On August 1, 1942, major changes took place at Belzec death camp. Commandant Christian Wirth was appointed to the post of Inspekteur der SS-Sonderkommandos-Abteilung Reinhard (Inspector of SS-Sonderkommandos) and set up a temporary office at the Julius Schreck Kaserne on Litauer Straße in Lublin, before moving to a permanent headquarters—a two-storey villa on Chelmska Street on the Alter Flugplatz (Old Airfield) camp. The ground floor rooms were used as offices, staffed by Wirth, Oberhauser—who came with Wirth from Belzec—and Willi Häusler, who came from Berlin and was responsible for salaries and administration, and a couple of secretaries. On the first floor was located a first–class dining room and living quarters for Wirth and his staff. The old airfield camp served as the main sorting depot for the clothing and belongings taken from the victims of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, in three old hangers.[79]
SS-Obersturmführer Gottlieb Hering replaced Wirth as the commandant of Belzec. He was well-known to Wirth, as he had served in the Stuttgart C.I.D. (Criminal Invesigations Department) with Wirth as well as in a number of T4 institutions throughout the Reich.
SS-Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein, the chief disinfection officer in the Main Hygienic Office of the Waffen-SS, and SS-Obersturmbannführer Wilhelm Pfannenstiel—professor and director of the Hygienic Institute at the University of Marburg / Lahn—travelled to Lublin to advise on disinfection issues and to see whether Zyklon B could be used to improve the killing capacity.
Gerstein wrote a very detailed report of their visit to Belzec in August 1942 on May 4, 1945, in Rottweil, in southwestern part of Germany. Gerstein committed suicide before he could face trial, in his prison cell in Cherche-Midi in Paris, on July 25, 1945. His report and extracts of the testimony by Wilhelm Pfannenstiel follow, providing an almost unique description of Belzec death camp by non-members of the guard personnel:
The next day we went to Belzec. A small station had been built especially for this purpose on a hill just north of the Lublin—Lemberg Chaussee in the left corner of the demarcation line. South of the road some houses with the notice ‘Sonderkommando der Waffen–SS’. As Polizeihauptman Wirth, the actual head of the whole killing installations was not yet there, Globocnik introduced me to SS-Hauptsturmführer Obermeyer (from Pirmasens).[80] The latter only let me see that afternoon what he had to show me. I did not see any dead that day, but in the hot August weather the whole place smelt like the plague and there were millions of flies everywhere.
Right by the small two-track station there was a large shed, the so-called cloakroom with a large counter where valuables were handed over. Then there was a room containing about 100 chairs—the barbers room. Then an outdoor path under birch-trees, with a double barbed-wire fence on the left and right, with the sign ‘To the inhalation and bathrooms’. In front of us a sort of bath-house with geraniums, then a few steps, and then three rooms each on the right and left 5 x 5 metres, 1.9 metres high, with wooden doors like garages. In the rear wall, hardly visible in the darkness, large sliding doors. On the roof, as a ‘witty little joke’ the Star of David. In front of the building a notice: ‘Hackenholt Institute’. More than that I was not able to see that afternoon.
Shortly before seven the next morning I was informed: “The first transport is coming in ten minutes!” The first train from Lemberg did in fact arrive in a few minutes. Forty-five wagons containing 6,700 people, of whom 1,450 were already dead on arrival. Children were looking out from behind the barred windows, their faces dreadfully pale and frightened, their eyes filled with the fear of death, besides men and women. The train came into the station: 200 Ukrainians tore open the doors and drove people out of the wagons with their leather whips. A big loudspeaker gave further instructions: undress completely, take off artificial limbs, spectacles etc. Give up valuables at the counter without credit notes or receipts. Tie shoes together carefully, otherwise in the pile of shoes, which was a good 25 metres high, no–one could have found a pair that matched. Then the women and children went to the barber who cut off all their hair with two or three chops with the scissors and stuffed it into potato sacks. “That is put to some special use in U-boats—for caulking or something like that,” the SS Corporal on duty told me.
Then the procession started to move. With a lovely young girl at the front, they all walked along the path, all naked, men, women and children, without their artificial limbs. I stood with Hauptmann Wirth up on the ramp between the chambers. Mothers with their babies at the breast came up, hesitated and entered the death chambers. A sturdy SS man stood in the corner and told the wretched people in a clerical tone of voice: “Nothing at all is going to happen to you! You must take a deep breath in the chambers. That expands the lungs. This inhalation is necessary because of illnesses and infection.” When asked what was going to happen to them, he answered: “Well of course, the men must work, building houses and roads , but the women don’t have to work. Only if they want to, they can help with the housework or in the kitchen.” This gave some of these poor people a glimmer of hope that lasted long enough for them to take the few steps into the chambers without resisting.
The majority realized—the smell told them what their fate was to be! So they climbed the steps and then they saw everything. Mothers with babies at the breast, naked little children, adults, men, women—all naked. They hesitated, but they went into the gas chamber, pushed on by those behind them, or driven in by the leather whips of the SS. Most of them without saying a word. A Jewess of about 40, with eyes blazing, called down upon the heads of the murderers the blood being spilt here. Hauptmann Wirth personally gave her five or six lashes in the face with his riding-whip. Then she too disappeared into the chamber.
Many people were praying. I prayed with rhem. I pressed myself into a corner and cried aloud to my God and theirs. How gladly I would have gone with them into the chambers. How gladly I would have their death with them. Then they would have found a uniformed SS officer in their chambers. The matter would have been treated as a case of death by misadventure and dealt with: missing presumed dead, unheralded and unsung. But I could not do that yet. First I had to make known what I had seen here!
The chambers filled. Cram them well in—Hauptmann Wirth had ordered. Pepole were standing on each other’s feet. 700–800 on 25 square metres, in 45 cubic metres! The SS forced as many in together as was physically possible. The doors closed. Meanwhile the others were waiting outside in the open air, naked…. Now at last I understood why the whole installation was called the Hackenholt Institute. Hackenholt was the driver of the diesel engine—a minor technician who was also the builder of this installation. The people were to be killed with diesel exhaust fumes.
Gerstein recalled what happened next:
But the diesel did not work! Hauptmann Wirth came. He was obviously embarrassed that this had to happen on the very day that I was there. Yes I saw everything! And I waited. My stop-watch had recorded it all well. 50 minutes-70 minutes—the diesel did not start! The people were waiting in the gas chambers . In vain! We heard them weeping, sobbing…. Hauptmann Wirth struck the Ukrainian who was supposed to be helping Unterscharführer Hackenholt mend the diesel. The whip hit him in the face 13 or 14 times. After 2 hours 49 minutes—the stop-watch had recorded it all well—the diesel started.
Up till then people were alive in these four chambers, four times 750 people in four times 45 cubic metres. Another 25 minutes went by. True, many were now dead. One could see that through the little glass window through which the electric light lit up the chamber for a moment. After 28 minutes only a few were still alive. At last, after 32 minutes everyone was dead! Men of the work squad opened the wooden doors from the other side. They—Jews themselves—had been promised their freedom and a certain percentage of all valuables found in payment for the ghastly duty they performed.
The dead were standing upright like basalt pillars, pressed together in the chambers. There would not have been room to fall down or even to bend over. One could tell the families, even in death. They were still holding hands, stiffened in death, so that it was difficult to tear them apart in order to clear the chamber for the next load. The corpses were thrown out—wet with sweat and urine, soiled with excrement, menstrual blood on their legs. Children’s bodies flew through the air. There was no time to lose. The whips of the Ukrainians whistled down on the backs of the work squad. Two dozen dentists opened the mouths with hooks and looked for gold. Gold on the right, without gold on the left. Other dentists used pliers and hammers to break gold teeth and crowns out of the Jews.
The naked corpses were carried in wooden barrows just a few metres away to pits of 100 by 20 by 12 metres. After some days the putrefying bodies swelled up and then, a short time later, collapsed violently so that a new batch could be thrown on top of them. Then 10 centimetres of sand was strewn over it so that only a few single heads and arms stuck out. In one of these spots I saw Jews clambering about on the corpses in the pits and working. I was told by an oversight those who were already dead when the transport arrived had not been undressed. Because of the textiles and valuables, which they would otherwise have taken with them to the grave, this had of course to be rectified. Nobody took any trouble either in Belzec or in Treblinka to record or count those who had been killed. The figures were only estimates based on the capacity of the wagons.
The next day—the 19th August 1942—we went in Hauptmann Wirth’s car to Treblinka, 120 km, NNE of Warsaw. The installations was somewhat similar to that in Belzec except that it was larger. Eight gas chambers and veritable mountains of cases, textiles and underclothes. A banquet in the dining-hall was laid on in our honour in typical Himmlerite Old German style. The meal was simple, but there were masses of everything. Himmler himself had ordered that the men of these Kommandos should receive as much meat, butter and other things, particularly alcohol, as they wanted.
We then went by car to Warsaw…………[81]
Some historians have questioned the veracity of Kurt Gerstein’s account, but if you compare what he recounted with the testimony of Wilhem Pfannenstiel regarding Belzec, there are clear similarities. His testimony given on April 25, 1960, supports a great deal of what Kurt Gerstein wrote:
When I am asked about executions of Jews I must confirm that on 19 August 1942 I witnessed an execution of Jews at Belzec extermination camp….. during this first visit I was taken around by a certain Polizeihauptmann named Wirth, who also showed and explained to me the extermination installations in the camp. He told me that the following morning a new transport of about 500 Jews would be arriving at the camp, who would be channeled through these extermination chambers. He asked me whether I would like to watch one of these extermination actions, to which, after a great deal of reflection, I consented. I planned to submit a report to the Reichsarzt-SS about these extermination actions. In order to write a report I had however, first to observe an action with my own eyes. I remained in the camp, spent the night there and was witness to the following events the next morning.[82]
A goods train travelled directly into the camp of Belzec, the freight cars were opened and Jews whom I believe were from the area of Romania or Hungary were unloaded. The cars were crammed fairly full. There were men, women and children of every age. They were ordered to get into line and then had to proceed to an assembly area and take off their shoes. I stood a little to the side of this line and watched the proceedings together with Polizeihauptmann Wirth and Obersturmführer Gerstein.
The SS escorts took up guard positions outside the camp and Jewish functionaries from the camp gave the arriving transports to understand that they would now be examined and instructed them to undress so that they could be deloused and take a bath. They also told them they had to inhale in a certain room to prevent them passing on any illnesses through their respiratory tracts. I could not understand what the Jewish camp functionaries were saying but Herr Wirth explained it to me.
After the Jews had removed their shoes they were separated by sex. The women went together with the children into a hut. There their hair was shorn and then they had to get undressed. The men went into another hut, where they received the same treatment. I saw what happened in the women’s hut with my own eyes. After they had undressed, the whole procedure went fairly quickly. They ran naked from the hut through a hedge into the actual extermination centre. The whole extermination centre looked just like a normal delousing institution. In front of the building there were pots of geraniums and a sign saying ‘Hackenholt Foundation’, above which there was a Star of David. The building was brightly and pleasantly painted so as not to suggest that people would be killed here. From what I saw, I do not believe that the people who had just arrived, had any idea of what would happen to them.
Pfannenstiel then recalled what happened next:
Inside the building, the Jews had to enter chambers into which was channeled the exhaust of a 100?—HP engine, located in the same building. In it there were six such extermination chambers. They were windowless, had electric lights and two doors. One door led outside so that the bodies could be removed. People were led from a corridor into the chambers through an ordinary air-tight door with bolts. There was a glass peep-hole, as I recall, next to the door in the wall. Through this window one could watch what was happening inside the room but only when it was not too full of people. After a short time the glass became steamed up.
When the people had been locked up in the room the motor was switched on and then I suppose the stop-valves or vents to the chambers opened. Whether they were stop-valves or vents I would not like to say. It is possible that the pipe led directly to the chambers. Once the engine was running, the light in the chambers was switched off. This was followed by palpable disquiet in the chamber. In my view it was only then that the people sensed something else was in store for them. It seemed to me that behind the thick walls and door they were praying and shouting for help.
After about twelve minutes it became silent in the chambers. The Jewish personnel then opened the doors leading outside and pulled the bodies out of the chambers with long hooks. To do this they had to put these hooks in the mouths of the bodies. In front of the building they were once again thoroughly examined and the bodily orifices were searched for valuables. Gold teeth were ripped out and collected in tins. These activities were carried out by the Jewishcamp personnel.
The bodies were taken from the searching area directly and thrown into deep mass graves which were situated near the extermination institute. When the grave was fairly full, petrol—it may have been some other flammable liquid—was poured over the bodies and they were then set alight. I had barely established that the bodies were not completely burned when a layer of earth was thrown over them and then more bodies were put into the same grave. During the disposal of the bodies I also established that the whole procedure was not entirely satisfactory from the point of view of hygiene.[83]
What is questionable is the date of the visit as recalled by Wilhelm Pfannenstiel—the trip to Treblinka on August 19, 1942. From the testimony by Josef Oberhauser, Wirth went to Treblinka with Odilo Globocnik to see for himself the chaos that Dr. Irmfried Eberl had allowed to develop. Oberhauser accompanied Wirth and Globocnik, supporting Wirth in his new role as Inspekteur der SS-Sonderkommandos Abteilung Reinhard. Another extremely important flaw in Kurt Gerstein’s account is that he saw a gassing facility with eight chambers. At that time there was only the three chamber gassing facility in August 1942; the new gas chambers construction was only started when Wirth and Stangl were at Treblinka.
This would either indicate that either Gerstein and Pfannenstiel made more than one trip to the extermination camps, or the visit was later, either September or October 1942. It is known that Pfannenstiel was indeed in Lublin in September 1942. A German police message decoded by the British Intelligence Service at Bletchley Park revealed that Ernst Lerch, Globocnik’s adjutant, had to provide a car for him on September 30, 1942.[84]
*
At virtually the same time as the visit of Kurt Gerstein and Wilhem Pfannenstiel in one of the transports from Lvov (Lemberg), one of the few survivors from the Belzec death camp, Rudolf Reder, arrived at the camp. We owe a great debt to Reder for writing down his experiences of Belzec—almost a unique account of what life and death was like in this man-made hell. During the month of August 1942, the killings reached a frenzied peak, with 50,000 Jews murdered at Belzec between August 10–23, 1942. Mass deportations from Krakow between August 25–30, 1942, saw 14,000 Jews murdered. Other large scale deportions from Drohobycz, Przemysl, Tarnopol, and Krakow district added to the death toll. So to provide the clearest picture of what happened to all the transports during August 1942 and beyond, we will use extracts from Rudolf Reder book Belzec to cover his transportation, arrival, and initial stay in the death camp:
Reder recalls the start of the deportation from the Janowska camp in Lvov:
At six in the morning they ordered us to get up off the damp grass and form up in fours, and the long rows of the doomed marched to the Kleparow station. Gestapo and Ukrainians surrounded us in tight ranks. Not a single person could escape. They herded us onto the ramp at the station. A long freight train was already waiting just pass the ramp. There were fifty cars. They began loading us. The doors of the freight cars had been slid open and Gestapo stood on both sides, two on each side with whips in their hands beating everyone on the face and head on the way in.[85]
The convoy of death reached Belzec:
About noon the train reached the Belzec station. It was a small station. Little houses stood around it. The Gestapo lived in these little houses. Belzec was on the Lublin-Tomaszow line, fifteen kilometres from Rawa Ruska. At the Belzec station the train reversed from the main line onto a spur that ran another kilometer, straight through the gate of the death camp. Ukrainian railroad workers also lived near the Belzec station, and there was a small post office. An old German with a thick black mustache got into the locomotive at Belzec—I do not know his name but I would recognise him in an instant—he looked like a hangman.[86] He took command of the train and drove it right to the camp. It took two minutes to get to the camp. The German who had driven the train to the camp got down and ‘helped’. Shouting and lashing out, he drove the people from the train. He himself went into each car and checked whether someone remained there. He knew all the tricks. When the train was empty and checked, he signalled with his flag and drove the train out of the camp.[87]
The Reichsbahn official was Rudolf Gockel. Teo Pansera, a Polish Volksdeutscher who worked for the Ostbahn in Belzec, recalled in an interview on July 12, 2000, that the German station master Gockel attended his wedding uninvited, “sitting like a lord” on the first cart, with his pressed uniform and his handle-bar mustache—a sight to behold.[88]
Rudolf Reder remembered the first moments at the death camp:
The train pulled into a yard about a kilometer long and wide, surrounded by barbed wire and iron fencing, one atop the other, two meters high. The wire was not electrified. You drove into that yard through a wide, wooden gate topped with barbed wire. Next to the gate stood a hut where a sentry sat with a telephone. In front of the hut stood several SS-men with dogs. When a train had passed through the gate, the sentry closed it and went inside the hut.[89]
Now the SS-men took control of the transport:
Several dozen SS-men opened the cars, screaming “los!” They drove people out of the cars with whips and rifle butts. The cars had doors a meter above the ground, and all those being herded out, young and old, had to jump. They broke arms and legs during this, having to jump to the ground...... Aside from the SS, the so-called ‘Zugsführers’ were on duty. These were the supervisors of the permanent Jewish death crew in the camp, dressed normally without camp insignia.
The sick, the old and the small children, all the ones who could not walk on their own, were placed on stretchers and set down at the edge of enormous dug graves. Gestapo–man Jirmann[90] shot them there, and then pushed them into the grave with the rifle butt.[91]
The next part of the process was where the SS announced to the new arrivals that they needed to take a bath, all done to allay fears and stop resistance from occurring:
Jirmann spoke very loudly and distinctly. “Ihr gehts jetzt baden, nachher werdet ihr zur Arbeit geschickt” (Now you are going for a bath and afterwards you will be sent to work). That was all. Everybody cheered up and was happy that they were going to work after all. They applauded.....
The whole crowd moved on in silence, the men straight through the yard to a building on which it was written in large letters: ‘Bade und Inhalationsraume’ (Baths and Inhalation Room). The women went some twenty meters further to a large barracks, thirty meters by fifteen. The women and girls had their hair shaved off in that barracks..... later on I saw that only a few minutes later when they were given wooden stools and lined up across the barracks, when they were ordered to sit, and eight Jewish barbers, robots silent as the grave, approached them to shave their hair down to the scalp with clippers.[92]
Now the doomed women and children took their final journey:
I stood off to the side, in the yard, together with the group picked out to dig graves, watching my brothers, sisters, acquaintances and friends being driven to their death. While the women were being herded forward, naked and shaved, whipped like cattle to the slaughter, without being counted, faster, faster,—the men had already died in the chambers. It took more or less two hours to shave the women, which is also how long it took to prepare for the murder and the murder itself.
Several dozen SS-men used whips and sharp bayonets to drive the women to the building with the chambers and up three steps to the gangway, where the askars counted 750 people into each chamber.... I heard the doors closing, the moans and the screams; I heard the desperate cries in Polish and Yiddish, the bloodcurdling laments of the children and the women, and then one joined, terrifying cry..... That lasted fifteen minutes. The machine ran for twenty minutes and after twenty minutes it was very quiet, the askars opened the doors from the outside, and I together with the other workers—picked out like me from previous transports, without any tattoos or insignia—we went to work. We dragged the bodies of people who had still been alive not long ago; we used leather straps to drag them to the huge, waiting mass graves and the orchestra played during this, it played from morning to evening.[93]
Rudolf Reder was able, through his book, to shed some light on the social activities of the camp staff, once the daily tasks of exterminating thousands of innocent men, women, and children was concluded for the day:
No one from the families ever came, and none of them lived with a woman. They raised whole flocks of geese and ducks. People said that in the spring they were sent whole baskets of cherries. Crates of vodka and wine were brought daily...... Each Sunday evening they summoned the camp orchestra and held a drunken party. Only the Gestapo got together, they gorged themselves and drank. They threw scraps of leftovers to the musicians.[94]
The Trawnikimänner also enjoyed socializing, and they had a recreation center—a small bar called the Komadowski Bar—on the same side of the road as the Kommandantur and SS NCO living quarters on Tomaszowska Steet.