The deportation of Jews from Stanisławów to Bełżec

On 12 September 1942, a Saturday that was also the first day of the Jewish New Year – Rosh Hashanah 5703 – German and Ukrainian police surrounded the ghetto in Stanisławów (Ivano-Frankivsk). People were dragged out of their homes and hiding places, herded onto a square and the next morning driven to the railway station. A train took them to the Bełżec death camp, where they were murdered in the gas chambers. According to the German historian Dieter Pohl and the Holocaust Encyclopedia of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington (USHMM), between 3,000 and 4,000 people were deported; according to the Israeli encyclopaedia of Jewish communities, Pinkas Hakehillot, and some other studies, about 5,000.

Many accounts state that the deportation was ordered by “SS commander Brandt” and that the victims died at Bełżec “on the same day”. Both statements need qualifying. Oskar Brandt was not an SS commander but a Gestapo officer – the deputy of Hans Krüger, head of the Security Police outpost in Stanisławów; some studies say that after Krüger’s recall in August 1942 it was Brandt who took over the outpost. According to Pohl, it was Brandt who, when the authorities in Lwów announced another train to Bełżec, set the deportation for the New Year festival. The victims did not, however, die on 12 September: according to the accounts collected in Pinkas Hakehillot, they were held on the square in the ghetto all night and marched to the station only in the morning. The journey to Bełżec usually took many hours, and people were killed in the camp almost immediately on arrival – most probably, therefore, on 13 or 14 September. No surviving document records the exact date.

The ghetto in September 1942

Stanisławów, before the war a provincial capital with a Jewish community of several tens of thousands, had lain since August 1941 in the District of Galicia of the General Government. The Security Police outpost headed by Krüger murdered tens of thousands of people there in less than a year. Between 10,000 and 12,000 Jews were killed on 12 October 1941 in the Jewish cemetery during Bloody Sunday. The survivors were crammed into the ghetto, which was sealed in December. On the night of 31 March–1 April 1942, on the eve of Passover, the police set fire to houses in the ghetto and sent the first transport to Bełżec.

In the summer shootings became an everyday occurrence. On 22 August, in a “reprisal action”, the Germans hanged the chairman of the Judenrat, Mordechai Goldstein, and about twenty Jewish policemen, and shot more than a thousand people. According to Pohl, the Security Police also shot several hundred people each in the courtyard of its headquarters on 28 August and on 4 and 9 September. At the beginning of September the ghetto, reduced in size after each action, still held about 11,000 people – fewer than half of those who had been crammed into it nine months earlier.

By then it was well known in Galicia what “resettlement” meant. July and August brought a wave of deportations from all over the district: from Rawa Ruska, Sambor, Borysław and Drohobycz, and above all from Lwów, from where between 40,000 and 50,000 people were deported to Bełżec during the so-called Great Action in the Lwów Ghetto (10–23 August). At the same time the Germans were emptying the Warsaw Ghetto in the Great Deportation, sending its inhabitants to Treblinka. Bełżec, the first of the Operation Reinhard camps, was rebuilt in the summer: the wooden barrack with three gas chambers was replaced by a larger building with six. From August the camp was commanded by Gottlieb Hering, the successor of Christian Wirth.

The New Year festival

As in earlier actions, the “resettlement” was announced on posters. The ghetto was surrounded by German Security Police and Order Police officers and by the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. According to survivors’ accounts collected in Pinkas Hakehillot, the scenes of March were repeated: policemen set fire to houses to drive out those in hiding, threw grenades into cellars and shot at those who ran. Those caught were herded onto a square between Batorego and Belwederska Streets, where they were beaten and tormented all night. In the morning the column was marched on foot to the railway station and loaded into goods wagons.

Pohl, drawing on the verdict in the Krüger case and on post-war testimony, writes that only doctors were exempted from among those detained – everyone else was deported. According to Pinkas Hakehillot, between several hundred and a thousand people were murdered in the ghetto itself during the action, including the patients of both of its hospitals. How many died on the way is not known. The conditions of such transports are described in a report by Westermann, a lieutenant of the Order Police, on the deportation from Kołomyja (Kolomyia) in those same days: a train carrying more than 8,200 people, which left on the evening of 10 September and stopped at Stanisławów on the way, reached Bełżec the next day with some two thousand dead in its wagons. Many tried to jump from the trains; the escort fired at them, and the bodies were left lying along the tracks.

At Bełżec SS men and guards trained at Trawniki (PL) drove the people out of the wagons, ordered them to undress and herded them into the gas chambers, into which engine exhaust was pumped. The whole procedure took a few hours. The bodies were buried in mass pits. None of those deported on 12 September came back.

The choice of date was no accident. In 1941 Bloody Sunday had fallen on the festival of Hoshana Rabbah, the first deportation on the eve of Passover, and the September one on the New Year. The authors of Pinkas Hakehillot regard this as deliberate. The same pattern was repeated in other towns: on 21 September, Yom Kippur, the Germans deported some 5,000 Jews from the Brzeżany and Rohatyn districts to Bełżec. Actions on holy days made it possible to find people at home and robbed the victims of the last space that could give them a sense of community.

September in Galicia

The Stanisławów deportation was one of many links in the September wave. According to the tallies of the camp’s historians, in that month alone transports left for Bełżec from, among other places, Stryj (3 September, about 5,000 people), Skole (5 September, about 6,500), Kołomyja and its surroundings (7–10 September, nearly 13,000), Kamionka Strumiłowa and Radziechów, Brody, Brzeżany and Rohatyn, Borszczów and Tarnopol. At the same time the Stanisławów outpost was killing on the spot. In September Jews from the surrounding localities were brought into the city and shot in the Jewish cemetery. On 15–17 September officers of the outpost, led according to Pohl by Wilhelm Assmann, liquidated the Jewish community of Kałusz, which in July had numbered more than 5,500 people. On 26 September several hundred people were again shot in the courtyard of the police headquarters in Stanisławów.

After these weeks, according to German figures, officially about 6,000 Jews remained in the whole of the Stanisławów district – compared with more than 50,000 before the killing began. The ghetto, reduced once more, held mainly people employed by German institutions. Their work cards were re-checked every few weeks, and those whose cards were taken away ended up in the Gestapo courtyard, which the prisoners called the “courtyard of death”, or in the Janowska camp in Lwów.

Place in the war

The Rosh Hashanah deportation brought the Stanisławów ghetto close to its end. On 15 October 1942 another great action was carried out, after which – as Pohl writes – most of the city’s Jewish community had been wiped out; only thanks to the courage of one railwayman did 150 Jewish railway workers survive it. In November the deportations reached Nadwórna and its surroundings. In January 1943 the police shot about a thousand people without work papers, and on 22 February Brandt had the ghetto surrounded and almost all its remaining inhabitants shot in the Jewish cemetery. The Germans declared Stanisławów “free of Jews”. Of the roughly 25,000 Jews who had lived in the city before the war, about 1,500 survived according to the USHMM, many of them outside the city; in Stanisławów itself about a hundred people lived to see liberation in hiding.

Bełżec went on receiving transports until December 1942. In a radio message sent in January 1943 by the deputy head of Operation Reinhard, Hermann Höfle, the number of Jews murdered there by the end of 1942 was given as 434,508; most of them came from Galicia and from the Kraków and Lublin districts. From the end of 1942 the Germans had the bodies exhumed and burned, and in the spring of 1943 they dismantled the camp and erased its traces. Of the several hundred thousand people brought to Bełżec, according to researchers, only a handful survived the war – escapees from the camp.

Most of the perpetrators escaped justice or answered for their crimes only many years later. Krüger was sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Münster only in 1968. The deportation of 12 September 1942 stands today as an example of what the destruction of the Jews of Galicia looked like in the autumn of 1942: a local police outpost, obedient to train schedules set in Lwów and Lublin, turned one religious festival after another into a day of mass death, and the murdered communities vanished one after another within the space of a few weeks.