When was belzec concentration camp liberated

Other teams of Jews were used to tidy and sort the huts where the victims had taken off their clothes etc. It took about three hours to kill and then clean up one trainload of Jews. The six gas chambers could take 1, Jews; the three-hour process was greatly reduced in time. However, as more were being murdered at one time, the SS needed more Jews to work as Sonderkommandos. At Belzec, in the second stage of its existence with six gas chambers, there were Sonderkommado. Those still alive when the camp stopped being used were sent to Sobibor to be murdered.

As with all the death camps , exact figures of deaths are impossible to acquire. In February , SS and police personnel and Trawniki-trained guards murder small groups of Jews deported from towns near Belzec.

They carry out these killings to test the efficacy and capacity of the gas chambers. By March , the camp is ready for mass killing operations. The systematic mass murder of Jews begins in Belzec with deportations from the city Lublin. These deportations are the first to be carried out within the framework of Operation Reinhard. By April 14, , German authorities will kill nearly 30, of the 37, Jews of Lublin and about 15, Jews from Lvov.

During the summer of , the SS and police will deport over , Jews from the Krakow district to Belzec. The first phase of gassing operations ends at Belzec after the arrival of over 11, Jews from the city Tarnow. Operation Reinhard authorities in Lublin halt deportations in order to replace the wooden building that houses the gas chambers with a more substantial structure. SS and police authorities construct a larger building with six gas chambers.

These new gas chambers enable the camp authorities to kill up to 1, people at one time. The six gas chambers begin operations in July. Like the original chamber, they use carbon monoxide gas from the exhaust fumes of a motor vehicle engine. Deportations to Belzec resume. Polish underground officials in occupied Poland send a report to the Polish government-in-exile in London.

This report details the killing process in the Belzec camp. Carbon monoxide was funneled into the gas chambers, killing all those inside.

The process was then repeated with deportees in the next 20 freight cars. Members of the Sonderkommandos special detachments worked in the killing area. Sonderkommandos were groups of Jewish prisoners selected to remain alive as forced laborers. They removed bodies from the gas chambers and buried the victims in mass graves. Other prisoners, who were selected for temporary survival, worked in the administration-reception area.

In addition, these prisoners were responsible for cleaning out freight cars for the next deportation. German SS and police personnel and the Trawniki-trained guards periodically murdered the members of these detachments of Jewish laborers. Those murdered were then replaced with persons selected from newly arriving transports. In October , on orders from Odilo Globocnik, camp personnel deployed Jewish forced laborers from various locations in Lublin District to exhume the mass graves at Belzec.

This was in keeping with the efforts of the Sonderkommando , tasked with excavating and destroying evidence of Nazi mass murder in the German-occupied east. By late spring , Jewish forced laborers, guarded by the SS and police and their auxiliaries, had completed the task of exhuming and burning the bodies. They had also dismantled the camp.

In June , the camp was liquidated and the Jewish forced laborers were either shot in Belzec or deported to the Sobibor killing center to be gassed. After the Belzec camp was dismantled, the Germans ploughed over the site.

They built a manor house and planted trees and crops to disguise the area as a farm. A former auxiliary police guard was placed on the site to farm the property in order to further camouflage the site. In July , the area was taken over by the advancing Soviet Army.

Black, Peter. Adam Janiszewski. Lublin: Ad Rem, De Mildt, Dick. 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. For Teachers Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust. It contained six chambers of 5 by 4 metres, with a total capacity of 1 to 1 people - about half the number of people from twenty trucks. Over the entrance to the building was a sign saying Showers and disinfection area.

In the second week of July, transports began to arrive again. Between July and October some Jews came from the Krakow area and around from the Lvov area. The transports also brought German, Austrian and Czech Jews who had already been deported to Polish ghettos. There was also a plan to send Jews from Romania there, but the Romanian government refused to hand them over. He replaced Christian Wirth , who had been promoted to inspector of all the Operation Reinhard extermination camps.

At the end of December , the camp was shut down. By then, most of the Jews in the Generalgouvernement area had been exterminated, and the camp was closed on the decision of the leadership of Operation Reinhard. Sobibor and Treblinka continued to operate, however, as did Auschwitz -Birkenau. Between December and spring , the mass graves were opened and the bodies of victims were burnt, using pyres made from railway tracks.

The traces of the extermination camp were covered over, and the or so prisoners who were forced to help with the cremation were then sent to their deaths in Sobibor. He managed to escape in November , and after the war wrote an account of his life in the camp. Most of them were Jewish, but there were also several thousand Roma. Photo: M.