Bełżec extermination camp

Bełżec (, in ), was a Nazi extermination camp (a death camp) during the Holocaust. It operated during World War II, from  to the end of . 

In those eight months, around 450,000 Jews were murdered at the camp by the Schutzstaffel (SS), the Nazis' paramilitary organization. The SS also killed an unknown number of Christian Poles and Roma people at Bełżec. 

Bełżec was the first Nazi camp that used permanent gas chambers to kill prisoners.

 History 
As part of Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution", the Nazis made plans to kill every one of Europe's 11 million Jews.Michael Bryant, Eyewitness to Genocide: The Operation Reinhard Death Camp Trials, 1955-1966 (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2014), pp. 1—4 In 1941 they created the first death camp at Chelmno in Poland. It was a killing center designed to mass-murder Jews. 

Then, in 1942, the Nazis launched Operation Reinhard. This was a plan to kill every Jew in the General Government (a part of German-occupied Poland) - around 2 million people. The plan called for three more killing centers to be built. Bełżec was the first new death camp the Nazis built.

 Location 
The camp was located in the village of Bełżec in German-occupied Poland. It was about  south of the local railroad station, which made it easy to transport large numbers of deported Jews there.

 Legacy 
Only seven Jews who worked as slave laborers in Bełżec's Sonderkommando survived World War II. Just one of them submitted postwar testimony officially. 

Because there are so few witnesses who can testify about the camp's operation, very little is known about Bełżec.

Notable people
 Elsa Binder ( 1920  1942), a Polish-born Jewish diarist, may have lived and died at Bełżec

 Related pages 

 Extermination camps
 Nazi concentration camps
 Nazi Germany
 The Final Solution
 The Holocaust
 Antisemitism

 References 

Category:Nazi concentration camps in Poland
Category:1942 in Europe
Category:1940s in Germany
Category:1940s in Poland