When was belzec established




















Belzec was in the southeast corner of Poland, and like Auschwitz-Birkenau , Treblinka and Sobibor , was in a remote sight, away from prying eyes.

Belzec began its murders in March and it closed in December Belzec was responsible for up to , deaths in the Holocaust. Initially at Belzec there were three gas chambers in use. This was later increased to six to cope with the increased human traffic that was being sent to the camp.

Unlike Auschwitz, which covered a large area, Belzec was reasonably small. A rail spur led directly to the camp. SS official Kurt Gerstein inspects Belzec. He checks the efficiency of carbon monoxide as a gassing agent in the Operation Reinhard camps.

Gerstein later leaks a detailed report in an effort to make Allied and neutral circles aware of the Holocaust. He sends the report to Swiss and Swedish diplomats, Catholic church officials, and the Dutch government-in-exile.

The Operation Reinhard authorities halt deportations to Belzec. By this time, German authorities have killed approximately , Jews in the Belzec killing center.

Arad, Yitzhak. Black, Peter. Adam Janiszewski. Lublin: Ad Rem, We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia.

View the list of all donors. Trending keywords:. Featured Content. Tags Find topics of interest and explore encyclopedia content related to those topics. Browse A-Z Find articles, photos, maps, films, and more listed alphabetically.

The second camp housed the gas chambers and burial pits. It was reached by a long, narrow passageway with barbed wire fencing on either side, known as 'the tube'. The extermination site was screened off from the rest of the camp by leafy branches intertwined with the barbed wire. Camouflage was essential to the murder process. A transport numbering rail trucks, holding about , Jews, would arrive at Belzec station. It would be divided into two or three smaller convoys which would be pushed into the camp.

The Jews would then be rapidly disembarked onto the platform where they were assured that they had arrived at a transit camp. They were told that before being assigned to labor duties elsewhere they would be disinfected and showered.

Men were separated from women and children and marched off to large huts where they undressed. Women had their hair shaven off. They were then brutally pushed to "the tube" and into the gas chambers which were disguised as "showers. In the first phase of its operations, from mid-March to mid-May , Belzec had three gas chambers in a wooden barrack with a double wall filled with sand.

The gas chambers were half-lined with tin and equipped with two airtight doors, one for entry and one through which corpses were removed. The carbon monoxide gas was piped in from a diesel engine mounted outside. Once the gas chambers were filled and the doors shut, the killing process took up to 30 minutes.

Teams of Jewish laborers who had been selected from earlier transports then removed the corpses and dragged them to burial pits. During the several months of its operation, between and thousand people were killed there. Both the first primitive wooden gas chamber and its improved concrete version were built in such a way so as to resemble a bathhouse. The imitations of showers were installed at the ceilings and the inscriptions by the door contained information that the rooms were for bathing and inhalation.

The work connected with burying dead bodies and segregating the property was done by a group of about Jewish prisoners. From time to time Germans carried out selections and as a result, they shot the people who were not capable of working any more. New workers were chosen from the people coming in next transports.



0コメント

  • 1000 / 1000