Killing begins at Bełżec

On 17 March 1942 the first trains carrying Jews were shunted onto the siding by the railway station at Bełżec, a village in Tomaszów county on the borders of the Lublin, Kraków and Galicia districts. In the morning a transport arrived from the Lublin ghetto, in the afternoon one from Lwów. Each, according to the sources, carried between about 1,400 and 1,600 people. They were told they were in a transit camp and that after a bath they would travel on east to work. Within a few hours almost all of them had died in gas chambers filled with engine exhaust. This was how the Bełżec extermination camp began operating, the first killing centre with permanent gas chambers in the General Government. Historians take this day as the start of the systematic extermination of the Polish Jews, later given the name Operation Reinhard.

A camp by the tracks

The decision to build the camp was taken in the autumn of 1941. A key role in it was played by the SS and Police Leader of the Lublin district, Odilo Globocnik, who in the summer had already discussed the future of the Lublin region with Heinrich Himmler, and who in September agreed with the leadership of the Führer’s Chancellery that men from Aktion T4 would be sent to Lublin – the murder of patients in German psychiatric institutions, in which killing with gas had been learned. According to some historians, among them Bogdan Musiał, the final decisions were taken at a meeting between Globocnik and Himmler on 13 October 1941. It is still disputed whether the camp was meant from the start to kill all the Jews of the General Government, or for the time being only the Jews of the Lublin district.

The site was chosen with care. Bełżec lay on the Lublin–Lwów railway line, within reach of large Jewish populations in three districts, and had a siding left over from a former timber business; in 1940 there had already been a labour camp here, whose prisoners dug an anti-tank ditch along the border with the USSR. The nearness of the former border was meant to lend credibility to the lie of “resettlement to the east”.

Construction began on 1 November 1941 on a wooded hill a few hundred metres from the station. The first work was done by Polish labourers from the area, assigned by the local authority and – as they testified after the war – unaware of what they were building, and by guards trained at Trawniki (PL), most of them former Soviet prisoners of war. Later a group of Jews from nearby Lubycza Królewska (PL) worked here. According to historians of the camp, they – about 120 people – became the first victims of the gas chambers in February 1942. On 22 December 1941 the commandant arrived: Christian Wirth, a criminal police officer and until then inspector of the T4 centres. In January 1942 he brought his former subordinates from the “euthanasia centre” at Bernburg from the Reich; the German staff usually numbered about twenty men, and the guard force about a hundred auxiliaries.

The first chambers were housed in a wooden hut: three rooms lined with zinc sheeting and disguised as a bathhouse. Over the winter Wirth and his men tried out various methods of killing – gas from cylinders, a vehicle converted into a gas chamber – until they decided that the simplest would be the exhaust of an engine, probably taken from a captured Soviet tank. Exactly who fell victim to these “experiments” apart from the workers from Lubycza is not known; researchers, among them Michael Tregenza and Robert Kuwałek (PL), differ in their assessments.

Lublin, the night of 16–17 March

Before the war about 40,000 Jews lived in Lublin. The Germans set up the ghetto in the Podzamcze district in March 1941. On the night of 16–17 March 1942 they began to liquidate it, starting with the so-called large ghetto. The operation was coordinated by the Operation Reinhard staff in Lublin, where deportations were directed by Hermann Höfle. Those seized were herded to the square by the Maharshal synagogue below the castle, and from there driven about two kilometres through the city streets to the railway siding on what is today Zimna Street. The old and sick who could not walk were killed on the spot. According to Polish studies, the Germans set a daily “quota” of about 1,400 people.

The deportations went on until mid-April. According to some historians, nearly 26,000 Lublin Jews were murdered at Bełżec in that period; other studies give about 28,000 or even 30,000. The rest, holders of German work certificates, were moved to a smaller ghetto at Majdan Tatarski. Two or three men from the first Lublin transports, according to accounts collected by historians, managed to escape from Bełżec and make their way back to Lublin via Zamość, where they told members of the Jewish councils what they had seen.

Lwów and Galicia

In Lwów, in the Galicia district, the first deportation operation began on 14 March. Those seized were above all people the Germans considered “unfit for work” or “asocial elements”. By 1 April between 10,000 and 15,000 people had been deported to Bełżec. From 19 March the deportations extended to the ghettos in the western part of the district, along the railway line to Lublin: Żółkiew, Rawa Ruska, Drohobycz, and later also Stanisławów and Kołomyja. By 7 April about 13,000 Jews from these towns had been murdered at Bełżec. On 20 March, when a transport arrived from Żółkiew (PL), the women refused to enter the chambers; in the confusion two of them hid, escaped from the camp at night and returned to the town.

At the end of March the Germans also began emptying the “transit ghettos” in the Lublin district – Piaski (PL) and Izbica – to make room for Jews expelled from the Reich, Austria and the Protectorate, as well as the ghettos in Zamość, Kraśnik and Lubartów. In this first phase the deportations mainly took people deemed unfit for work, and a single transport rarely held more than 3,000 people.

A few hours

The method of killing worked out at Bełżec under Wirth’s supervision was later to be repeated in other camps. The train stopped at the station, where it was divided into sections; a locomotive pushed a few wagons at a time onto the ramp inside the camp. SS men and guards drove people out of the wagons, and one of the Germans – at first often Wirth himself – made a speech about bathing and disinfection. Anyone who protested was beaten or killed in front of the others. The men undressed and went straight down a narrow corridor screened with branches to the chambers; the women first had their hair cut off. Once the doors were shut, the engine was started. The gassing took about 20–30 minutes. The bodies were pulled out by Jewish prisoners, briefly spared from the transports, who buried them in mass pits. The whole procedure, from arrival to burial of the bodies, took two to three hours according to historians of the camp.

In the first week one or two trains a day arrived at Bełżec, each with a thousand to fifteen hundred people, and then larger ones. According to Kuwałek’s calculations, about 66,000 Jews had been murdered here by mid-April 1942; other studies speak of more than 60,000. Secrecy could not be maintained: escapees, like those from Lublin and Żółkiew, carried news to the ghettos. Two months earlier, at the Wannsee Conference, the state secretary in the General Government administration, Josef Bühler, had declared that his administration would welcome the start of the “final solution” on its territory. At Bełżec that solution began to be put into practice.

How many people died at Bełżec

The camp staff destroyed the records, so the number of victims has been established indirectly and the estimates vary. In 1947 the Polish investigating judge Eugeniusz Szrojt put it at no fewer than 600,000; the same figure was accepted by the court in Munich in 1964, and after them by the Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad. Later research produced lower figures: Wolfgang Scheffler wrote of about 447,000, Raul Hilberg of 550,000. The most important document turned out to be a radio telegram that Höfle sent from Lublin in January 1943 (the British intercepted it on 11 January) to Adolf Eichmann in Berlin and to the Security Police in Kraków. Decrypted by British intelligence, it lay in the archives until 2000; it was described in 2001 by the historians Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas. According to it, 434,508 people had “arrived” at Bełżec by 31 December 1942 – historians read the word as the number of those murdered. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) gives this figure (as a minimum). Kuwałek, author of a monograph on the camp, counted 179 transports carrying 440,000–453,000 people, and the Museum and Memorial at Bełżec accepts about 450,000 victims. Some authors, such as Robin O’Neil, have given much higher figures.

The overwhelming majority of those killed were Polish Jews from the Lublin, Kraków and Galicia districts, but there were also Jews from Germany, Austria, Bohemia and Slovakia who had earlier been deported to ghettos in the General Government. An unknown number of Roma and Poles also died at Bełżec. The long-repeated figure of 1,500 Poles murdered for helping Jews rested, according to today’s researchers, on doubtful testimony.

What came next

In mid-April 1942 Wirth left, and some of the staff were sent to the camp then being built at Sobibór. Transports to Bełżec resumed at the end of May, and in the summer, after a larger, solid building with six chambers had been put up, the camp received as many as several trains a day, above all from Galicia and the Kraków district. In August Wirth became inspector of all the camps of the operation, and Gottlieb Hering became commandant of Bełżec (according to the USHMM as early as June). The last transports came in December 1942. After that the Germans made the prisoners dig up and burn the bodies; in the spring of 1943 they dismantled the camp, and the last prisoners were taken – according to the USHMM in June – to Sobibór.

Of the several hundred thousand people brought to Bełżec, according to researchers, two escapees about whom there is no doubt survived the war: Rudolf Reder (PL) of Lwów, who in 1946 published an account of the camp in Kraków, and Chaim Hirszman (PL); some studies count a third, Rabbi Izrael Szapiro, whose account is, however, less certain. In 1963 West German prosecutors charged eight former SS men from Bełżec; the court in Munich dropped the case against seven of them in 1964, and in 1965 sentenced the only one convicted, Josef Oberhauser, to four and a half years in prison. A memorial and museum on the site of the former camp were opened only in 2004.