Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews by Peter Longerich

Author:Peter Longerich [Longerich, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: ePub Bud (www.epubbud.com)
Published: 2011-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

330

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

The ‘Final Solution’ in Eastern Europe 1942

Poland

The Deportations from the Districts of Lublin and Galicia to the

Extermination Camps of Belzec and Sobibor

On 20 January 1942 the population and welfare department of the General

Government demanded that its offices attached to the district governors ‘send a

list of ghettos in their district as soon as possible’, and forward their population

figures. 96 These statistics had already been used in the preparation for the deportations in the districts of Lublin and Galicia.

They could start on this since Belzec extermination camp, the construction of

which had begun the previous November, was completed in March 1942. Belzec,

in the south-eastern part of the district of Lublin, directly on the railway line to

Lemberg (Lvov) was to be the prototype of the extermination camps built in the

General Government. It covered a relatively small area, a rectangle with sides

about 270 m long, and initially consisted of a barrack with three gas chambers.

The staff consisted of 20 to 30 Germans, and 90 to 120 so called ‘Trawnikis’: Soviet

prisoners of war, Ukrainians, and ethnic Germans who had passed through the

Trawniki SS training camp in the district of Lublin, run by Globocnik. Apart from

that, there was a Jewish work unit in Belzec whose members were repeatedly

replaced by newly arrived prisoners and murdered.

A spur line made it possible to move railway wagons directly into the camp.

Here the victims were led to believe that they were in a transit camp. Men,

woman, and children were separated; they had to undress, hand over their

valuable objects, women had their hair cut off. The people were then driven

naked along a narrow, fenced path, known as the ‘Schlauch’, or ‘tube’, to the gas

chambers, which were disguised as shower rooms. An engine produced the

deadly exhaust fumes which would generally kill the victims in an agonizing

way within 20 to 30 minutes. 97 Jewish forced labourers then had to take the corpses of the murdered people out of the gas chambers and transport them to

the large graves in the camp grounds, which had been dug by Jewish forced

labourers in 1940.

In the district of Lublin the deportations began in mid-March: between 16 March

and 20 April the ghetto in the district capital, Lublin, was almost completely cleared

in two phases. 98 This enterprise was run by SS and police chief Odilo Globocnik and by units of the Security Police, the Order Police, and Trawniki men, while the civil

administration provided essential support. 99 Himmler had stayed there immediately before the beginning of the clearance of the Lublin ghetto, which marks the

beginning of the systematic murder of the Jews in the General Government and

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