Belzec opens for industrial murder
17th March 1942: The first operational use of one of the three mass murder facilities set up under Operation Reinhard to kill the Jews of Poland
The remains of Poland, after the Germans had annexed the western part, were now simply called the ‘General Government’ area. Within this area were some two million Jews. Originally the Nazis had thought that they might create a massive reservation for Jews in this area, possibly as a prelude to deporting them all to some foreign island. They had been gathered into ghettos where starvation and disease were killing many.
As the ‘Holocaust by Bullets’ proceeded in the Baltic states and Russia, with some areas being declared ‘Judenfrei’, the authorities in the former Poland looked for ways of killing all their Jews as well. They looked for more ‘efficient’ methods of killing than the mass shootings used by the travelling Einsatzgruppen.
The preparations for 'Operation Reinhard' predated Hitler decision in December 1941 to kill all the Jews in Europe. Belzec was the first of three ‘camps’ to open, each built near transport centres in central Poland. Other concentration camps such as Auschwitz had a ‘selection’ procedure for some prisoners to be diverted their slave labour works. But people were sent to Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka solely to be murdered.
The process worked on deception. Trainloads of victims arriving by cattle trucks were marshalled in the reception side of the ‘camp’ where they were told that they were at a transit camp from where they would be shipped to labour camps. They just needed to have showers first.
They were then moved at great speed and with increasing brutality through the “tube” to the killing side of the facility.
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