The Belzec death camp: history, biographies, remembrance

315 Pages·2016·8.41 MB·English

by  Webb, Chris

This book is a comprehensive account of the Belzec death camp in Poland which
was the fi rst death camp using static gas chambers as part of the Aktion Rein-
hardt mass murder program. This study covers the construction and the develop-
ment of the mass murder process. The story is painstakingly told from all sides, W
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the Jewish inmates, the perpetrators, and the Polish inhabitants of Belzec village, b
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Taken together, the patchwork of quotations, pictures and testimony comprising this
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book serves to reinforce the impression that human depravity passed a certain thresh- e
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old there. The Belzec death camp offers a glimpse of this abyss, when genocide was D
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streamlined—administered and employed against enemies of the Third Reich for no
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other reason than that they were Jewish. Matthew Feldmann, Teesside University h

C
a
m
T
p HE
C W has been studying the Holocaust for over forty years. This is the second
HRIS EBB
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book on one of the Aktion Reinhardt death camps. His book co-written with
ELZEC
Michal Chocholaty on Treblinka was published by ibidem Press in 2014.
He has been involved in a number of Holocaust related websites and regularly
lectures at a number of Universities. He is also a Research Associate for the Centre
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of Fascist, Anti-Fascist, and Post Fascist Studies at Teesside University in the UK.
H , B , R
ISTORY IOGRAPHIES EMEMBRANCE
With a foreword by Matthew Feldman
ISBN: 978-3-8382-0866-4
ibidem Chris Webb ibidem
Chris Webb

The Belzec
Death Camp
History, Biographies,
Remembrance

Chris Webb

THE BELZEC
DEATH CAMP
History, Biographies,
Remembrance
ibidem- Verlag
Stuttgart
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen
Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de
abrufbar.

ISBN-13: 978-3-8382-6826-2
© ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press
Stuttgart, Germany 2016
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FOR
ROBERT KUWALEK & SIR MARTIN GILBERT

Dedicated to the memory of
Billy Rutherford, & Harry Stadler

Foreword
Professor Matthew Feldman
University of Teesside, UK

The death camp at Belzec was the first site in history designed to
kill human beings in an industrial manner in static gas chambers
on an unparalleled scale. During the Second World War, the Third
Reich deployed gassing and mass-cremation technologies in order
to literally turn millions of victims into ash. In this sense, the Third
Reich’s earliest extermination camp at Belzec remains a low-water
mark in human relations with one another. Internecine wars and
savagery have always pocked human history. But never before had
mass murder and modern technology come together to provide a
purpose-built, self-contained, assembly-line operation for the de-
struction of an entire people.
The death camps collectively known as Operation Reinhard(t)1,
of which Belzec was the earliest constructed in 1941—it was joined
by Sobibor and Treblinka later in 1942—managed this genocidal
process brutally, yet bureaucratically. In the months following Nazi
Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, mass
shootings in the east had proven unsatisfactory and difficult to
conceal. Expertise and personnel were then engaged from an earli-
er gassing program, also using carbon monoxide gas, which had
murdered more than 72,000 patients in converted asylum facilities
over the preceding two years.2

1 The spelling of Aktion Reinhardt is fraught—the Germans involved in the
mass murder programme spelt it with a “t” and without a “t”. In this book
Reinhardt is favored, as the recruitment pledge is spelt that way.
2 For details on the T-4 Operation and its relevance to the development of the
Holocaust, see Friedlander, Henry, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Eutha-
nasia to the Final Solution. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill,
1995.
vii
In a grisly process of trial and error, technicians from the eu-
phemistically-entitled “Euthanasia Program” helped to develop
mobile gas-vans, to murder Jews from the Warthegau region, they
were murdered in the converted “palace” at Chelmno. By the end
of 1941, with the construction of Belzec about halfway completed,
the Nazi leadership had decided upon a process of total destruc-
tion—one whereby European Jews would be gassed, pillaged, and
disposed of, preferably in a secluded place next to a main railway
line in Nazi-occupied territory.3
It was this method, built from scratch and refined over the
coming months, which was to be first perfected at Belzec in June
1942. Victims were sometimes murdered at a rate of 10,000 persons
a day—in hermetically sealed chambers, people piled into over-
crowded trains before reaching their final destination, corpses
pillaged for valuables after being gassed. Later the bodies were
burned—these had been buried in mass graves at first, before trial
and error made this, too, more efficient—over an enormous hu-
man grill, also designed by the overseers of the “Final Solution to
the Jewish Question,” Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstaffel—or SS.4
This uniquely insidious project was directed at the Jews of Eu-
rope. One of the very few survivors from Belzec, an enslaved work-
er named Rudolf Reder—kept barely alive as a camp handyman
prior to escaping—established as early as 1946 that “Belzec served
no other purpose than that of murdering Jews.” After witnessing
uncountable thousands of his fellow Jews from Poland sent to their
deaths, some he knew well, Reder recalled:
Words are inadequate to describe our state of mind and what we
felt when we heard the terrible moans of those people and the cries
of the children being murdered. Three times a day we saw people

3 For more on Reich Security Main Office role in the Holocaust see Wildt, Mi-
chael, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Secu-
rity Main Office, University of Wisconsin Press, London, 2009.
4 R. Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution, Pimli-
co, London, 2004; David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, Vintage,
London, 2005; Berndt Rieger, Creator of Nazi Death Camps: The Life of Odilo
Globocnik, Vallentine Mitchell, London, 2007.
viii
going nearly mad. Nor were we far from madness either. How we
survived from one day to the next I cannot say, for we had no illu-
sions. Little by little we too were dying, together with those thou-
sands of people who, for a short while, went through an agony of
hope. Apathetic and resigned to our fate, we felt neither hunger
nor cold. We all waited our turn to die an inhuman death. Only
when we heard the heart-rending cries of small children—
“Mummy, mummy, but I have been a good boy” and “Dark. dark”—
did we feel something.5
This inhumanity was meted out to a minimum of 434,508 peo-
ple at Belzec, nearly all of them Polish Jews.6 According to a recent
debate in the pages of East European Jewish Affairs, the number is
likely still higher: perhaps 600,000 Jews were murdered there, or
even 800,000.7 Who knows, for instance, how many unregistered
trains, containing some 50 boxcars filled with thousands of terri-
fied Jews, were diverted to Belzec during the height of its activity
in Summer-Autumn 1942? Affixing a precise number of victims is
as impossible as imagining the individual fate of Jews suffocated at
one of the principal charnel houses of the Holocaust—and indeed
in human history—Belzec.
Notwithstanding this staggering reality, relatively little has been
written to date on Belzec by scholars in English. This is borne out
by the scattered references to Belzec in excellent studies on the
Holocaust that have been recently published by Christopher
Browning, Saul Friedlander, and Peter Longerich.8 One reason for

5 R. Reder, Belzec, translated by M. M. Rubel, in Polin, Studies in Polish Jewry,
vol. 13, 2000, pp. 276, 287.
6 Höfle Telegram, National Archives Kew, HW 16/32.
7 Three articles debating these figures have been published by the academic
journal East European Jewish Affairs: Robin O’Neil’s Belzec: A Reassessment of
the Number of Victims, 29/1 1999, pp. 85–118; a response by Dieter Pohl and
Peter Witte entitled The Number of Victims of Belzec Extermination Camp: A
Faulty Reassessment; and O’Neil rejoinder Belzec: Toward a Constructive De-
bate 31/1 2001, pp. 15–25.
8 C. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish
Policy 1939–1942, Arrow Books, London, 2005; Friedlander, Saul, The Years of
Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939–1945, Weidenfeld and Nicol-
son London, 2007; Longerich, Peter, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and
Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010.
ix