Six death camps, Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, were established for the systematic mass murder of Jews as part of the Final Solution, first in gas vans and then in gas chambers.
Chełmno was the first extermination center established by the Germans in occupied Poland. It operated from December 8, 1941, to January 1945. Jews from the Łódź ghetto and the surrounding area were sent to Chełmno, where they were killed in “shower trucks.”
The extermination procedure was as follows: upon arrival at the camp, prisoners were ordered to undress, their belongings were taken away, and they were pushed into a truck with an exhaust pipe leading into a closed van. As soon as the doors closed, the truck started moving and headed for the intended burial site in a nearby forest. With the help of just three “shower trucks,” 300,000 Jews and 5,000 Gypsies were exterminated in Chełmno. Only three Jews managed to escape from the Chełmno death camp.
In March 1942, the Germans opened three extermination camps on the eastern border of the General Government, near the main railway lines. The Belzec extermination camp operated from March to December 1942; in the spring of 1943, they began burning corpses from the graves to hide the traces of the killings. Sobibor operated from May to July 1942 and from October 1942 to October 1943. Treblinka operated from July 1942 to August 1943.
All three death camps used the same method of extermination: carbon monoxide from large diesel engines was fed into hermetically sealed chambers. The victims, naked and crammed into the chambers, died quickly. The bodies were then thrown into huge pits and burned. These three camps were “death factories” in the most literal sense: the entire process, from the arrival of the prisoners to their extermination, took only a few hours, and the site was ready for the next transport with new victims, who were disposed of just as quickly.
The purpose of the death camps was to exterminate all the Jews of Central Europe as part of the “Final Solution” program. The camps were equipped with stationary gas chambers. As a rule, no selection was made at these three camps. Upon arrival, everyone—men, women, and children—was sent straight to their deaths. A total of 1,700,000 Jews, mainly from Poland, were killed in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
Majdanek was established at the end of 1941 as a camp for Soviet prisoners of war, and later also held Poles who opposed the Nazi regime. In the fall of 1942, gas chambers and crematoria were built here, and by the spring of 1942, thousands of Jews brought from Slovakia, Bohemia, Moravia, Germany, and Poland had been exterminated there. About 78,000 people were killed in Majdanek.
Of those deported to the three death camps still operating in 1944—Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Chełmno—only a few were left alive. They performed tasks related to the extermination process: sorting and packing the clothes and hair of those killed, removing bodies from the gas chambers, burying the dead, and burning corpses. These Jews were part of the so-called Sonderkommando. They worked in brutal conditions of terror and violence, and many of them were also killed after a short period of time and replaced by others.
All the rest—women, men, children, the elderly, and the already weakened camp prisoners—were sent to the gas chambers. Deportations and mass extermination continued until the end of 1944, when, on Himmler’s orders, the killings in the gas chambers were stopped. Camp prisoners continued to die from abuse, starvation, and disease.
