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elzec
November 1, 1941, construction had begun on the Belzec killing
center. The timing of the creation of Belzec coincided with
the creation of *Chelmno, one of the six Nazi killing centers
where murder by gassing became operational on December
8, 1941. Gassing was by mobile gas canisters of the same type
that were built by SS men stationed at Belzec, which were
used to kill mental patients in *Zamosc county in December–January
1941–42.
By the end of February 1942 about 120 Jews from Lubycza
Krolewska had become the first victims of gassing at Belzec.
Between March 17, 1942, and April 14, 1942, “the great action”
of killing Jews began as some 70,000–75,000 Jews, most of
them from Lublin and Lvov, were murdered. The first gassing
installations consisted of three gas chambers located inside a
small 26 × 13 foot barrack. The floor of the gas chamber and
the walls were covered with tin and the door was made of hard
wood to prevent it from being broken open from the inside.
The pace of killing overwhelmed the camp’s facilities, so on
April 17 the gassing ceased, resuming only in the middle of
May 1942 when transports from the Cracow district start arriving
again to a functioning camp. Once again the speed of
deportation outpaced the camp’s facilities. So deportations
were halted again and murder by gassing ceased in mid-June
to permit the old gas chambers to be torn down and replaced
with much larger and more efficient ones. They were made of
brick and concrete with one door for entering the gas chambers
and another for clearing out the bodies. The size of each
gas chamber was 13 × 16 feet. At the entrance to the building
was a sign: “Shower and Disinfection Room.” Their capacity
was 1,000–1,200 bodies at a time, or those incarcerated in ten
freight cars of arriving prisoners.
By the second week of July deportations and the gassing
that followed resumed, continuing uninterrupted until
December when the gassing operations were halted. Work
detachments of Jewish forced laborers excavated mass graves
and burned the bodies to remove all evidence of the crime.
When the work was completed, the Germans murdered virtually
all surviving forced laborers at *Sobibor. Chaim Hirszman
jumped from the train to Sobibor and survived until liberation.
He was killed in Lublin, in 1945. A third escapee, Sylko
Herc returned to Belzec, where he remained for 2–3 days before
going to Cracow. His fate is not known.
In spring 1943–summer 1944, German officials and
*Trawniki-trained auxiliaries plowed under the site of the
Belzec camp, planted trees, and built a manor house nearby
in order to conceal any traces of the killing center. At the end
of July 1944, the Soviet Army overran Belzec
The staff of Belzec consisted of between 14 and 30 SS officials,
many of whom were veterans of the T-4 operations: the
murder of mentally retarded, physically infirm, and emotionally
disturbed Germans, where the Nazis pioneered murder by
gassing. Some 90–120 Trawniki-trained guards joined them.
Trawniki was the camp where 2,500 captured Soviet soldiers
and 2,200 civilians became police auxiliaries for the Aktion
Reinhard killing centers. These troops worked throughout
the camps and supported deportations throughout Germanoccupied
Poland.
Christian Wirth, the commandant of Belzec, first developed
the killing center. In 1942 Globocnik appointed him inspector
of the SS Special Detachments with overall responsibility
for the Aktion Reinhard camps. Nicknamed the “Wild
Christian” by his fellow SS men, his “ideas” for Belzec were
also used in Sobibor and Treblinka. He was suceeded as Belzec’s
commandant by Gottleib Hering in August 1942.
The design of the gas chambers is credited to SS-
Haupscharfuehrer (Master Sergeant) Lorenz Hackenholt,
who first served as a mechanic in the T-4 program operating
the mobile gas vans. After his experience at Belzec he constructed
the gas chambers at Sobibor and Treblinka. The gas
chambers were euphemistically called Stiftung Hackenholt
(Hackenholt Foundation).
Only one Belzec official faced charges after the war,
Wirth’s deputy, Josef Oberhauer, a veteran of T-4, who supervised
the construction of Belzec. In 1965 he was sentenced to
four years and six months in prison.
Number of Victims
Until recently, historians cited 600,000 as the number of Jews
killed at Belzec. First established in 1946, the figure was based
on the prewar population of Jewish communities presumably
deported to Belzec. Because this estimate does not account for
Jews murdered in the ghetto deportation operations, or shot
in other locations, it is too high.
To date, only one known document, a report dated January
11, 1943, from the coordinator of Aktion Reinhard, Hermann
Hoefle, to SS-Obersturmbannfuehrer Adolf *Eichmann
in Berlin, gives a specific figure for Jews killed in Belzec:
434,508. The report, intercepted by the British during World
War II, and recently discovered as a declassified document,
purports to be a statistical summary of the actual number of
Jews arriving at Belzec up to December 31, 1942. It had been
radioed on January 11, 1943, by Hoefle for the attention of SS-
Obersturmbannfuehrer (Lieutenant Colonel) Franz Heim,
commander of Security Police in Cracow, and to Eichmann,
in Berlin.
As Rudolph Reder reported, there was no detailed count
of Belzec’s victims and some transports may even not have
been included in Hoefle’s figures. The Belzec Memorial estimates
that the actual death toll for Jews at Belzec may have
been as high as 500,000. Groups of non-Jewish Poles and
Roma and Sinti were murdered at the Belzec death camp as
well. Their number, according to testimonies, could range
from dozens to several hundred, but a specific number could
not be determined. Poles have argued that several of the Poles
were killed for the “crime of saving Jews,” but to date no evidence
has been found to substantiate this claim.
Rudolph Reder, the only known survivor of Bełzec who
lived to tell his story, escaped his captors in November 1942
when he was taken outside the camp by them.
Reder described the killing process as follows:
310 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3