Belzec Extermination Camp - Closure and Dismantlement

Closure and Dismantlement

A last train with 300 Jewish prisoners, told to depart for Germany but instead sent to Sobibor for gassing, departed in late June 1943 as the closing act of the camp. As part of the Nazi plan called Sonderaktion 1005, bodies were exhumed and then cremated and bone fragments pulverized. The German and Ukrainian personnel then dismantled the camp and reforested the site with firs and wild lupines. Any equipment that could be reused was taken to the concentration camp Majdanek. Wirth's house and the neighboring SS building, which had been the property of the Polish Railway before the war, were not demolished.

When the staff left, the local population from the surrounding villages started large-scale excavations on the camp site, searching for gold and valuables. These diggings were so extensive that the area was covered by human remains of all kind, and the Nazis' efforts to disguise the site were thwarted. In response, SS personnel were again ordered to the camp site to turn it into a farm, with one Ukrainian SS guard assigned to reside there permanently with his family. This model for guarding and disguising former camp sites was later adopted in Treblinka and Sobibor.