SS Colonel General Christian Wirth, a former police officer who had played a leading roll in implementing the T4 euthanasia program, was appointed the first camp commander. He commanded 20-30 SS men, plus a guard company of 90-120 Ukrainians who were trained at Trawniki camp. Belzec extermination camp was quite small, with a circumference of 1,220 yards. It was divided into two sections, each one surrounded by a barbed wire fence. There were watch towers all around the perimeter of the camp. The first camp was split into two parts. The smaller area contained: Administration Buildings and Ukranian's Barracks
The larger part included the spur line which carried rail trucks in to the camp, an expanse where Jewish deportees were sorted into groups of men or women and children, the barracks where they were forced to undress and were shaven, storerooms for their clothes, personal objects, etc., and huts for the Jewish workers who were employed by the SS to carry out the duties associated with the murder process.
The second camp housed the gas chambers and burial pits. It was reached by a long narrow passageway with barbed wire fencing on either side, known as the "tube". The extermination site was screened off from the rest of the camp by leafy branches intertwined with barbed wire.
Camouflage was essential to the murder process. A transport numbering 40-60 rail trucks, holding about 2000 to 2,500 Jews, would arrive at Belzec station. It would be divided into two or three smaller convoys which would be pushed to the camp. The Jews would then be rapidly disembarked onto the platform where they were assured that they had arrived at a transit camp. They were told that before being assigned to work duties they would first be disinfected and showered. Men were separated from women and children and marched off to larger huts to undress. Women had their hair shaved off. They were brutally pushed to the "tube" and into the gas chambers which were disguised as "showers". The brutalized and disoriented Jews, often weak from hours or days spent in cattle trucks, had barely any time to evaluate their fate or react defensively.
In the first phase of its operations, from mid-March 1942 through mid-May 1942, Belzec had three gas chambers in a wooden barrackwith a double wall filled with sand. The gas chambers were half-lined with tin and equipped with two airtight doors, one for entry and one the corpses would be removed from. The carbon monoxide gas was piped in from a diesel engine mounted outside. Once the gas chambers were filled and the doors shut, the killing process would take up to 30 minutes. Teams of Jewish laborers who had been selected from earlier transports then removed the corpses and dragged them to the burial pits. Other jewish workers removed gold teeth from the corpses back at the platform, teams of Jews cleaned up trucks and tidied platforms. In the undressing room more Jewish workers were busy sorting clothing, luggage, and personal objects. It took up to three hours to "process" one section of a transport.
In mid-May the transports stopped while the system was refined. In mid-June construction began on brick and concrete buildings housing 6 gas chambers, each one 13 x 16 feet. This enabled the SS to kill up to 1,200 Jews at a time, which meant that trains needed to be broken down only in two parts. Jews could also be moved through all the stages of undressing and shaving more quickly. During this period, about 1,000 Jews were kept alive for short periods of time to man the various work teams. A substantial number were employed by the SS as craftsmen. All were liquidated after a while. Those remaining when the camp ceased to function were transported to Sobibor death camp and murdered. There were only a handfull of survivors at Belzec.
It is estimated that 600,000 Jews were murdered at Belzec and probably dozens of thousands of gypsies. In the first phase of its operations, 80,000 Jews were killed, having been brought from the ghettos of Lublin, Lvov, and elsewhere in the Lublin area and Galicia. The second phase, from mid-July 1942, through the end of Dec. of 1942, saw the arrival and gassing of 130,00 Jews from the Cracow area, 215,000 from the Lvov region and smaller numbers from Lublin and Radom.
During the early months of 1943, the corpses of murdered Jews were disinterred and burned in open air pits. The camp was then closed. However, local people excavated the ground for valuables and had to be driven off by guards. To deter other scavengers, the area of the camp was plowed over and turned into a farm. One of the Ukranian guards was made the farmer.
