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Belzec was originally no extermination-camp, but a forced labour facility for Jews living in the Lublin district and the surrounding towns. The work consisted in making fortifications, bunkers, and anti-tank ditches along the river Bug to mark the border between German- and Soviet-occupied Poland. In the middle of August 1940 it had since end of may arrived so many Jews that the camp was housing 11 000 prisoners. This despite the fact that several of thousand died of hunger, overwork, starvation and executions. In the middle of March 1942 was the decision made; Belzec was to be transformed in to an extermination- camp under the management of the chief of police in Lublin; Odilo Globocnic. It was this man who also established the extermination-camps Majdanek and Sobibor. Belzec was the first camp built as a part of Aktion Reinhard. The campwas, as Chelmo, divided into to parts: one for the reception of the prisoners (in this part also the guards and the managementŐs quarters was situated), and one part for extermination (it was here the gas chambers and the crematorium was). The Jews came at first from Poland, but later also from Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The first months the prisoners was killed with fumes from diesel engines, but then, in August 1942, there was experimented with a new gas: Zyklon B. This gas proved to highly effective, and was used in other extermination-camps to. The corpses was cleaned of all their values and buried in mass-graves. In 1942 all gassing of prisoners stopped and early the next year were all corpses exhumed and cremated. Then the camp shot down. One means that over 600 000 prisoners was killed in Belzec, including 2 000 non-Jews.
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