Belzec

Belzec was the site of a Death camp Nazi during the Second world war, in current the Poland. The camp belonged to the Aktion Reinhardt.

A strategic situation

The October 13rd 1941, Heinrich Himmler gave the chief of the police force of Lublin, the chief of brigade S Odilo Globocnik, two orders which were closely related one to the other: first of all germaniser the sector around Zamosc and to start to make function the very first death camp of the general government close to Belzec.

The site was selected for three reasons:

1 - It is located at the border between the zone of Lublin and the Galicie because of its objective to be been used as place of extermination for the Jews of these two zones.

2- For reasons of transport it extends beside the main roads and railroad between Lublin and Lvov.

3 - The northern border of the camp of death was delimited by the anti-tank ditch dug one year before by the Jewish workmen of the Slavic countries of the old camp of obligatory work. In the beginning, this ditch was dug for military reasons, but it was used like first enormous common grave.

Active persons in charge

The expert of Globocnik as regards construction, the Obersturmfuehrer S Richard Thomalla, put himself at work in the first days of November 1941, with the assistance of the villagers and the Polish men of Trawniki, then thereafter with Jewish workmen of the Slavic countries. Construction was completed at the beginning of March 1942.

The two commanders of the camp, Christian Wirth and Gottlieb Hering, of the police officers criminele had - as almost all their personnel - summer implied since 1940 in the Nazi program of euthanasia, Wirth in particular as supervisor of each of the six establishments of euthanasia of Reich, Hering as a not-medical chief of Sonnenstein (Pirna, Saxony) and of Hadamar. As a participant in the first gazage of the T-4 test on handicapped people with Brandenburg, Wirth was, before even its arrival with Belzec, an expert of the massacre.

It obviously was selected for this reason to become the first chief of the first death camp in the general government. It could have proposed to transfer T-4 technology to kill by carbon monoxide gas in the fixed gas chambers of Belzec, whereas the similar technology used in the mobile gas vans used since December 1941 in the death camp of Chelmno (Kulmhof) had shown its limits as for the number of victims compared to prévisons Nazis.

Management of the camp

For economic reasons and of transport, Wirth did not use here industrial carbon monoxide out of bottle as for T-4, but used this same gas provided by a large engine (although the witnesses differ as for his type, it was most probably petrol engine), whose exhaust emits smoke, poison in a closed space, which was brought by a system of pipes in the gas chambers. For transport of Jews and gipsies of small number and on a short distance, a to the minimum reduced version of the technology of the truck with gas was employed in Belzec: Lorenz Hackenholt present at the time of T-4 and first operator of the gas rooms, rebuilt a Opel-Blitz vehicle with the assistance of a local craftsman in a small gas van. A member of the personnel testified that appointed office Jewish were assassinated in this car during the all last days of Belzec.

The gas chambers out of wooden were camouflaged in barraquements and showers of a camp of work, so that the victims did not achieve the true goal of the place, and the process was led as quickly as possible: people were forced to run of the trains to the gas rooms, leaving them any time to carry out where they were or to project a revolt. A handle of Jews were selected to carry out the whole of the manual work implied by the extermination (to remove the bodies of the gas rooms, to bury them, sort and repair the clothing of the victims, etc). The process of extermination itself was led by Hackenholt, the guards (mainly of the Soviet prisoners of war as well as recruits among civil Polish or Ukrainians) and of the Jewish auxiliaries (the Sonderkommando S). The latter were killed periodically and replaced by new arrivals so that they do not organize either a revolt.

Thereafter, the death camp was composed of two under-camps: the Camp I, which included the barraquements trawnikis, workshops and barraquements of the Jews, the sector of reception including/understanding two barraquements stripping, and the camp II, which contained the gas chambers and the common graves. The two camps were connected by a narrow corridor called Schlauch, or the " tube." the German guards and the administration were placed in two small buildings apart from the camp of the other with dimensions of the road.

The three gas chambers of Belzec started to function officially on March 17th, 1942, the date given for the beginning of the Reinhard operation. Its first victims were expelled Jews of Lublin and Lvov.

There were many technical difficulties for this first attempt at extermination of mass. The mechanisms of gas room broke down and usually only one or two functioned at the same time. Moreover, the corpses were buried in wells only covered of one narrow layer of ground. The bodies often inflated because of heat due to the putrefaction, the escape from gases, and covering by the ground. This last problem was corrected in other camps of died with the introduction of the crematoriums.

One soon realized that the three original gas rooms were insufficient to achieve the assigned objectives, particularly with the increasingly significant number of the arrivals coming from Cracow and Lvov. A new complex with six gas chambers of 4x4 or 4x5 meters, made concrete, was set up. The rooms in with gas out of wooden were then dismantled. The new installation, which could operate on more than 1.000 victims at the same time, was imitated by two of the other death camps of the Reinhard operation: Sobibór and Treblinka. In December 1942, the last convoy of Jews arrived at Belzec. At this moment, Jews in the sector where Belzec was located had been almost entirely exterminated, and the authorities Nazis estimated that the new equipment in construction with Auschwitz-Birkenau could take over.

An appalling assessment

According to the telegram of Hoefle, 434.508 Jews were killed in Belzec. There is as evidence as a certain number of gipsies were also exterminated there. Only two Jews are known to have survived Belzec: Rudolf Reder and Chaim Herszman. The lack of survivors constitutes can be the reason for which this camp is so much little known in spite of its enormous number of victims.

What became the executives of the camp?

The first commander of the camp, Christian Wirth, was killed in Italy by partisans close to Trieste at the end of May 1944. Its successor Gottlieb Hering was used after the war for one short period as a chief of criminal police force as Heilbronn and died in autumn 1945 in a hospital. Lorenz Hackenholt survived the war, but found forever. Seven former members of Einsatzgruppen de Belzec were shown with Munich (Germany), but only one, Josef Oberhauser, were submitted with the legal authorities in 1965 and were condemned to four years and half of prison.

The history of the death camp of Belzec is the documentary film object of Guillaume Moscovitz going back to 2005.

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