During World War II (1930-1945), Germany occupied Belzec, a small town in Southeastern Poland. They had established labour camps along Poland’s Bug River. The camps were headquartered at Belzec. German secret services (SS) officials deported Jews from nearby districts to the Belzec labour camp and its subsidiary camps to build fortifications and anti-tank ditches along the Bug River. This Nazi German extermination camp was dismantled in 1941.
Planned moves
In November 1941, the SS and police authorities in Lublin district began to construct a killing centre on the site of the former Belzec labour camp. As the site was well connected with roads and railway lines, it proved was strategically easy to transport the Jews. Belzec began operations on March 17, 1942. The first Jewish communities deported to Belzec were those from Lublin and Lvov . Belzec was the second German killing centre, but the first among the Operation Reinhard killing centres. (Nazi code-name for the extermination of the two million Jews who lived Poland) to begin.
The centre consisted of a small staff of SS personnel, police officials, a police auxiliary guard unit. The centre was divided into a combined administration-reception area with a separate area, which could carry out the mass murder hidden from view of waiting victims. waiting in the reception area. A narrow enclosed path connected the sections of the killing centre. The separate area included the gas chambers and mass graves. Rail tracks ran from the gas chambers to the burial pits. Barbed-wire fences and trees served as a camouflage, preventing anyone from looking in.
On March 17, trains with 40 to 60 freight cars, with around 80 to 100 people crowded into each car, arrived at the Belzec railway station. Twenty freight cars were detached at a given point in time and brought from the station into the camp. The Jews were then ordered to disembark at the platform of the reception area. They were told that this was a transit camp and were asked to hand over all their valuables. Initially, men were separated from women and children, but with increasing numbers and chaos, it added to the chaos and the sorting was scrapped. They were then forced to undress and run through the tube leading them into the gas chambers which were labelled as showers. Unaware, people entered and once the chamber doors were sealed, the police guards would release carbon monoxide into the chambers, killing everyone.
Members of the Sonderkommandos (special detachments groups) were selected to remain alive as forced labourers. Their work was to remove the bodies from the gas chambers and bury the victims. Other prisoners worked in the administration-reception area, and they would ensure that the deportees disembarked, disrobed and handed over valuables.
From March to December 1942, as many as 4,34,500 Jews were killed. The Germans also deported German, Austrian, and Czech Jews from Izbica, Piaski, and elsewhere to Belzec.
In 1943,the bodies were exhumed the bodies and burned them and dismantled the camp. Later that year, some of the temporary labourers were shot in Belzec while others were deported to the Sobibor killing centre to be gassed. After the camp was dismantled, the Germans ploughed over the site, built a manor house and planted trees and crops to disguise the area.
