Belzec Extermination Camp

The Belzec extermination camp was one of three Reinhard camps established in Poland as part of the Nazi’s Final Solution, which dealt with the determination to eradicate 2,284,000 Jews. The other Reinhard camps were Sobibor and Treblinka, and between one and a half and two million prisoners perished at the three camps. Operation Reinhard had been named in honor of Gestapo Chief Reinhard Heydrick and was led by Austrian SS member Odilo Globocnik. The Belzec camp was built on a spur of the Lublin-Lvov railway line in the southeastern section of Poland. Between March 1942 and June 1943, an estimated 600,000 Jews were exterminated at Belzec, along with an unknown number of Roma and Soviets.

Brief History

Since Belzec was never intended to house live prisoners, it was small, measuring approximately 862 by 902 feet. It was composed of Camp I, which held the reception and administration areas, and Camp II, which included three barracks equipped with pipes for pumping carbon monoxide into gas chambers disguised as baths. Several watchtowers oversaw the camp, which was surrounded by a double fence of chicken and barbed wire that was camouflaged by trees and branches.

Any prisoner unable to walk was shot upon arrival at Belzec. Others were sent directly to the "bath and inhalation" chambers after being stripped of clothing and valuables. Unaware that they were heading to their deaths, many prisoners initially welcomed the opportunity to bathe after traveling in cattle cars, in which from 100 to 250 prisoners were tightly packed without food or sanitation. Each day, new prisoners arrived aboard four trains that transported Jews from Germany, Austria, Holland, France, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and other parts of Poland. After 30 minutes, gas chambers were emptied, and bodies were thrown into ditches that served as mass graves. The strongest among new arrivals were sometimes separated out to serve as camp workers (Sonderkommandos).

In the spring of 1943 as fears spread about the approach of the Red Army, Jewish workers that had been co-opted as slave laborers were ordered to exhume the bodies in the mass graves and incinerate them. Afterwards, they were forced to spread remaining ashes and bone fragments. The land that had held the camp was then plowed over, and new trees were planted to disguise the fact that the land had been used as a death camp. Nazi personnel were relocated to a farmhouse designated for that purpose.

There are no liberation stories for Belzec, and there are only four known survivors. Three of those escaped, and the other was smuggled out as a child. After the remaining Belzec prisoners were killed as the Red Army approached the camp in June 1943, the six hundred workers who had been forced to operate the camp were transferred to nearby Sobibor and executed.

Because the Nazis were determined to wipe out evidence of their horrific crimes, no records were kept that could identify those who had died at Belzec. It was not until 1997 when ground was being cleared for building a new memorial that the extent of the horrors became known as workers discovered 31 mass graves. Most of what is known has been learned from workers who built the camp and local residents. Much debate has taken place concerning the culpability of those residents who were able to hear the cries of the victims and smell the incinerated bodies. It has been suggested that they feared for their own lives and those of their families or that they simply became immune to the horrors of a war characterized by atrocities.

Overview

Belzec operations were carried out by two dozen SS personnel who had been trained as experts in euthanizing large groups of people. The SS was assisted by sixty to eighty Ukrainian guards (Trawnikamner). Joseph Oberhauser oversaw the building of Belzec. Known as "Savage Christian" by SS guards, Christian Wirth arrived in December 1941 as camp commander. It was Wirth who oversaw the creation of the gas chambers disguised as showers. Wirth used an internal combustion car engine to pump carbon monoxide into the chambers, negating the need to buy supplies from outside sources, which would have left evidence of his crimes. Oberhauser retained charge of Camp II, and Gootfried Schwartz served as Wirth’s assistant. Lorenz Hackenholt was the chief operator of the gas chambers. When Wirth left Belzec in June 1942, he was replaced by SS First Lieutenant Gottlieb Hering.

The only child to survive Belzec was Braha Rauffmann, who was smuggled out of the camp as a seven-year-old and hidden under a wood pile by a Polish woman. When she was freed after almost two years in hiding, she could not straighten her legs, and she had forgotten what the stars and moon looked like. Braha Rauffmann’s story was made public in 2005 with the release of Belzec, a documentary by French filmmaker Guillaume Moscovitz. Chaim Hirszman, a worker on the last train to leave Belzec, escaped by removing planks from the car’s floor. Hirszman testified that children under three had been buried alive upon arrival at camp. He was murdered in 1946 by anti-Semitic Poles. Rudolph Reder, the only adult who survived long enough to testify about Belzec’s atrocities, escaped in November 1942. Reder continued to testify at trials of former Nazis but was not always able to identify those who had participated in the atrocities.

After the war ended, locals destroyed the farmhouse erected by the Nazis after the mass extermination. The first memorial erected at the site of the mass graves consisted of two emaciated figures and never mentioned that the majority of victims were Jews. It read, "In memory of the victims of Hitler’s terror murdered from 1942 to 1943." In 1987, planning for a new memorial was initiated through a partnership between the Polish government and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The new memorial opened in 2004, featuring the "Cast-Iron Border" detailing the Belzec crimes. Since names were not generally known, memorials were erected containing only first names or family names of those believed to have died at Belzec. Visitors enter the memorial at the rail spur where Belzec victims were brought in to the camp. Next, visitors encounter the "Stone Pile," which honors victims by naming their home towns. The memorial also cites a passage from the Bible: "Earth do not cover my blood, let there be no resting place for my outcry!" (Job 16:18).

The Belzec trials were held in Munich, Germany, in January 1963. The chief defendant was Joseph Oberhauser, who received a sentence of four and one-half years but served only half. Other SS personnel brought to trial included Werner Dubois, Erich Fuchs, Hans Girtzig, Heinrich Gley, Robert Juhrs, Karl Schluch, Heinrich Unverhau, and Ernest Zierke. All were acquitted because the victims of their crimes were dead and unable to testify against them. Jurors accepted the argument that the defendants had only been following orders when they committed the crimes. An attempt to try Samuel Kunz, a former SS guard who admitted that he had participated in the murders of Jews at Belzec, was thwarted by the death of the 89-year-old defendant in 2010.

Bibliography

Arad, Yitzhad. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1987. Print.

"Belzec Death Camp Memorial and Museum." University of Minnesota, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 2014. Web. 5 June 2014.

Bloxham, Donald. Genocide on Trial: The War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print.

Blutinger, Jeffrey. "An Inconvenient Past: Post-Communist Holocaust Memorialization." Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 29 (Fall 2010): 73–94. Print.

"Concentration Camps: Belzec." Jewish Virtual Library. 2015. Web. 5 June 2015.

Debski, Tadeusz. A Battlefield of Ideas: Nazi Concentration Camps and Their Polish Prisoners. New York: Columbia UP, 2001. Print.

Hayes, Peter, ed. How Was It Possible? : A Holocaust Reader. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2015. Print.

Khiterer, Victoria, Ryan Barrick, and David Misal. The Holocaust: Memories and History. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2014. Print.

Sofsky, Wolfgang. The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp. William Templer, trans. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.

Wachsmann, Nikolaus. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Farrar, 2015. Print.

Weindling, Paul. Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments: Science and Suffering in the Holocaust. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print.