The Six Death Camps

The regime built or adapted six camps specifically for the killing of Jews on arrival. Together they murdered around three million people between December 1941 and the autumn of 1944. They were not interchangeable. Each was a different operation, with a different design, a different commandant, a different killing method, and a different end. The pages on the wider concentration camp system cover what the camps had in common. This page covers the differences.

Chełmno (Kulmhof)

Chełmno, in the part of western Poland annexed to the Reich, was the first of the dedicated extermination sites. It opened on 8 December 1941, six weeks before the Wannsee Conference. The site was a manor house and an attached forest, with mass graves dug in the forest. The killing method was mobile gas vans: enclosed lorries in which the exhaust gas was diverted into a sealed compartment in the back. Around 30 to 40 people could be killed at once. The vans drove from the manor house into the forest, taking around 15 minutes for the carbon monoxide to kill the occupants, then unloaded the bodies at a mass grave for burial. From spring 1942 the bodies were exhumed and burned to destroy the evidence.

Around 320,000 people were murdered at Chełmno. The site was operated by a small SS Sonderkommando, around 50 to 100 men, with a few dozen Jewish prisoner labour. The camp ran in two phases: December 1941 to March 1943, and June 1944 to January 1945. Around three Jewish prisoners survived. Chełmno is the camp at which the lowest number of survivors was produced relative to the death toll, of any extermination camp.

Bełżec

Bełżec, in the Generalgouvernement, opened on 17 March 1942. It was the first of the three Operation Reinhard camps and the first to use stationary gas chambers fed by carbon monoxide from a captured Soviet diesel engine. Around 600,000 people were murdered at Bełżec, almost all Jews from the Galicia and Lublin districts of occupied Poland. The killing was complete by December 1942. The camp was dismantled in spring 1943 and the site planted with trees.

Bełżec produced two known survivors: Rudolf Reder, who escaped during a transport between the camp and Lvov in late 1942, and Chaim Hirszman, who escaped from a deportation train. Reder gave detailed post-war testimony at Polish trials and wrote his memoir Bełżec in 1946. Hirszman was murdered in Lublin in 1946 by the Polish anti-communist underground, the day before he was due to give testimony to a Polish court. The two known survivors of around 600,000 dead are an extreme demonstration of how thoroughly the Operation Reinhard camps wiped out their populations.

Sobibor

Sobibor, also in the Generalgouvernement, opened in May 1942. The killing method was the same as at Bełżec: stationary gas chambers fed by diesel exhaust. Around 200,000 people were murdered at Sobibor before the Sonderkommando uprising of 14 October 1943, in which around 300 prisoners broke out and around 50 ultimately survived to liberation. The Sobibor revolt is covered on its own page in the Concentration Camps section. The camp was dismantled by the SS in the weeks after the revolt and the site planted with trees.

Treblinka

Treblinka, the third Operation Reinhard camp, opened on 23 July 1942. It was the largest of the three by death toll. Around 800,000 people were murdered there, most of them Jews from the Warsaw ghetto and the smaller ghettos of central Poland. The killing method was again diesel-engine carbon monoxide. The camp had a double-fenced layout, with the lower camp where new arrivals were processed (the so-called fake station with painted timetables and a fake clock that always showed the same hour) and the upper camp where the gas chambers and the burning pyres operated. The Treblinka Sonderkommando revolt of 2 August 1943, covered on its own page, produced around 70 surviving witnesses including Yankel Wiernik, Samuel Willenberg and Richard Glazar. Treblinka was dismantled in November 1943.

Majdanek

Majdanek, near Lublin in the Generalgouvernement, was originally a Soviet prisoner of war camp set up in October 1941. It became, from autumn 1942, a combined labour and extermination camp. Unlike the Operation Reinhard camps, Majdanek was a major operation in physical scale, holding tens of thousands of prisoners as labour. It used Zyklon B in stationary gas chambers, the same method as Auschwitz, rather than the diesel-engine carbon monoxide of the other Operation Reinhard camps. Around 80,000 people died at Majdanek, of whom around 60,000 were Jews. The camp was overrun by the Soviet Army on 23 July 1944 in such a sudden advance that the SS did not have time to dismantle the killing machinery. Majdanek is the only extermination camp the Soviets reached intact, and the photographs and films they produced of it became the first widely-distributed visual evidence of the Holocaust killing programme. The Soviet documentation was largely disbelieved at the time in the Western press, partly because of Cold War scepticism and partly because the scale was outside what most readers were prepared to accept. The Western liberation of the camps the following spring confirmed the Soviet evidence.

Auschwitz-Birkenau

Auschwitz-Birkenau is the largest and best-known of the six. Auschwitz I, the original Polish political prisoner camp, opened in May 1940. The killing function was added at Auschwitz II (Birkenau) from spring 1942. Birkenau used Zyklon B in four large gas chamber and crematorium complexes (Crematoria II, III, IV and V), each capable of killing and disposing of around 2,000 people at a time. Around 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz, of whom around 1 million were Jews. Auschwitz also served as a major labour camp, with around 130,000 prisoners at peak working in IG Farben’s Buna-Werke synthetic rubber plant at the satellite camp Auschwitz III (Monowitz) and in the network of around 45 sub-camps in the surrounding region. Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Army on 27 January 1945. The date is now International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Around 7,000 prisoners were found alive at the main camp and the satellite sites; the rest had been sent on death marches in mid-January.

What the six together did

The total death toll at the six extermination camps is around three million people. The figure is around half the entire Holocaust death toll. The other half was killed in the open-air shootings of the Einsatzgruppen and the local auxiliaries in the eastern territories, in the ghettos before the deportations, and in the death marches at the end of the war. The six camps are the part of the killing programme that left the deepest physical and bureaucratic record, partly because their geographic footprint was concentrated and partly because the killing happened in a more documented form than the open-air shootings. The deniers concentrate most of their effort on these six camps, particularly Auschwitz and Treblinka, because the rest of the killing programme, while equally well documented in its own way, is harder to attack rhetorically.

See also

Sources

  • Yitzhak Arad, Bełżec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, 1987
  • Robert Jan van Pelt and Deborah Dwork, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, Norton, 1996
  • Patrick Montague, Chełmno and the Holocaust, University of North Carolina Press, 2012
  • Tomasz Kranz, The Extermination of Jews at Majdanek Concentration Camp, Panstwowe Muzeum na Majdanku, 2007
  • USHMM: Killing Centres