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From and by Jim Rogers: ·This date, August 26, in 1942, at Chortkiv, the Ukrainian police and German Schutzpolizei deported 2,000 Jews to Bełżec extermination camp. 500 of the sick and children are murdered on the spot.Photo: Belzec SS staff outside the camp perimeter, from the collections of the Belzec Museum and Ghetto Fighters' House. German occupied Poland, 1942. Right to left: Heinrich Barbl, Artur Dachsel, Lorenz Hackenholt, Ernst Zierke, Karl Gringers. Left (uniformed): Friedrich Tauscher, Karl Alfred Schluch (second).Chortkiv is a city in Ternopil Oblast (province) in western Ukraine. In the past Chortkiv was the home of many Hasidic Jews; it was a notable shtetl and had a significant number of Jews residing there prior to the Holocaust. The town was annexed to the Soviet Union from September 17, 1939, until June 1941. Its Polish inhabitants, particularly students of the local high school, organized a failed uprising in January 1940, which would serve as the first Polish uprising of World War II. From 1941-1944 it was annexed to Nazi Germany. After the defeat of the Nazis by the Red Army in 1944, the town returned to Soviet control until in 1991 it became part of independent Ukraine.Belzec was a Nazi German extermination camp built by the SS for the purpose of implementing the secretive Operation Reinhard, the plan to eradicate Polish Jewry, a key part of the "Final Solution" which entailed the murder of some 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.The camp operated from March 17, 1942, to the end of June 1943. It was situated about 0.5 km south of the local railroad station of Bełżec, in the new Distrikt Lublin of the semi-colonial General Government territory of German-occupied Poland. The burning of exhumed corpses on five open air grids and bone crushing continued until March 1943.Between 430,000 and 500,000 Jews are believed to have been murdered by the SS at Bełżec. This makes it the third deadliest extermination camp, exceeded only by Treblinka and Auschwitz. Only seven Jews performing slave labor with the camp's Sonderkommando survived World War II; and only one of them became known, due to his postwar official testimony. The lack of viable witnesses who could testify about the camp's operation is the primary reason why Belzec is so little known despite the enormous number of victims.The city of Lublin became the hub of early Nazi transfer of about 95,000 German, Austrian, and Polish Jews expelled from the West and the General Government area. The prisoners were put to work by the Schutzstaffel (SS) in the construction of anti-tank ditches along the transitory Nazi-Soviet border. The Burggraben project was abandoned with the onset of Operation Barbarossa.On October 13, 1941, Heinrich Himmler gave the SS and Police Leader of Lublin, SS Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik an order to start Germanizing the area around Zamość, which entailed the removal of Jews from the areas of future settlement.The site near Bełżec was chosen for several reasons: it was situated on the border between the Lublin District and the German District of Galicia formed after Operation Barbarossa. It could "process" the Jews of both regions. The ease of transportation was secured by the railroad junction at nearby Rawa-Ruska and the highway between Lublin-Stadt and Lemberg. The northern boundary of the planned killing center consisted of an anti-tank trench constructed a year earlier. The ditch, excavated originally for military purposes was likely to serve as the first mass grave.Globocnik brought in Obersturmführer Richard Thomalla who was a civil engineer by profession and the camp construction expert in the SS. Work had commenced in early November 1941, using local builders overseen by a squad of Trawniki guards. The installation, resembling a railway transit point for the purpose of forced labour, was finished before Christmas. It featured insulated barracks for showering among several other structures. Some local men were released. The SS completed the work in February 1942 by fitting in the tank engine and the exhaust piping systems for gassing. The trial killings were performed in early March. On March 17, 1942, the daily gassing operations at Belzec extermination camp began with the T4 leadership brought in from Germany under the guise of Organization Todt.Organization Todt (OT) was a civil and military engineering organization in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, named for its founder, Fritz Todt, an engineer and senior Nazi. The organization was responsible for a huge range of engineering projects both in Nazi Germany and in occupied territories from France to the Soviet Union. It became notorious for using forced labor. From 1943-45 during the late phase of the Third Reich, OT administered all constructions of concentration camps to supply forced labor to industry.The three commandants of the camp including Kriminalpolizei officers SS-Sturmbannführer Christian Wirth and SS-Hauptsturmführer Gottlieb Hering, had been involved in the forced euthanasia program since 1940 in common with almost all of their German staff thereafter. Wirth had the leading position as the supervisor of six extermination hospitals in the Reich; Hering was the non-medical chief of the Sonnenstein gassing facility in Saxony as well as at the Hadamar Euthanasia Center. Wirth had been a killing expert from the beginning as participant of the first T-4 gassing of handicapped people at the Brandenburg Euthanasia Center. He was an obvious choice to be the first commandant of the first stationary extermination camp of Operation Reinhard in the General Government. It was his proposal to use the exhaust gas emitted by the internal combustion engine of a motorcar as the killing agent instead of the bottled carbon monoxide, because no delivery from outside the camp would be required.Christian Wirth (November 24, 1885 – May 26, 1944) was a German policeman and SS officer who was one of the leading architects of the program to exterminate the Jewish people of Poland, known as Operation Reinhard. His nicknames included “Christian the Terrible” and “The Wild Christian.” Wirth served as Inspector of all Operation Reinhard camps. He was the first Commandant of Bełżec extermination camp. He was later killed by Yugoslav partisans in Hrpelje-Kozina near Trieste.Wirth developed his method on the basis of experience he had gained in the fixed gas chambers of Action T4. Even though Zyklon B became broadly available later on, Wirth decided against it. Zyklon B was produced by a private firm for both Birkenau, and Majdanek nearby, but their infrastructure differed. Belzec was an Operation Reinhard camp meant to circumvent the problems of supply, and instead, rely on a system of extermination based on ordinary and readily available killing agents. For economic and practical reasons, Wirth had almost the same carbon monoxide gas used in T-4, generated with a large engine with a system of pipes delivering exhaust fumes into the gas chambers.Belzec "processing" zone consisted of two sections surrounded by a high barbed wire fence camouflaged with cut fir branches: Camp 1, which included the victims' unloading area with two undressing barracks further up; as well as Camp 2, which contained the gas chambers and the mass graves dug by the crawler excavator. The two zones were completely screened from each other and connected only by a narrow corridor called der Schlauch, or "the Tube.”All arriving Jews disembarked from the trains at a platform in the reception zone. They were met by SS-Scharführer Fritz Jirmann (Irmann) standing at the podium with a loudspeaker, and were told by the Sonderkommando men that they had arrived at a transit camp. To ready themselves for the communal shower, women and children were separated from men. The disrobed new arrivals were forced to run along a fenced off path to the gas chambers, leaving them no time to absorb where they were.The wooden gas chambers were disguised as the shower barracks, so that the victims would not realize the true purpose of the facility. The gassing itself, which took about 30 minutes, was conducted by Hackenholt with the Ukrainian guards and a Jewish aide. Removing the bodies from the gas chambers, burying them, sorting and repairing the victims' clothing for shipping was performed by Sonderkommando work details. The workshops for the Jewish prisoners and the barracks for the Ukrainian guards were separated from the "processing" zone behind an embankment of the old Otto Line with the barbed wire on top. Most Jews from the corpse unit were killed periodically and replaced by new arrivals, so that they would neither organize a revolt nor survive to tell about the camp's purpose. The German SS and the administration were housed in two cottages outside the camp.The second phase of extermination began in July 1942, when the new gas chambers were built of brick and mortar on a lightweight foundation, enabling the facility to "process" Jews of the two largest agglomerations nearby including the Kraków and the Lwów Ghettos. The wooden gas chambers were dismantled. The new building 24 m long and 10 m wide had six gas chambers, insulated with the cement walls. It could handle over 1,000 victims at a time.One Wehrmacht sergeant at the train station in Rzeszow, Wilhelm Cornides, recorded in his diary a conversation with a German policeman on August 30, 1942. The Bahnschutzpolizei told him: "trains filled with Jews pass almost daily through the railway yards and leave immediately on the way to the camp. They return swept clean most often the same evening."The last transport of Jews arrived at Belzec on December 11, 1942. The buried remains often swelled in the heat as a result of putrefaction and the escape of gases. The surface layer of soil split. In the last phase of the camp operations, all prior mass graves were unearthed by a mechanical digger. It was the result of direct orders from the Nazi leadership (possibly Himmler), soon after the Soviet Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish soldiers was discovered in Russia. At Katyn, the German led exhumations by the international Katyn Commission revealed details of the mass murder by examining preserved bodies. The Germans attempted to use the commission's results to drive a wedge between the Allies.In October 1942 the secret exhumation and burning of all corpses was ordered to cover up the crime on direct orders from SS-Obergruppenführer Odilo Globocnik, the deputy of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in Berlin. The bodies were placed on pyres made from rail tracks, splashed with petrol and burned. The bones were collected and crushed. The last period of camp's operation continued until June 1943 when the area was ploughed over, and disguised as a farm.The more detailed description of how the gas chambers at Belzec were managed came in 1945 from Kurt Gerstein, Head of the Technical Disinfection Services who used to deliver Zyklon B to Auschwitz from the company called Degesch during the Holocaust. In his postwar Report written while in the French custody, Gerstein described his visit to Belzec on August 19, 1942. He witnessed there the unloading of 45 cattle cars crowded with 6,700 Jews deported from the Lwów Ghetto less than a hundred kilometers away, of whom 1,450 were already dead on arrival from suffocation and thirst. The remaining new arrivals were marched naked in batches to the gas chambers; beaten with whips to squeeze tighter inside.