Bełżec extermination camp

Bełżec, in German Belzec , was the site of the first of the Nazi German extermination camps created for the purpose of implementing the secretive Operation Reinhard, which entailed the murder of some 2.2 million Jews during the Holocaust. The camp was situated in German-occupied Poland about 0.5 km south of the local railroad station of Bełżec, in the new Distrikt Lublin of the semi-colonial General Government territory, and operated from March 17 1942 to the end of 1942-December. The burning of exhumed corpses on five open-air grids and bone crushing continued until March 1943.

Between 430,000 and 500,000 Jews are believed to have been murdered by German Nazis at Bełżec, along with an unknown number of Poles and Romani people. Only seven Jews imprisoned at the camp have survived World War II; only one, or two known from their submitted testimonies. The small number of Holocaust survivors who could testify about it is the primary reason why this camp is so little known despite the enormous number of victims.

Camp construction and purposes
In the interwar period the village of Bełżec was situated northwest of the major Polish city of Lwów (Lemberg, now Lviv, Ukraine), and 47 mi southeast of Lublin; the two cities with the biggest Jewish population in southeastern Poland under the German occupation since 1939. Originally, the Belzec camp was set up in April 1940 for the Jewish forced labor in the implementation of the Burggraben project, part of the German strategic plan codenamed Operation Otto against the Soviets. Lublin was the hub of deportations of about 95,000 Polish Jews from the General Government. The prisoners were put to work by the Schutzstaffel (SS) in the whole territory of the so-called Lublin reservation, exploited in the construction of defensive structures and anti-tank ditches along the Nazi-Soviet demarcation line. The Burggraben project was abandonded with the onset of Operation Barbarossa.

On 13 October 1941, Heinrich Himmler gave the SS-and-Police Leader of Lublin, SS Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik an order to start Germanizing the area around Zamość. The decision to begin work on the first stationary gas chambers in the General Government preceded the actual Wannsee Conference by three months. The site near Bełżec was chosen for several reasons: it was situated on the border between the Lublin District and the German Distrikt Galizien set up after the attack against the Soviets. It could "process" the Jews of both regions. The ease of transportation was secured by the railroad junction at nearby Rawa Ruska and the highways between Lublin and Lemberg. The northern boundary of the planned killing centre consisted of an anti-tank trench constructed by Jewish slave workers a year earlier. The ditch, excavated originally for military purposes was likely to serve as the first mass grave. Globocnik brought in the camp construction expert SS Obersturmführer Richard Thomalla who commenced work in early November 1941, using Polish villagers, Trawniki guards and Jewish slave workers. The installation was finished by early March 1942.

The camp had begun daily gassing operations on 17 March 1942, as envisioned by the January 1942 Wannsee plan of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. The leading proponents of gassing were Dr Wilhelm Dopheide, SS-Obersturmbannführer Dr Ludwig Losacker, SS-Obersturmbannführer Helmut Tanzmann and SS-Gruppenführer and Governor Otto Wächter. Dopheide along with SS-Oberführer Viktor Brack decided to use the Action T4 personnel in the process. The SS officer Kurt Gerstein mentioned in his report, that Dr Herbert Linden was in Bełżec with a visit during August 1942.

Experience in the Action T4 euthanasia program
The two commanders of the camp, Kriminalpolizei officers SS-Sturmbannführer Christian Wirth and SS-Hauptsturmführer Gottlieb Hering, had been involved in the Nazi euthanasia Action T4 program since 1940, in common with almost all of their German staff. Wirth had the leading position as a supervisor of all six euthanasia institutions in the Reich; Hering as the non-medical chief of Sonnenstein hospital in Saxony and at the Hadamar Euthanasia Centre. Wirth had been a killing expert from the beginning, as participant of the first T-4 test gassing of handicapped people at the Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre. He was, therefore, an obvious choice to be the first commandant of the first extermination camp in the General Government. It was his proposal to implement the T-4 method of killing by poison gas inside fake shower rooms although Wirth proposed exhaust fumes instead, which didn't require deliveries. The comparable technology of mobile gas vans used at Chelmno killing centre before December 1941 had proven insufficient for the planned number of victims of the stationary gas chambers at Bełżec.

Wirth developed his ideas on the basis of experience he had gained in the "euthanasia" program and decided to supply the fixed gas chamber with gas produced by the internal-combustion engine of a motorcar. Wirth rejected Zyklon B which was later used at Birkenau. This gas was produced by private firms and its extensive use in Bełżec might have aroused suspicion and led to problems of supply. He therefore preferred a system of extermination based on ordinary, universally available killing agent. 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 large engine (although witnesses differ as to its type, most probably it was a petrol engine), whose exhaust fumes, poisonous in an enclosed space, 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 Bełżec. The T-4 man and first operator of the gas chambers, SS-Hauptscharführer Lorenz Hackenholt, rebuilt an Opel-Blitz post-office vehicle with the help of a local craftsman into a small gas van.

Concealment of camp's purpose from victims
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, guards, and a Jewish aide. The Jewish Sonderkommandos were killed periodically and replaced by new arrivals, so that they would neither organize a revolt nor survive to tell about the camp.

Camp operation
Eventually, Belzec 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 der Schlauch, or "Tube". The German guards and the administration were housed in two cottages outside the camp across the road.

Bełżec's three gas chambers began operating officially on March 17, 1942, the first of the Operation Reinhard camps to begin killing. Its first victims were Jews deported from Lublin and Lwów. 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 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 Kraków and Lviv. A new complex with six gas chambers made of concrete, each 4 × 5 or 8 meters, was erected, and 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: Sobibor and Treblinka. There was a sign on the new building that read "Stiftung Hackenholt" or Hackenholt Foundation named after the SS NCO who designed it. In December 1942, the last shipment of Jews arrived in Bełżec. By that time, the Jews in the area served by Bełżec had been almost entirely murdered, and it was felt that the new facilities under construction at Auschwitz-Birkenau could kill the rest.

Command structure


The camp's first known commander, Christian Wirth, lived very close to the camp in a house which also served as a kitchen for the SS as well as an armoury. He later moved to the Lublin airfield site to oversee Operation Reinhard. He was transferred to San Sabba, a former rice mill in Trieste, Italy. He received the Iron Cross in April 1944. He was killed the following month by partisans whilst travelling in an open topped car in what is today western Slovenia. His successor Gottlieb Hering served after the war for a short time as the chief of Criminal Police of Heilbronn and died in autumn 1945 in a hospital. Lorenz Hackenholt survived the war, but disappeared in 1945.

Only seven former members of the SS-Sonderkommando Belzec were indicted in Munich. Of these, just one, Josef Oberhauser, was brought to trial in 1964, and sentenced to four years and six months in prison, of which he served half before being released.

Camp guards
Bełżec camp guards included Germans (Volksdeutsche) and former Soviet prisoners of war. Before they were posted as "Hiwi" (German letterword for Hilfswilligen, lit. "those willing to help") in the concentration camps, most Soviet POWs who served as camp guards underwent special training at the Trawniki SS camp division, originally set up as the holding center for Soviet POWs following Operation Barbarossa. They provided the bulk of Wachmänner collaborators in all major killing sites of the "Final Solution".

Closure and dismantlement
In the last phase of the camp operations, all prior mass graves were unearthed. The bodies were gradually removed and then cremated on long open-air pyres, part of the Nazi plan to hide the evidence of mass murder, known as the Sonderaktion 1005. Bone fragments were pulverized and mixed with the ashes. The site was planted with small firs and wild lupines and the camp was dismantled. The last train with 300 Jewish Sonderkommando prisoners who performed the cleanup operation departed to Sobibor extermination camp for gassing in late June 1943. They were told that they were being evacuated to Germany instead. Any equipment that could be reused was taken by the German and Ukrainian personnel to the concentration camp Majdanek. Wirth's house and the neighboring SS building, which had been the property of the Polish Railway before the war, were not demolished.

When the Germans left, some people from the surrounding villages returned to the site and began plucking the fresh lupins and digging in the soil mixed with ashes in search of manmade nuggets shaped from melted gold once hidden on the bodies of victims. The area was covered with unearthed evidence of mass murder and human remains. The efforts to disguise the site were thwarted. In response, the SS personnel with work commandos were ordered back to the camp to turn it into a fake farm with one Ukrainian SS guard assigned to settle there permanently with his family. This model for guarding and disguising former camp sites was later adopted in Treblinka and Sobibor.

Kurt Gerstein's testimony
SS Lt. Kurt Gerstein, who worked in the SS medical service, was ordered to deliver a shipment of Zyklon B to Bełżec. He was so shocked by what he saw that he immediately buried the canisters of poison gas, and confessed his experiences to the Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter in a train from Warsaw to Berlin, where they met on August 20. He describes how he arrived at Bełżec on August 19 (another source gives the date as August 18) where he witnessed the unloading of 45 train cars crowded with 6,700 Jews, many of whom were already dead, but the rest were marched naked to the gas chambers, where:

Death toll
Historian Eugeniusz Szrojt in his 1947 study published by the Bulletin of the Main Commission for Investigation of the German Crimes in Poland (Biuletyn Głównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce, 1947) following investigation by GKBZNwP which began in 1945, estimated the number of people murdered in Bełżec as 600,000. This number became widely accepted in literature. Raul Hilberg gave a figure of 550,000. Yitzhak Arad accepted 600,000 as minimum, and the sum in his table of Bełżec deportations exceeded 500,000. Józef Marszałek calculated 500,000. British historian Robin O'Neil once gave an estimate of about 800,000 (based on his investigations at the site). German historians Dieter Pohl and Peter Witte, gave estimate of 480,000 to 540,000. Michael Tregenza stated that it would have been possible to have buried up to one million victims on the site although the true death toll is probably around half of that amount.

The crucial piece of evidence in the debate was published in 2001 by Stephen Tyas and Peter Witte. It was the Höfle Telegram sent by Operation Reinhard's Chief of Staff Hermann Höfle, which indicated that 434,508 Jews ("cumulative arrivals") were killed in Bełżec through December 31, 1942. As the camp had ceased to operate for mass killings by then, this figure needs to be treated as almost absolute in regard to Holocaust trains statistics. "In our view," wrote Pohl & Witte in 2001, "there is no evidence to justify a figure higher than that of 600,000 victims." After this period a sonderkommando of up to 500 people worked in the camp, disinterring the bodies and burning them. The sonderkommando was transported to Sobibor extermination camp around August 1943 and murdered on arrival.

The difference between this "low-end" figure and other estimates can be explained by the lack of exact and detailed sources on the deportations statistics. Thus, Y. Arad writes, that he had to rely, in part, on Yizkor books, which were not guaranteed to give the exact estimates of the numbers of deportees. He also had to rely on partial German railway documentation, from the numbers of trains could be gleaned. But here also assumptions had to be made about the number of persons per train. Considering the vagueness of primary sources, many old scholarly estimates are not far off the mark.

It should also be noted that it is not completely clear whether the Jews who died in transit are included in the final sum. Considering the aim of compiling such a statistic (which was to know the overall number of the victims of the "Final Solution"—Hoefle's numbers were used in Korherr Report) they probably were included. Also, the sources like Westermann's report contain the exact data about the number of deported persons, but only estimates of the numbers of those who died in transit, the fact which also hints that they were included in the final sum, because it would be hard for the authorities in Bełżec to learn the exact number of those murdered, excluding the dead in transport.

Remains of the camp
From late 1997 until early 1998, a thorough archaeological survey of the site was conducted. The survey was headed by Andrzej Kola, director of the Underwater Archaeological Department at the University of Toruń, and Mieczysław Góra, senior curator of the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Łódź. The team identified the railway sidings and remains of a number of buildings. They also found 33 mass graves, the largest of which were 210 by 60 feet. The team estimated that they had found 15,000 unburned bodies, and "The largest mass graves ... contained unburned human remains (parts and pieces of skulls with hair and skin attached) and entire bodies preserved in wax-fat transformation. The foul smelling bottom layer of the graves consisted of several inches to a meter thick of human fat resembling black soap. One grave contained uncrushed human bones so closely packed that the drill could not penetrate."

Postwar commemoration


As a result of the Nazi German efforts to erase evidence of the camp's existence near the war's end, almost all its traces disappeared from the site. Even though, the leveled-out mass graves of the camp's victims remained, there were no survivors to alert the Stalinist officials to the true significance of the site in the postwar years. Therefore the scene was not legally protected until the late 1940s. Some local inhabitants dug in the ground to look for concealed valuables buried with the ashes. Pursuit of the Nazi German perpetrators of the Holocaust in Germany in the second half of the 1950s drew first serious attention to the site. Furthermore, Soviet trials of Russian camp personnel held in Kiev and Krasnodar in the early 1960s soon followed suit.

In the 1960s the area of the former camp was fenced off, and the first few monuments were placed on the site. The fenced area did not correspond to the actual area of the camp during its operation due to lack of proper evidence and modern forensic research, and so some commercial development took place on areas formerly belonging to it. Due to the isolated location on Poland's eastern border, only a very small number of people visited the former camp before 1988. The site was largely forgotten and poorly maintained.

Following the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship in 1989, the situation slowly changed. As the number of visitors to Poland interested in Holocaust sites increased, more of them came to Bełżec. Many reacted negatively to the unkept state of the grounds. In the late 1990s extensive investigations were carried out on the camp grounds to determine precisely the camp's extent and provide greater understanding of its operation. Buildings constructed after the war on the camp grounds were removed. In 2004, Belzec became a new branch of the Majdanek State Museum, and a large new monument commemorating the camp's victims was unveiled.