by Yitzhak Arad
Upon arrival at Belzec station, the train stopped. There, the train, which usually numbered between forty to sixty freight cars, was split into two or three sections; each was driven separately into the camp, because the absorption capacity of the ramp inside the camp was no more than twenty cars. When the empty cars returned, after they had been unloaded, another section of the train was driven in. The guards who had escorted the train and the German and Polish railroad workers who had driven the train from the embarkation stations were not permitted to enter the camp. There would be no unnecessary eyewitnesses to what was going on inside. The train was driven into the camp by a select and trusted crew of German railroad workers.
A Polish locomotive driver, Stefan Kirsz, who was in the Belzec station, testified to what he saw from the vicinity of the camp:
As a co-driver of a locomotive, I led the Jewish transports from the station of Rava-Russkaya to Belzec many times. . . . These transports were divided in Belzec into three parts. Each part, which consisted of twenty freight cars, was taken to the railway spur inside the camp pushed by the locomotive, and stopped near the former border wall of 1939/40 [outside the camp]. Immediately after the freight cars stopped inside the camp, they were emptied of the Jews. Within 3-5 minutes the twenty cars were empty of Jews and their luggage. I saw that in addition to the living, corpses were taken out. . . . The Germans did not allow us to watch the camp, but I was able to see it when I approached the camp and deceptively pretended that I must put the coal closer to the entrance gate.2
The view of the camp and the “treatment” that greeted a transport of Jews was as follows:
• The camp looked “peaceful”; no graves, pits, or gas chambers could be seen by the victims. They believed that they had arrived in a “transit camp,” and an SS man strengthened this belief by announcing that they should undress and make their way to the baths for cleaning and disinfection. They were told that afterward they would receive clean clothes and be sent to labor camps. The barbed-wire fences and the armed guards that were around also kept the victims submissive and calm.
• The separation between the sexes, the undressing, and even the haircuts given to the women convinced them even more that they were going to the baths. At this stage they were hurried along and beaten so as to prevent any thought of escape or resistance. For reasons of security, and also to prevent escape and resistance, the men were taken to the gas chambers first, before they grasped what was happening. Afterward, the women and children were taken.3
• The gas chamber resembled ordinary baths. When they were closed and the victims were packed inside, they still did not know what was happening. Even if they finally realized that they were being gassed, it was too late. The building and doors were strong enough to resist any pressure from inside. Within minutes those inside the gas chambers lost consciousness, and a few minutes later, their lives.
When a transport of Jews disembarked, usually a group of young, strong men was removed from the crowd. They numbered a few dozen, or sometimes even a few hundred men. Most were taken to Camp II and put to work. It was their duty to pull the bodies out of the gas chambers, carry them to the open ditches, and bury them. Some of them collected the clothes and goods left behind by the victims and transferred them to the sorting place. Others had to remove from the train the people who had died on the way and those who were unable to walk and take them to the pits in Camp II. These Jews were organized in work groups under their own capos. They were kept for a few days or even weeks, tortured, and weakened through work. Each day some were murdered and replaced by others taken from the transports.
SS Unterscharführer Karl Alfred Schluch, a former euthanasia employee who served in Belzec from February or March 1942, when the killing operations began, for some sixteen months, described the handling of a transport:
In the morning or noon time we were informed by Wirth, Schwartz, or by Oberhauser that a transport with Jews should arrive soon. . . . The disembarkation from the freight cars was carried out by a group of Jewish prisoners under the command of their capos. Two or three Germans from the camp staff supervised this action. It was my obligation to carry out such supervisions. After the disembarkation, the Jews were taken to the assembly square. During the disembarkation, the Jews were told that they had come here for transfer and they should go to baths and disinfection. This announcement was made by Wirth and translated by a Jewish capo. Afterward the Jews were taken to the undressing barracks.4
Kurt Franz, who served under Wirth in Belzec, testified:
I heard with my own ears how Wirth, in a quite convincing voice, explained to the Jews that they would be deported further and before that, for hygienic reasons, they must bathe themselves and their clothes would have to be disinfected. Inside the undressing barrack was a counter for the deposit of valuables. It was made clear to the Jews that after the bath their valuables would be returned to them. I can still hear, until today, how the Jews applauded Wirth after his speech. This behavior of the Jews convinces me that the Jews believed Wirth. . . .5
After undressing, first the men and later the women with the children were taken through the “tube” to the gas chambers. SS Unterscharführer Schluch testified:
My post in the “tube” was close to the undressing barrack. Wirth briefed me that while I was there I should influence the Jews to behave calmly. After leaving the undressing barracks, I had to show the Jews the way to the gas chambers. I believe that when I showed the Jews the way they were convinced that they were really going to the baths. After the Jews entered the gas chambers, the doors were closed by Hackenholt himself or by the Ukrainians subordinate to him. Then Hackenholt switched on the engine which supplied the gas. After five or seven minutes—and this is only an estimate—someone looked through the small window into the gas chamber to verify whether all inside were dead. Only then were the outside doors opened and the gas chambers ventilated. . . . After the ventilation of the gas chambers, a Jewish working group under the command of their capos entered and removed the bodies from the chambers. Occasionally, I had to supervise at this place; therefore, I can describe the whole process, which I saw and witnessed personally.
The Jews inside the gas chambers were densely packed. This is the reason that the corpses were not lying on the floor but were mixed up in disorder in all directions, some of them kneeling, according to the amount of space they had. The corpses were besmirched with mud and urine or with spit. I could see that the lips and tips of the noses were a bluish color. Some of them had their eyes closed, others’ eyes rolled. The bodies were dragged out of the gas chambers and inspected by a dentist, who removed finger-rings and gold teeth. . . . After this procedure, the corpses were thrown into a big pit. . . .6
The number of gas chambers in operation during the first months of the extermination activity in Belzec is hard to establish. As a result of technical problems or breakdowns, probably only one or two out of the three gas chambers were in operation at any given time.7 There were also some difficulties concerning the burial of the victims. After a pit was full of corpses, it was covered with a thin layer of earth. From the heat, putrefaction, and in some cases water that penetrated into the pits, the corpses swelled, and the thin layer of earth split. What happened then is described by Franz Stangl, who visited Belzec in April 1942:
Wirth was not in his office, they said he was up at the camp. . . . I asked what was the matter. The man I was talking to said that one of the pits had overflowed. They had put too many corpses in it and putrefaction had progressed too fast so that the liquid underneath had pushed the bodies on top up and over, and the corpses had rolled down the hill. I saw some of them—oh God, it was awful. . . .8
Those people who had no strength to go through the ordinary extermination procedure, from the train to the gas chambers, were taken directly to the pits and there they were shot. SS Unterscharführer Robert Juhrs, who arrived in Belzec in the summer of 1942 and who took part in such shootings, described how they were carried
out:
I had to carry out the shooting of Jews once In that transport the cars were overloaded; some of the Jews were unable to walk. Maybe, in that confusion, some of the Jews had been pushed down and had been crushed underfoot. Therefore, there were Jews that, by no means, could cover the way to the undressing barrack. [Gottlieb] Hering gave me an order to shoot these Jews. He told me verbally: “Juhrs, take these Jews to Camp II immediately and shoot them there.” . . . These Jews were taken to the gate [of Camp II] by a Jewish working group, and from there they were taken to the pits by other working Jews. As I remember, there were seven Jews, men and women, who were taken inside the pit. . . . It is hard to describe the condition these people were in, after their long journey in the unimaginably packed freight cars. I regarded the killing of these people in this way as a mercy and redemption. . . . I shot these Jews with a machine gun, as they stood on the edge of the pit. I aimed directly at their heads so that everyone died instantly. I am absolutely sure that nobody felt any torment. . . .9
The first large Jewish community that was deported for extermination in Belzec was Lublin. During less than four weeks, from March 17 to April 14, close to 30,000 Jews, out of 37,000 who lived in the Lublin ghetto, were sent to Belzec. During this same period, an additional 13,500 Jews were deported from the Lublin district to Belzec, among them 3,000 from Zamosc, 3,400 from Piaski, 2,200 from Izbica and other places (see Appendix A).
The first transport with Jews from the Lvov district came from Zolkiew, a town 50 km southeast of Belzec. This transport, with about 700 Jews, arrived in Belzec on March 25 or 26, 1942. Within a period of three weeks after the first transport from Zolkiew, almost 30,000 Jews arrived in Belzec from the Lvov district. Among them were 15,000 Jews deported from Lvov during the so-called “March Aktion,” 5,000 from Stanislawow, 5,000 from Kolomyya, and others from Drogobych and Rava-Russkaya. During the wave of deportations from the Lvov district, most of the Jews sent to Belzec were, according to the Germans’ classification, “nonworking” Jews.
After about four weeks of intensive activity, during which approximately 75,000 Jews had been killed, the transports stopped. Toward the end of April or beginning of May 1942, Wirth, along with the SS men stationed there, left the camp. Oberhauser related:
After those first gassing operations, Wirth, Schwartz and all the German personnel disappeared from Belzec. As his final official act, Wirth had, before his departure, gassed or shot the fifty working Jews, including their capos. When Wirth and his people departed, I was in Lublin. I had a big transport of material to bring. When I came again to Belzec, nobody was there. In the camp there were about twenty Ukrainian guards. They were under the command of SS Scharführer Feiks. Curiously enough, SS and Police Leader Globocnik had no knowledge of the departure of Wirth and his men. He sent me to Belzec to find out in which direction Wirth had gone. I found out that he had left for Berlin via Lvov and Cracow, without reporting to Globocnik.10
At that time it was not clear whether Wirth was subordinate to Globocnik or to the euthanasia program in Berlin.
The reasons for Wirth’s departure from Belzec and the intermission in the killing operation there are unknown. It is possible that Wirth saw his task as completed after he had erected Belzec, had experimented, and had developed the extermination process there. At that time the Sobibor death camp had also become operational, with Wirth’s help, and he could see his task as fulfilled. No doubt Wirth had aspirations for a higher post than commander of Belzec, especially as he had held important assignments in the past in the euthanasia program.
At the beginning of May 1942, SS Oberführer Viktor Brack, one of the euthanasia leaders in Berlin, visited Globocnik in Lublin. Globocnik demanded the return of Wirth and his men to Belzec and additional euthanasia people for Operation Reinhard. Following this request Wirth returned to Belzec in the middle of May 1942.
In the last week of May, two small transports with 1,350 Jews arrived from two small ghettos near Zamosc (Laszczow—350; Komarow—1,000). At the beginning of June 1942, new transports, this time from the Cracow district, began arriving in Belzec. Three transports with 5,000 Jews from the city of Cracow arrived between June 1 and 6. From June 11 to 19, an additional 11,600 Jews arrived in Belzec from Cracow district.11 (See Appendix A.)
With the beginning of the deportations from Cracow district and the deportations from the Lvov and Lublin districts, it was clear to Wirth that the three wooden gas chambers in Belzec would no longer be sufficient to hold the increased number of Jews arriving in the transports. New, larger gas chambers would have to be built. To facilitate construction, the deportations to Belzec were stopped temporarily in the middle of June 1942 with the approval of Operation Reinhard headquarters in Lublin. The first stage of the Belzec operation was terminated. During this stage, from the middle of March until the middle of June 1942, about 93,000 Jews had been murdered in Belzec.
The old wooden building with its three gas chambers was dismantled, and on the same site a bigger, more solid building was erected. The new building was 24 meters long and 10 meters wide. It had six gas chambers, each of them 4 × 8 meters. (According to other sources, the size of the new gas chambers was 4 × 5 meters each.) Toward the middle of July, the new gas chambers were operational.12
Rudolf Reder, one of the two survivors of Belzec (see pp. 264–65), described the gas chambers:
The building was low, long, and wide. It was of grey concrete, had a flat roof covered with pap, and above it a net covered with green branches. Three steps without railings, 1 meter wide, led into the building. In front of the building was a big flower pot with colorful flowers and a clearly written sign reading: “Bade und Inhalationsräume” [Bath and Inhalation Rooms]. The steps led to a dark, long, and empty corridor, 1.5 meters wide. On the right and left of the corridor were doors to the gas chambers. These were wooden doors, 1 meter wide. . . . The corridor and the chambers were lower than ordinary rooms, no higher than 2 meters. On the opposite wall of each chamber was a removable door, 2 meters wide, from which the gassed bodies were thrown out. Outside the building was a shed, 2 × 2 meters, where the engine for the gas was installed. The chambers were 1.5 meters above ground level. . . .13
Karl Schluch described the inside of the gas chambers:
. . . I can relate that I saw the gas chambers in the euthanasia institutions, and I was shown the gas chambers in Belzec. . . . These were each about 4 × 8 meters. They had a friendly, bright appearance. Whether the color was yellow or grey, I don’t remember. Maybe the walls were painted with oil colors. In any case, the floor and part of the walls were made so that cleaning would be easy. The newly arriving Jews must not guess the purpose the room served, and they should believe that it was a bath. Vaguely I remember that there were shower-heads on the ceiling.14
These new gas chambers could absorb over 2,000 people at a time, the capacity of a transport of about twenty freight cars. Belzec was now ready to renew activity on an even larger scale.
10
Sobibor: May to July, 1942
After the experimental killings were carried out in Sobibor in April 1942, routine mass extermination began there in the first days of May 1942. Franz Stangl, the commander of Sobibor, who had visited Belzec, had studied the extermination technique there, and had introduced it in his camp, received additional advice and instructions when Wirth visited Sobibor during the experimental killings there.1 The killing process in Sobibor was in effect an improved version of what had been implemented in Belzec.
The deportation trains stopped at the station of Sobibor. No more than eighteen to twenty freight cars were taken into the camp. When the train was composed of more cars, it was split into two or three parts. The escort and railway workers remained outside the camp, and only a specially trusted team of German railway workers drove the train inside. In the camp, the train stopped along the ramp, and the cars were opened by the Ukrainians. The people were ordered to disembark and were driven into Camp II, which was the recepti
on area.
Dov Freiberg, a survivor of Sobibor, described his arrival at the camp:
. . . Germans and Ukrainians opened our freight cars and expelled us. It was May 15, 1942. We were taken through a gate into a square surrounded by barbed wire. . . . We were separated there, men on the one side, women and children on the other. After a short period, the women and children were taken away by SS men. Where they were taken to, we did not know, but we could hear screams and laughter of the SS men when they undressed. Afterward we heard a mixture of noises, a running engine, the playing of an orchestra. . . . We were kept overnight. It was terrible. The Ukrainians hit us and did not allow us to go to the toilet. We had to relieve ourselves sitting on the spot. They told us that nothing bad would happen to us and that the women had already been sent to work. . . . In the morning some SS men appeared and selected skilled workers. . . . Then they pointed out some young and strong men. I was among them. . . . We were about thirty men. We had to put the clothes and parcels in order. . . .2
The Sobibor train station sign near the house of the forester.
SS Oberscharführer Kurt Bolender, who served in Sobibor, testified as to the killing process:
. . . Before the Jews undressed, Oberscharführer [Hermann] Michel [deputy commander of the camp] made a speech to them. On these occasions, he used to wear a white coat to give the impression [that he was] a physician. Michel announced to the Jews that they would be sent to work. But before this they would have to take baths and undergo disinfection so as to prevent the spread of diseases. . . . After undressing, the Jews were taken through the so-called Schlauch. They were led to the gas chambers not by the Germans but by Ukrainians. . . . After the Jews entered the gas chambers, the Ukrainians closed the doors. . . . The motor which supplied the gas was switched on by a Ukrainian called Emil and by a German driver called Erich Bauer from Berlin. After the gassing, the doors were opened, and the corpses were removed by a group of Jewish workers. . . .3