Belzec Killing Center Claimed 500, 000 Victims

This number is an estimate based on the (in)famous Hofle Telegram sent to Berlin on 11 January 1943 by Operation Reinhard’s Chief of Staff Hermann H;fle. The radio telegram indicated that 434,508 Jews were deported to Belzec through December 31, 1942.

This total was based on numbers shared by the SS with the state-run Deutsche Reichsbahn (DRG). The camp had ceased to operate by then – the last transport with victims arrived 20 days earlier. Given the fact that DRG numbers were incomplete, 500,000 appears to be a realistic estimate.

Decision to establish a killing center in Belzec was most likely made by Odilo Globocnik – the CEO of Operation Reinhard – in mid-October of 1941 and immediately approved by SS-Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler. Death factory at Belzec commenced its operations on March 17, 1942.

Only seven Jews performing slave labor with the camp’s Sonderkommando survived World War II. Only one experience there became known, thanks to his official postwar testimony.

The lack of viable witnesses able to testify about the camp’s operation is the primary reason why Belzec is little known, despite the high victim number count (Sobibor with less than half that number is far more well-known).

The history of Belzec death factory (the first in Operation Reinhard) can be divided into two stages of operation. The first phase, from March 17 to the end of June 1942, was marked by the existence of smaller gas chambers housed in barracks constructed of planks and insulated with sand and rubber.

There were many technical difficulties with the early process of mass murder. The gassing installation was imperfect and usually only one or two rooms were working, causing a backlog and forcing victims to wait to be “processed”.

In the first three months, 80,000 people were murdered and buried in pits covered with a shallow layer of earth. The victims were Jews deported from the Lublin Ghetto and its vicinity (Belzec was for Lublin what Chelmno was tor Lodz). The original three gas chambers were found insufficient for completing their purpose.

The second phase of extermination began in July 1942, when new gas chambers were built of brick and mortar on a lightweight foundation, thus enabling the facility to “process” Jews of the two largest cities nearby – the Krak;w and Lw;w (Lviv/Lemberg) ghettos.

The wooden gas chambers were dismantled. The new building had six gas chambers, insulated with cement walls. It could handle over 1,000 victims at a time. This design was soon replicated in the other two Operation Reinhard killing centers: Sobibor and Treblinka. In all three death factories powerful (500 hp) V-2 diesel engine taken out of captured Soviet T-34 medium tank (what irony!) was reportedly used.

There was a hand-painted sign on the new building that read Stiftung Hackenholt or Hackenholt Foundation named after the SS man who designed it (he disappeared after the end of the war). Until December 1942, at least 350,000 Jews were murdered in the new gas chambers.

In October 1942, the exhumation and burning of all corpses was ordered to cover up the crime on direct orders from SS general Odilo Globocnik, the CEO of Operation Reinhard.

The bodies were placed on pyres made from rail tracks, splashed with petrol and burned over wood. The bones were collected and crushed. The last period of camp’s operation continued until June 1943 when the area was ploughed over, and (not very successfully) disguised as a farm. Still, model for guarding and disguising murder sites was also adopted at the Treblinka and Sobibor killing centers.

The last train with 300 Jewish Sonderkommando prisoners who performed the clean-up operation departed to Sobibor death factory for gassing in late June 1943. They were told that they were being evacuated to Germany. Any equipment that could be reused was taken by the German and Ukrainian personnel to Majdanek killing center.