On 13 October 1941, Heinrich Himmler gave SS and Police Leader Lublin, SS Brigadefuehrer Odilo Globocnik, two orders in a conference, which were closely connected with each other: to start Germanizing the area around Zamość and to start work on the first extermination camp in the General Government near Belzec. The site was chosen for three reasons: it was situated at the border between the districts Lublin and Galicia, thus indicating its purpose to serve as a killing site for the Jews of both districts; for reasons of transport it lay next to the railroad and the main road between Lublin and Lvov; the northern boundary of the planned death camp was the anti-tank ditch dug a year before by Jewish slave workers of the former forced labor camp. The ditch was originally excavated for of military reasons, now it was likely to serve as the first huge mass grave. Globocnik's construction expert SS Obersturmfuehrer Richard Thomalla commenced work in early November 1941, using Polish villagers, Globocnik's Trawniki men and, later, Jewish slave workers. The installation was finished by early March 1942. The two commanders of the camp, Kriminalpolizei officers Christian Wirth and Gottlieb Hering, had — in common with almost all of their staff — been involved in the Nazi euthanasiaAction T-4 program since 1940. Wirth had the leading position as a supervisor of all six euthanasia institutions in the Reich; Hering as the non-medical chief of Sonnenstein (Pirna, Saxony) and Hadamar. As a participant of the first T-4 test gassing of handicapped people at Brandenbur, Wirth had been a killing expert from the beginning. He was, therefore, an obvious choice to be the first commandant of the first extermination camp in the General Government. It might have been his proposal to transfer the T-4 technology of killing by carbon monoxide gas in stationary gas chambers to Belzec, because the comparable technology of mobile gas vans used before since December 1941 in the extermination campChelmno (Kulmhof) had proven insufficient as to the planned number of victims. For economic and transport reasons, Wirth did not make use here of industrial bottled carbon monoxide as in T-4, but had the same gas supplied by a large engine (although witnesses differ as to its type, most probably it was a petrol engine), whose exhaust fumes, poisonous in an enclosed space, were led by a system of pipes into the gas chambers. For very small transports of Jews and Gypsies over a short distance, a minimized version of the gas van technology was used in Belzec: T-4 man and first operator of the gas chambers, Lorenz Hackenholt, rebuilt an Opel-Blitz post office vehicle with the help of a local craftsman into a small gas van. A member of the staff testified that the Jewish office girls were murdered in this car on the very last day of Belzec. The wooden gas chambers were disguised as the barracks and showers of a labor camp, so that the victims would not realize the true purpose of the site, and the process was conducted as quickly as possible: people were forced to run from the trains to the gas chambers, leaving them no time to absorb where they were or to plan a revolt. Finally, a handful of Jews were selected to perform all the manual work involved with extermination (removing the bodies from the gas chambers, burying them, sorting and repairing the victims' clothing, etc.). The extermination process itself was conducted by Hackenholt, Ukrainian guards, and a Jewish aide. The Jewish Sonderkommandos were killed periodically and replaced by new arrivals, so that they would not organize in a revolt either. Eventually, the extermination camp consisted of two subcamps: Camp I, which included the barracks of the Ukrainians, the workshops and barracks of the Jews, the reception area with two undressing barracks, and Camp II, which contained the gas chambers and the mass graves. The two camps were connected by a narrow corridor called the Schlauch, or "Tube". The German guards and the administration were housed in two cottages outside the camp across the road. Belzec's three gas chambers began operating officially on March 17, 1942, the date given for the start of Operation Reinhard. Its first victims were Jews deported from Lublin and Lvov. There were many technical difficulties in this first attempt at mass extermination. The gas chamber mechanisms were problematic, and usually only one or two were working at any given time, causing a backlog. Furthermore, the corpses were buried in pits covered with only a narrow layer of earth. The bodies often swelled in the heat as a result of putrefaction and the escape of gases, and the covering of earth split. This latter problem was corrected in other death camps with the introduction of crematoria. It was soon realized that the original three gas chambers were insufficient for completing the task at hand, especially with the growing number of arrivals from Kraków and Lvov. A new complex with six gas chambers made of concrete, each 4 × 5 or 8 meters, was erected, and the wooden gas chambers were dismantled. The new facility, which could handle over 1,000 victims at a time, was imitated by the other two Operation Reinhard extermination camps: Sobibór and Treblinka. There was a sign on the new building that read "Stiftung Hackenholt" or Hackenholt Foundation named after the SS-NCO who designed it. In December 1942, the last shipment of Jews arrived in Belzec. By that time, the Jews in the area served by Belzec had been almost entirely exterminated, and it was felt that the new facilities under construction at Auschwitz-Birkenau could handle the rest. The camp's first commander, Christian Wirth, was killed in Italy by partisans near Trieste in the end of May, 1944. His successor Gottlieb Hering served after the war for a short time as the chief of Criminal Police of Heilbronn and died in Fall 1945 in a hospital. Lorenz Hackenholt survived the war, but has never been found again. Seven former members of the SS-Sonderkommando Belzec were indicted in Munich (Germany), but only one, Josef Oberhauser, was brought to trial in 1965 and sentenced to four and a half years in prison.
Four and a half years in prison. Sounds like Australia today. The leftist state government here in Perth is bringing in legislation right now to enact a "Bill of Rights". The police say it will be virtually impossible to bring anyone to trial. It means that no one can interfere with anyone's rights to do what they like.
