Before Operation Reinhard

In 1941, the Nazi leadership moved from forced removal to the systematic murder of Jews in occupied Eastern Europe. By late summer, mobile killing units in the Soviet territories were shooting Jewish men, women, and children; in the Wartheland, Jews began to be gassed in vans at Chełmno/Kulmhof on December 8, 1941. In this context, in autumn 1941, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler tasked Odilo Globocnik, SS and Police Leader in the Lublin District, with establishing an extermination site. Bełżec was chosen. No written order or full construction file survives, so the camp’s early development is only partially traceable.

Bełżec’s location was key. Centrally placed between the districts of Lublin, Galicia, and Kraków, it was served by rail links to Kraków, Lublin, and Lwów and was equipped with a forestry spur about 300 meters from the station to an unloading ramp easily folded into the killing grounds. The area was familiar to the occupiers: From May to October 1940, a web of labor camps had held more than 10,000 forced laborers—mostly Jews, with several hundred Roma and Sinti—around 3,000 of them in Bełżec. Hermann Höfle, later operational head of Reinhard, had already served there.

In autumn 1941, five Waffen-SS men with Aktion T4 euthanasia experience arrived to build the camp. Working with minimal oversight, they procured materials, cleared the wooded Kozielsk hill, and put up barracks and a gas chamber building. From mid-November to late December 1941, 20–30 conscripted—but well paid—local craftsmen assisted; the first Trawniki auxiliaries arrived in November, and by January 1942 about 150 Jews from nearby Lubycza Królewska were forced onto the site.

The team tested killing methods drawn from T4, first with bottled carbon monoxide from Lwów, then with a mobile gas van and a fixed chamber. They finally settled on stationary gas chambers fed by engine exhaust. Some fifty Jews were murdered in the first test killing in February 1942. Over nearly five months, the SS streamlined the murder sequence: shunting the freight cars in, driving people off, undressing, the fenced path to the chambers, gassing, and burial. Valuables and clothing were seized for shipment to Germany. Similar routines later defined Sobibór and Treblinka.

During Operation Reinhard

The arrival of two transports on March 17, 1942, is widely marked as the start of Operation Reinhard; in the following four weeks, until April 16, some 70,000 people—among them Jews from Lublin and Lwów—were murdered at Bełżec.

By mid-April, the graves were so overfilled that decomposition forced bodies up through the soil. Operations paused from April 17 to mid-May; a railway “transport ban” from June 18 to July 8 followed while rolling stock was diverted east. The SS used the downtime to expand capacity. Upon reopening, killings at the camp reached staggering numbers: About 135,000 Jews were murdered in August 1942 alone, with at least one death train arriving daily. The redesigned site had designated areas for the separate stages—the ramp, undressing barracks, and a longer, screened corridor leading up to a new masonry building with six gas chambers. Selected Jewish prisoners, not Trawniki guards, now opened the cars, drove people out, cleaned wagons, and prepared them for removal. Bełżec was divided into a lower camp (arrivals and undressing) and an upper camp (gassing and burial).

The broader complex included two German houses 500 meters away used as living and administrative quarters (the Kommandantur and a lodging house), a locomotive shed at the public station where a Jewish detail sorted stolen property, and, in the village, a pumping station repurposed as a laundry. The station ramp held about fifteen cars; longer trains were split. Trains often stood overnight, and escape attempts—frequently fatal—were common.

Testimony indicates that from August 1942, roughly 500 Jews were held as forced laborers at any given time, with the number fluctuating according to transports and SS needs. Early selectees were shot after a few days; by early summer the SS maintained more permanent work “commands.” Those in the upper camp dragged out bodies, broke out gold teeth, and dug and filled mass graves; those in the lower camp felled wood, built barracks, worked in workshops and kitchens, and handled arrivals and confiscations. Survivor Rudolf Reder later wrote that words could not express their emotions as they heard the groans of the dying and the screams of children; three times a day they watched people driven mad and felt themselves near insanity.

Bełżec could not be hidden. Railwaymen and nearby residents saw trains enter full and never return. Rumors and eyewitness accounts spread quickly. On April 8, 1942, Dr. Zygmunt Klukowski noted reports of two daily trains whose passengers were killed and burned. By summer, the camp was a “public secret.” The Oneg Shabbat archive in Warsaw received early warnings that Jews were being murdered in Bełżec “as in Chełmno,” and the Polish underground reported repeatedly; courier Jan Karski named Bełżec in materials he carried to London in autumn 1942.

The last known transports arrived from December 7–11, 1942, from Rawa Ruska. Reasons for the camp’s closure were never documented; however, historians point to the near-destruction of Galician Jewry, exhausted burial space, and abandoned plans to murder Romanian Jews there.

After Operation Reinhard

From August 1942, the SS had already begun burning bodies to erase evidence. In November 1942, large-scale exhumation and cremation began, likely using an excavator from Treblinka. Residents recalled months of continuous burning and foul-smelling smoke that carried for miles. As the “disinterment” phase ended, the SS dismantled buildings, towers, wire, and barracks and planted firs to disguise the ground. Some 300 Jewish prisoners were told they would be sent to a labor camp. Instead, on June 26, 1943, they were loaded onto a train to Sobibór. Gunfire there attested to their resistance and murder; notes later found in their clothing urged, “Do not trust the Germans.”

After the SS left, locals looted the unguarded site, even digging into graves for valuables. Polish authorities investigated in 1945–46, taking testimony that remains crucial for reconstructing the camp. In 1947, responsibility for memorialization passed to the state council, but the terrain saw years of neglect. A small ossuary (1949) and a partial fence (1954) offered scant protection, and industrial use damaged the ground. A first memorial opened in 1963 on part of the site, with generic inscriptions that did not identify the victims as Jews. Only in the mid-1990s did a comprehensive redesign begin, led by the American Jewish Committee and the Polish government, driven by survivor-advocate Miles Lerman. The new memorial opened on June 3, 2004, combining a museum (a branch of the State Museum at Majdanek) with an architectural ensemble that protects thirty-three mass graves and creates a symbolic cemetery. By late 2017 the site had received more than 450,000 visitors. In 2015, portions of the former German compound, including the Kommandantur and a 1942 service building, were added to the museum’s holdings, though other historically related structures nearby remain outside the marked memorial area.