Bełżec was a death camp set up in Poland by Nazi Germany during World War II (1939-1945). The killing center stood at the edge of the town of Bełżec, near Lublin in eastern Poland. Bełżec was one of several camps involved in Aktion Reinhard (Operation Reinhard), a Nazi plan to kill the roughly 2 million Jews living in German-occupied territory in what had been central Poland. German Schutzstaffel (SS) troops and police managed the Reinhard death camps. The SS was a special Nazi military group. Many of the camp guards were from Ukraine.
Bełżec opened as a death camp in March 1942. The camp was built along a railway line in a rugged, remote region. A ring of trees and branches woven into the encircling barbed-wire fence helped hide the camp from the outside. Prisoners entered the camp in railcars. They were unloaded, separated by sex, and forced to surrender their possessions. A few people, including some with special skills or trades, were used for forced labor. The others were stripped, the women had their hair cut off, and all were led into gas chambers. The Germans piped deadly carbon monoxide gas into the chambers, killing the people inside. The bodies were then removed and placed in mass graves nearby. Beginning in October 1942, many of these bodies were exhumed (dug up) and burned. A machine ground their bones to powder.
Bełżec’s victims were mostly Jews from Poland and Ukraine. A number of Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and Roma (sometimes called Gypsies) also died in the camp. The Germans murdered more than 450,000 people at Bełżec.
In June 1943, the Bełżec camp was dismantled. The last prisoners were sent to nearby Sobibór, where they were killed. To erase evidence of the death camp, the Nazis planted crops and trees over the camp. They aimed to disguise it as a farm. Investigators later reconstructed the history of Bełżec from documents, testimonies, and archaeological work. Today, a museum and a large memorial stand on the camp’s former grounds.
See also Concentration camp; Holocaust; Nazism; Schutzstaffel (SS).
