7/9/2023 0 Comments Captain franz stanglVisitors to the sites of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka (of whom there are far fewer than travel to Auschwitz) are shocked by how tiny these killing camps were. Thus Belzec measured less than 300 metres square. The death camp - unlike the concentration camp - needed relatively few facilities of any kind, and could be contained in a small space. Then, since he realised that the vast majority of arrivals would be alive only for a matter of hours, the large complex of buildings that characterised Auschwitz or Dachau could be dispensed with. First, the site chosen for Belzec, like each of the death camps, was in a remote area, away from any major population centre. In supervising the layout of the camp, he entered entirely new territory and broke completely with established concentration camp design. The three small gas chambers themselves were incorporated into a brick building that was disguised to resemble a shower room, with the carbon monoxide gas delivered through fake shower heads. He decided to use carbon monoxide gas as the means of murder, not supplied from canisters as in the gas chambers of the euthanasia programme, but from a normal combustion engine. No previous model determined their construction, and in many ways their history and operation more exactly encapsulates the uniqueness of the Nazis' "Final Solution" than does Auschwitz.Īt Belzec this loathsome man was to cram all his previous killing experience into one physical space. There was no precedent for the existence of these camps in the Nazi state - arguably no precedent for them in the whole of history. Something entirely different was born in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka during 1942. Only once people started to be murdered en masse at Auschwitz did the schizophrenic nature of its function begin to emerge - a state of mind that led the Nazis to blow up the gas chambers when they left, but to leave the rest of the massive complex largely intact. In contrast, no attempt was ever made by the Nazis, even in the last days of the camp's existence, to eliminate Auschwitz as a physical place, since it was born of an established pre-war model within the Nazi system - the concentration camp. Long before the end of the war the Nazis had destroyed the camps, and the land was left to return to forest or ploughed back into farmland. That these camps are not mentioned today in the same breath as Auschwitz is something of a black irony, because the Nazis themselves wanted their names erased from history and sought to ensure that every physical trace of them was removed once they had completed their murderous task. Instead, he relied on other places that, unlike Auschwitz, have scarcely seeped into the popular consciousness - Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Once again, contrary to popular belief, it was not to Auschwitz that Heinrich Himmler of the SS turned in 1942 when, in pursuit of the Nazis' "Final Solution", he ordered his men to murder several million Polish Jews (half of the six million Jews the Nazis killed in the Holocaust were Poles). Now they looked to the Nazis to make Germany "secure" and "law abiding" once again and the concentration camps were a key part, as they saw it, of achieving that aim. Before the Nazis came to power they'd lived through the Depression and watched as the country appeared to be splitting to the extremes and the Communists gained votes. I've filmed interviews with a number of solid German citizens - not all committed Nazis - who surprisingly believed at the time that the pre-war concentration camps were "necessary". And, contrary to popular belief, the concentration camps were not built primarily to hold Jews, but chiefly the Nazis' political opponents. A minority of people sent there were murdered - tortured, executed or killed while supposedly trying to "escape" - but the majority were released after a stay of about a year or 18 months. And these pre-war concentration camps, though places of enormous brutality, were not extermination centres. Indeed, a camp such as Dachau was built in the suburbs of an existing town there were propaganda advantages for the Nazis in making obvious their desire to imprison and "re-educate" those whom they considered malcontents. Unlike the later death camps, the Nazis never made any attempt to hide the concentration camps from the general population. The distinction between the two types of camps is crucial.
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