SS troops and a member of the Ukranian Auxiliary Force (l., in black uniform), Belzec (Bełżec), 1942

SS troops in Bełżec

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The ten men in SS uniforms are posing in the Bełżec extermination camp, in the south-east of today’s Poland. In 1940, a labour camp was established on the outskirts of the small town of Bełżec. In November 1941, the SS then had the site converted into an extermination camp. The systematic murder of people began in spring 1942. From the outset, the new extermination camp had planned little space to accommodate those deported there. The purpose of the Bełżec death camp was to kill the deportees directly after they arrived. Christian Wirth, later the camp commandant, was present during the construction phase. He had previously played a leading role in the T4 Action. Since 1940, the T4 Action had gassed people classified as mentally and physically disabled in six institutions in Germany.

Altough “T4 Action” was officially halted in summer 1941, the murder of disabled had not come to an end. However, many of those involved were detailed to the new killing centres in the East. They were already specialised in killing people, in particular through the use of gas.

In the months before the meeting at Wannsee, in some of the previous labour and concentration camps killing facilities were established. The use of gas chambers for mass killings was already part of the plan. A barrack with gas chambers was constructed in Bełżec, just as in the Sobibor and Treblinka camps. In 1942, at these three death camps alone, at least one million six hundred thousand men, women and children were killed. This unparalleled mass murder was given the code name “Operation Reinhard”.

For the mass murders at these killing centres, the SS employed detachments of so-called ‘Trawniki’ – primarily prisoners-of-war from autonomous western Soviet republics who were trained in a camp at Trawniki to put Nazi Germany’s plans for mass murder into operation.