organize in a revolt either.
Eventually, the extermination camp consisted of two subcamps: Camp I, which included the barracks of the Ukrainians, the workshops and barracks of the Jews, the reception area with two undressing barracks, and Camp II, which contained the gas chambers and the mass graves. The two camps were connected by a narrow corridor called the Schlauch, or "Tube." The German guards and the administration were housed in two nice cottages outside the camp across the road.
Belzec's three gas chambers began operating officially on March 17, 1942, the date given for the start of Operation Reinhard. Its first victims were Jews deported from Lublin and Lvov.
There were many technical difficulties in this first attempt at mass extermination. The gas chamber mechanisms were problematic, and usually only one or two were working at any given time, causing a backlog. Furthermore, the corpses were buried in pits covered with only a narrow layer of earth. The bodies often swelled in the heat as a result of putrefaction and the escape of gases, and the covering of earth actually split. This latter problem was corrected in other death camps with the introduction of crematoria.
It was soon realized that the original three gas chambers were insufficient for completing the task at hand, especially with the growing number of arrivals from Cracow and Lvov. A new complex with six gas chambers made of concrete, each 4 x 4 or 5 meters, was erected, the wooden gas chambers were dismantled. The new facility, which could handle over 1,000 victims at a time, was imitated by the other two Operation Reinhard extermination camps: Sobibór and Treblinka. Nevertheless, by December 1942, the last shipment of Jews arrived in Belzec. By that time, the Jews in the area served by Belzec had been almost entirely exterminated, and it was felt that the new facilities under construction at Auschwitz-Birkenau could handle the rest.
It is highly likely that about 436,000 people were killed in Belzec. The huge majority were Jews, though there is some evidence that a number of Gypsies were exterminated there, too. Only two Jews are known to have survived Belzec: Rudolf Reder and Chaim Herszman. The lack of survivors may be the reason why this camp is so little known despite its huge number of victims.
The camp's first commander, Christian Wirth, was killed in Italy by partisans near Trieste in the end of May, 1944. His successor Gottlieb Hering served after the war for a short time as the chief of Criminal Police of Heilbronn and died in the fall 1945 in a hospital. Lorenz Hackenholt survived the war, but has never been found again. Seven former members of the SS-Sonderkommando Belzec were indicted in Munich (Germany), but only one, Josef Oberhauser, was brought to trial in 1965 and sentenced to four and a half years in prison.
Bibliography
- Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1987, ISBN 0253342937
- Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Yale University Press, 2003, revised hardcover edition, ISBN 0300095570
- Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas, A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during "Einsatz Reinhardt" 1942, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3, Winter 2001, ISBN 0199225060
- Adalbert Rückerl (Ed.): NS-Vernichtungslager im Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, dtv dokumente, München 1977, ISBN 3423029o4x
- Rudolf Reder, Belzec, Kraków, 1946de:Vernichtungslager Belzec