The Belzec Death Camp

by Chris Webb

  On January 20, 1942, at a villa in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, Heydrich organized a conference on the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe.” The conference had been postponed from December 8, 1941, as Heydrich wrote to one of the participants Otto Hoffmann, that it had been necessary to postpone the conference “on account of events in which some of the invited gentlemen were concerned.”[16] This referred to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the previous day and the entry of the United States of America into the war. Those who attended the Wannsee Conference included the leading officials of the relevant ministries, senior representatives of the German authorities in the occupied countries, and senior members of the SS, including Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, and Adolf Eichmann, head of Department IV B4, the sub-section of the Gestapo dealing with Jewish affairs.

  *

  Odilo Lothario Globocnik was born on April 21, 1904, in Trieste, the son of an Austro-Slovene family, and a construction enginner by trade. In 1930 he joined the Nazi party in Carinthia, Austria and after the banning of the Nazi Party in Austria in 1934, earned a reputation as one of the most radical leaders of its underground cells. In 1933 Globocnik joined the SS, which also became a prohibited organization in Austria in 1934, and was appointed Stellvertretender Gauleiter (Deputy Party District Leader).[17]

  After serving several short terms of imprisonment, for illegal activities on behalf of the Nazis, he emerged as a key figure in the pre-Anschluß plans for Austria, serving as a key liaison figure between Adolf Hitler and the leading pro-Nazi Austrians.[18]

  After the Anschluß of March 1938 Globocnik’s star continued to rise, and on May 24 he was appointed to the coveted key position of Party District Leader (Gauleiter) of Vienna.

  His tenure was short-lived, however, and on January 30, 1939, he was dismissed from this lofty position for corruption, illegal speculation in foreign exchange and tax evasion—all on a grand scale.[19]

  After demotion to a lowly SS rank and undergoing basic military training with an SS-Standarte, he took part with his unit in the invasion of Poland. Eventually pardoned by Himmler, who needed such unscrupulous characters for future “unsavoury plans,” Globocnik was appointed to the post of SS- und Polizeiführer (SS and Police Leader) of Lublin on November 9, 1939. Globocnik had been chosen by the Reichsführer-SS as the central figure in Aktion Reinhardt, not only because of his ruthlessness, but also because of his virulent anti-Semitism.

  In Lublin, Globocnik surrounded himself with a number of his fellow Austrians, SS officers like Herman Julius Höfle, born in Salzburg on June 19, 1911. Höfle became Gobocnik’s deputy in Aktion Reinhardt, responsible for personnel and the organization of Jewish deportations, the extermination camps and the re-utilisation of the victim’s possessions and valuables. Höfle was later to play a significant role in mass deportation Aktionen in Warsaw and Białystok. Ernst Lerch, from Klagenfurt, became Globocnik’s closest confidante and adjutant. Georg Michalsen, a Silesian from Oppeln, was another adjutant, and he, too, participated with Höfle in the deportation of Jews from the ghettos in Warsaw and Białystok. Another, early member of this group was Amon Göth, who cleared the Tarnów, Krakow, and Zamosc ghettos, and later became the notorious commander of Płaszów Arbeitslager in Krakow.[20]

  The headquarters of Aktion Reinhardt was located in the Julius Schreck Barracks (Julius Schreck Kaserne) at Litauer Straße 11, in a former Polish school close to the city centre in Lublin, where Höfle not only worked but lived in a small apartment on the second floor. Also located in Lublin were the buildings in which the belongings and valuables seized from the Jews were stored: the former Catholic Action (Katolische Aktion) building on Chopin Straße and in pre-war aircraft hangers on the Old Airfield (Alter Flugplatz) on the southeastern outskirts of Lublin.[21]

  The most notorious and fearsome member of Aktion Reinhardt was SS-Obersturmführer / Kriminalinspektor Christian Wirth, the first commandant of Bełżec death camp and later Inspector of the SS-Sonderkommandos of Aktion Reinhardt. Before his transfer to Poland, Wirth had been a leading figure in Aktion T4—the extermination of the mentally and physically disabled in six so-called “euthanasia” killing centers in the Third Reich.

  The role of the T4 euthanasia program was fundamental to the execution of Aktion Reinhardt, the great majority of the staff in the death camps served their “apprenticeships” in mass murder at the euthanasia institutes of Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, and Pirna-Sonnenstein, where the victims had been murdered in gas chambers using CO gas from steel cylinders. The senior officers in both Aktion T4 and Aktion Reinhardt were all police officers with equivalent SS ranks, and, with Himmler’s approval, SS NCOs had emptied the gas chambers and cremated the bodies of the victims in portable furnaces. The SS-men performed this work wearing civilian clothes because Himmler did not want the possibility to arise of the public becoming aware of the participation of the SS in the killing. During Aktion Reinhardt, the SS authorities also supplemented the forces guarding the death camps by employing former Red Army troops who had been captured or had surrendered to the Germans, mostly ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) from the Ukraine, the Baltic states and the Volga region of Russia, who were trained in an SS camp in the village of Trawniki, 25 kilometers southeast of Lublin. The majority were already anti-Semitic—equating Bolsheviks with Jews—and were ideally suited to the persecution and extermination of Jews.

  On November 1, 1941, construction of the first Aktion Reinhardt death camp began near the village of Bełżec, 125 kilometers southeast of Lublin, and became operational in mid-March 1942. Construction of the second camp, at Sobibor, between the cities of Włodawa and Chełm on the River Bug, northeast of Lublin, came into operation at the end of April 1942. The third and last of these camps was located near the train station Treblinka,[22] about 100 kilometers northeast of Warsaw. All three camps shared some common vital facts: They were all situated on or close to main railway lines for the speedy delivery of the victims to their deaths and they were located in sparsely-populated regions. The true fate of the Jews was initially hidden from them by announcing that they were being “transported to the east for resettlement and work.” The Aktion Reinhardt death camps were very similar in layout, each camp being an improvement on its predecessor, and the “conveyor-belt” extermination process developed at Belzec by Christian Wirth was implemented, improved, and refined at the other two camps.

  The personnel assigned to Aktion Reinhardt came from a number of sources, SS and policemen who served under Globocnik’s command in the Lublin district, other SS-men and civilians drafted into the Aktion and members of the T4 euthanasia program.[23] Yitzhak Arad quotes in his book Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka that a total of 450 men were assigned to Aktion Reinhardt included 92 men from the T4 euthanasia program. However, more recent research by another author has identified a slightly higher total of 103 men, of whom 38 are known to have served at Belzec at one time or another.[24]

  The Old Lublin Airfield was also used throughout Aktion Reinhardt as a mustering center for personnel transferred from the T4 euthanasia institutions in the Reich, to the extermination of the Jews in the Generalgouvernement. The SS-men, police, and civilians thus transferred were usually met at the airfield by Wirth personally, on occasions accompanied by the death camp commandants Reichleitner, from Sobibor, and Stangl, from Treblinka. According to witnesses, at these selections of personnel, all three wore Schutzpolizei uniforms and none of them mentioned anything about their future employment or where they would be based. At the airfield depot the newcomers received Waffen-SS uniforms, provided by the SS garrison administration (SS-Standortverwaltung) in Lublin, but without the SS runes on the right-hand collar patches. The civilian employees from T4, especially the male psychiatric nurses among them, were sent first to the SS training camp at Trawniki, for a two week basic military training course.[25]

  The men selected in Lublin and distributed to the three Aktion Reinhardt death camps were augmented by
a company-sized unit of about 120 black-uniformed auxiliary guards who had also been trained at the SS training camp in Trawniki—the so-called Trawniki-men (Trawnikimänner)—usually referred to as “Ukrainians” because they were the majority.

  Those who spoke fluent German were appointed platoon or senior platoon leaders—Zugführers or Oberzugführers. The rest were known as Wachmänner. A select few of the Trawnikimänner were given other, special duties, including the maintenance and operation of the engines that pumped their poisonous exhaust fumes into the gas chambers. Among them were the infamous Ivan Marchenko (Ivan the Terrible) and Nikolay Shalayev, at the Treblinka death camp.[26]

  In the course of Aktion Reinhardt, approximately 1.6 million Jews were murdered in the death camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Jewish property to the value of 178,045,960 Reichsmark (RM) was seized by the SS, which represents the minimum known amount. Through the theft of large amounts of cash and valuables by Globocnik, SS-men, policemen and guards, the true total will never be known.

  The Aktion Reinhardt extermination operation ended officially in November 1943, and Himmler ordered Globocnik, who was by then the Higher SS and Police Leader for the Adriatic coastal region based in Trieste, to produce a detailed “balance sheet” for the murder program. Globocnik produced the requsted financial accounts and suggested that certain SS officers should be suitably rewarded for their “invaluable contribution” to Aktion Reinhardt. Globocnik received Himmler’s thanks for his “services to the German people,” but made no mention of medals for any of Globocnik’s subordinates.[27]

  After completion of the extermination work in the Generalgouvernement, most of the men who had served in Aktion Reinhardt were transferred to northern Italy, where their headquarters was in a disused rice mill in the San Sabba suburb of the Adriatic port of Trieste (Risiera di San Sabba). Divided into three SS units—RI, R-II and R-III—they operated under the code designation Einsatz R (Operation R), still under the command of Christian Wirth. Their primary task was the round-up and deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau of the surviving Italian Jews, and confiscation of their property and valuables. Einsatz R was simply a smaller version of Aktion Reinhardt. Additionally, Italian-Jewish mental patients were removed from their hospitals and sent to the T4 euthanasia institution at Schloss Hartheim in Austria for gassing. The units not engaged in these operations were assigned to security and anti-partisan patrols on the Istrian peninsula.

  Wirth turned San Sabba into an interrogation and execution center where not only Jews, but also Italian and Yugoslav partisans were tortured, beaten to death, or simply shot and their bodies cremated in a specially installed furnace in the courtyard.[28] The human ashes were dumped in the Adriatic Sea. There is also evidence that a gas van was used in San Sabba.

  The key members of Aktion Reinhardt mostly escaped justice, Globocnik and Höfle both committed suicide, whilst Wirth and Reichleitner (the second commandant of Sobibor death camp) were killed by partisans in northern Italy in 1944. Amon Göth was tried and sentenced to death for crimes committed in the Płaszów concentration camp (today a suburb of Krakow) in September 1946. Dr. Irmfried Eberl, the first commandant of Treblinka death camp, committed suicide in a West German prison in 1948 while awaiting trial. Only Franz Stangl[29] (the first commandant of Sobibor and second commandant of Treblinka) and Kurt Franz (the last commandant of Treblinka) were brought to trial. Both were found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment. Gottlieb Hering, the second commandant of Belzec death camp, and commandant of Poniatowa Jewish labor camp died on October 9, 1945, in unknown circumstances in the waiting room at the Katherinen hospital in Stetten im Remstal, Württemberg, Germany.

  As for members of the SS garrisons at the three death camps, a number of major figures like Karl Frenzel, from Sobibor, and Heinrich Arthur Matthes, August Miete, and Willy Mentz received life sentences, whist many others received prison terms of less than 10 years, but the vast majority of the SS-men and Ukrainians who served within the framework of Aktion Reinhardt were never brought to justice. Only Josef Oberhauser was found guilty of war crimes at the Belzec trial in Munich during the 1960s.

  Chapter II

  The Labor Camps In the Belzec Area

  The village of Belzec, in southeastern Poland, first appeared in records during the Middle Ages, and show the village as a settlement of animal breeders. At the beginning of the 17th century, the Lipski family—proprietors of Belzec—endeavoured to acquire a municipal charter, but this attempt failed because of the proximity of major towns such as Tomaszow Lubelski and Florianow, now re-named Narol.[30]

  Two hundred years later, in the 19th century, Belzec lay on the border between Galicia and the Kingdom of Poland, with a railway border crossing to that part of Poland under the Tsarist Russian occupation. The location ensured business flourished and this attracted an influx of Jewish settlers, and, just prior to the First World War, over one hundred Jewish families made a living here on cross-border trade. Most of the Jewish settlers came from Rawa Ruska and Jaroslaw. Jewish culture flourished in Belzec, and it had its own house of prayer and a traditional elementary school—a cheder.[31]

  During the First World War Belzec was occupied by Austrian troops and a part of the village was burnt down by Russian soldiers as a reprisal for the murder of a Russian officer by locals. During 1915, Belzec was liberated from Austrian occupation and six years later the village was incorporated into the new Republic of Poland.[32]

  The Jewish population declined during the interwar years, and on September 13, 1939, the German Army occupied the village. A number of the Poles and Ukrainians registered as Volksdeutsche—ethnic Germans—and some volunteered for war work in the Reich. History repeated itself when Belzec once again became a border post, this time between the Generalgouvernement and the Soviet Union.[33]

  From the end of May 1940 until August 1940, the Germans established a number of labor camps in and around the village of Belzec. These housed workers building the so-called “Otto Line”—a series of fortifications along the border with the Soviet Union. The Germans forced Jews from Lublin, Radom, and Warsaw districts to slave on this project, and Gypsies from the Reich and other parts of Poland were also used. The Jews were housed at three sites in Belzec: the Manor, which housed 1,000 people; Kessler’s Mill, which housed 500 people; and Locomotive Sheds, which housed 1,500 people.

  Outside Belzec village other workers were housed in Cieszanow in two barracks and Plaszow—not to be confused with the notorious Plaszow Arbeitslager in Krakow—in two houses and in Lipsko near Narol.[34]

  The labor camps were established in abandoned synagogues, warehouses or barns, a total of some 35 camps were created with over 10,000 workers employed on building fortifications, roads and regulating rivers.

  The commander of the labor camps complex was SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Dolp, who had also been the commandant of the Lipowa Street Camp in Lublin and during 1941—after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union—had served in the “SS Strongpoints in the East” construction program based in Minsk.[35] His deputy was SS-Hauptscharführer Franz Bartetzko, who later went on to manage the Jewish forced labor camp at Trawniki, from the spring of 1942.[36] Another more famous SS officer, Oskar Dirlewanger, who was the commander of the notorious SS-Sonderkommando Dirlewanger, which was made up of petty criminals and cut-throats. They were resoponsible for the orgy of killing of the population during the Warsaw uprising in 1944. Prior to this, Dirlewanger was the commander of a Jewish labor camp at Dzikow, one of the camps in the Belzec area.[37]

  The working conditions in the labor camps were truly awful, with workers beaten and tortured, and forced to perform heavy labor on starvation rations. Adam Czerniakow, the chairman of the Judenrat (Jewish Council) in the Warsaw ghetto, wrote about the Belzec labor camp conditions several times in his diary. His entry on August 29, 1940, is as follows:

  Word from the Belzec camp, poor food etc. I arranged for two conferences, one with participatio
n of Neustadt. I authorised the Obmann (Chairman) from Zamosc to engage doctors at our expense for Belzec. Tomorrow I will try to obtain a loan for the camp.[38]

  Another entry in his diary, recorded on September 3, 1940, stated that “Zabludowski, Faust and Furstenburg left for Lublin with the gifts for the workers including 10,000 zloty for the camp. Lambrecht made a demand for twenty doctors for the camp.” [39]

  Though the labor camps were controlled by the SS, the supply of food, clothes, and the administration was managed by the Lublin Judenrat. In Belzec, the Germans established a so-called Jewish Gremium, which was responsible for the camp’s organization. All costs connected with the existence of the prisoners were paid by the Judenrat of the towns from where the prisoners came. It was the Gremium who decided the allocation of food to the workers. After August 1940, the Gremium was re-named the Central Camps Council and was led by Leon Zylberajch from Lublin.

  The labor camps in Belzec and those located in the area were closed down in October 1940, and this “Eastern Rampart” was only some 40 kilometers in length, 2.5 meters deep and 7.5 meters wide, between Belzec and Dzikow Stary village. Some of the Jewish workers were released prior to the final liquidation of the labor camps, because they were unfit for work; the last transport of workers released went to Hrubieszow in late October 1940.

  No account of these terrible working conditions in the Belzec labor camps is complete without mentioning the fate of the Gypsies who were deported from the Reich and were incarcerated on a farm at Belzec Manor. As with the Jews, the Gypsies were also employed in digging fortifications on starvation rations and many succumbed to illnesses such as typhus and dysentery.