The Reconstruction of Belzec

Of the tragedies that played out at the three Action Reinhard camps, Belzec is the most mute. There are only two known survivors of Belzec to describe what they saw and experienced. One of the men, R. Reder, wrote a book published in Crakow in 1946. the second, named Chaim Herszman, was a witness before a Polish commission set up to investigate German war crimes. Herszmen had escaped from a train transporting him and last Jewish workers to Sobibor for execution Thet were being carried from from Belzec after the demolition of that camp. Hirszman lived to see the end of Nazism and had completed part of his deposition beore the Polish commission when it adjourned. He was to return the next day to complete his testimony. He never made it; he was murdered by Polish anti-Semites. Other first hand testimony exists from Polish and German Sources. The former were very restricted in the time and place they had to observe. The latter suffer from the obvious interest they had had in limiting their culpability.

Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard

From the earliest days of their movement, Holocaust deniers have largely centred their arguments on the Auschwitz death camp. Surveying the literature which makes up so-called Holocaust Revisionism,  the obsession with Auschwitz is undoubtedly one of its defining features. Since the early 1990s, with the advent of the modern world-wide web, Holocaust deniers have taken to the internet to try and argue their case. Until recently, the ensuing online debates between advocates of Holocaust denial and their critics have likewise focused on Auschwitz.


Our friends at the Holocaust Controversies Blog have written an article that focuses on the Operation Reinhard camps, Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, and the attempts to deny the reality of the murder at those camps by Holocaust deniers, Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf, and Thomas Kues. They dedicated this work to the memory of Harry W. Mazal OBE.


The work is entitled, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard: A Critique of the Falsehoods of, Mattogno, Graf, and Kues. 

January 2009

January 25, 2009. Added the essay August Hirt: Deadly Collector of the Victims of the Holocaust, by Anne S. Reamey

January 17, 2009. Verdicts in several key trials in Germany in the 1950s and 1960s that contain numerous references to the Final Solution. The documents are in German and are:

• The verdict in the "Auschwitz Trial" in Frankfurt am Main of August 19-20, 1965.
• The verdict in the Belzec Trial in Munich of January 21, 1965
• The verdict in the Sobibor Trial in Berlin of May 8, 1950
• The verdict in the Sobibor Trial in Frankfurt am Main of August 25, 1950
• The verdict in the Treblinka Trial in Düsseldorf of September 3, 1965
• The verdict in the Einsatzgruppen Trial in Ulm of August 29, 1958
• The verdict in the Einsatzgruppen Trial in Munich of July 21, 1961

January 10, 2009. Updated the Klarsfeld section on the Main Page

February 2008

February 25, 2008. Added Crematorium capacity to Quick Facts on the Holocaust page

February 12, 2008. Added The Reconstruction of Belzec , an aerial photographic reconstruction of the Belzec Death Camp by Alex Bay.

January 2004

January 14, 2004. Added new section on the extermination camps of Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor.


January 3, 2004. Updated questions and answers.