The Bełżec Remembrance Project: S.S. Men

Belzec, one of the most deadly of the concentration camps, was set up to enact Hitler's "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Problem".

Below is a list of the S.S. men (Lista SS-Sonderkommando Belzec) at the Belzec Death Camp. Additional information about them can be found here. Those who died prior to 1950 have a notation after their name with their cause of death. Those without any comment below survived without receiving any significant punishment for their crimes.

Those followed by a double asterisk (**) are still missing today.

Please contact us if you have any added information.

Editor's Note: After reading about these S.S. men, it is important to point out the worst of the below group according to eyewitness
testimony. As there is only one survivor who himself wrote his testimony, the eyewitness testimony is very limited. All of these men were very bad and most were sadists. A few went above and beyond in brutality, cruelty, inhumanity, and sadism. They were: Christian Wirth, Gottfried Schwarz, Josef Oberhauser, Lorenz Hackenholt, Reinhold Feiks (listed incorrectly in Rudolf Reder's testimony as "Felix Reinold"), Rudolf Gockel, Paul Groth, Fritz Jirmann (Irrman), Hans Schmidt from Latvia, and Gustav Wagner. Feiks (Feix) was transferred to the Budzyn Labor Camp. Groth and Wagner mostly worked at Sobibor camp. According to Rudolf Reder, Schmidt the Latvian "derived great satisfaction from murdering innocent people". Lorenz Hackenholt was a brute who had no friends, even among the Germans. He was responsible for the gas chamber construction and operations and thus responsible for 500,000+ Jewish deaths at Belzec. Rudolf Gockel, a fat old German, oversaw the train station at Belzec and was therefore responsible for the half a million souls who exited those trains. After exiting the trains, prisoners heard a speech delivered by Fritz Irrman. His job was to convince them, like Hermann Michel at Sobibor, that they would be taking a shower to keep the "labor camp" clean. The shower was actually the gas chambers. The speech was delivered over and over again, each time to murder a new group of thousands. Irman, Schmidt, and Schwartz were responsible for beating the vice-chairman of the Judenrat in Zamosc, Azriel Szeps, to death. The beating went on for hours. Per testimony, "The SS laughed and mocked him; 'Behold this is an important man, a prince among the Jews'," they sneered. "They pushed the victim against a wall and whipped him all over his body, especially his head/face."