His Own Men Feared Him: The Fall of Nazi Commandant of Belzec JJ

1 September 1939. Nazi Germany invades Poland, triggering the   Second World War. After defeating the Polish  army, the Germans establish an oppressive   occupation regime. In the weeks and months  that follow, German SS, police, and military   units target thousands of Polish civilians,  while millions of others face persecution,   forced labour, deportation, and death.

By 1942, Nazi Germany begins implementing   a plan codenamed Operation Reinhard, aimed  at systematically eliminating the Jewish   population of the General Government, the  German-administered territory of occupied   Poland. Three killing centres become the  core of the operation: Bełżec, Sobibór, and   Treblinka. Jews from across occupied Poland are  deported to these camps, where very few survive.

At Bełżec, the operation reaches its greatest  intensity during the second half of 1942.   In only a few months, hundreds of thousands  of men, women, and children lose their lives.   The man who commands the camp during this period  personally gives orders that determine the fate   of prisoners, terrorizes prisoners and guards  alike, and oversees one of the darkest periods   in the history of the Holocaust. His name is Gottlieb Hering.

Gottlieb Hering was born on 2 June 1887 in the  village of Warmbronn near the city of Stuttgart,   then part of the German Empire. Between 1907  and 1909, he completed his compulsory military   service before voluntarily remaining in the army  for another 3 years. After leaving active military   service, he joined the police and served as  a uniformed officer in the city of Heilbronn.

In 1914, Hering married, and the marriage produced  one child. The First World War began in July 1914,   and the following year, he was called into the  German Army. Hering was sent to the Western Front,   where he served until the end of the conflict  in November 1918. For his bravery in combat,   he was awarded several military decorations,  including the Iron Cross First Class.

During the turbulent years of the Weimar  Republic, which emerged after the fall of   the German Empire in 1918, Hering sympathized  with the Social Democratic Party of Germany   and continued his career in the criminal  police. He became an active opponent of the   growing Nazi movement and took part in police  actions directed against members of the Nazi   Party and its paramilitary organizations, the  SA and SS.

His hostility towards the movement   became so well known that he acquired the  nickname Nazifresser, meaning “Nazi eater.”  This reputation placed Gottlieb Hering in  a dangerous position after Adolf Hitler   came to power in January 1933. The local Nazis  demanded Hering’s dismissal from the police,   and his previous activities against the  movement were investigated.

His career was   reportedly saved through the intervention  of his longtime colleague Christian Wirth,   a man whose path would later cross Hering’s  again under far darker circumstances.  Hering’s political position soon  changed dramatically. In May 1933,   only months after Hitler’s rise to power,  he joined the Nazi Party.

The policeman   once known as the “Nazi eater” had now become a  member of the movement he had previously fought. The Second World War began on 1 September  1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.  In December of that year, Hering and  the other senior police officials were   sent to the port city of Gdynia on the  Baltic coast in German-occupied Poland.

Their task was to assist with the  resettlement of Baltic ethnic Germans   from the Soviet sphere of influence to Polish  territories recently annexed by Nazi Germany.  In late 1940, Hering was transferred to  the Nazi euthanasia program Aktion T4,   which systematically murdered people with mental  and physical disabilities.

He initially served   at the killing centres of Bernburg and Hadamar  before being transferred to Sonnenstein near   the German town of Pirna. There, Hering eventually  became head of the special registry office, which   helped conceal the killings through falsified  official records and fictitious causes of death. This is where the work of our historians,   researchers and editors  becomes the story you hear.

I’m Marchand Steenkamp, the voice behind  World History since 2022. In an era of   automated content, we wanted to show you the real  people who bring these documentaries to life. If you value human-made documentaries that tell  history accurately and respectfully, please like,   subscribe, and share your thoughts below.

Now, let’s continue with today’s story. At the Aktion T4 killing centres,  victims were murdered in gas   chambers using carbon monoxide.  Their bodies were then cremated,   while their families were deliberately deceived  about the true circumstances of their deaths.   The programme developed a system of organized mass  murder involving the transportation of victims,   gas chambers, cremation facilities, falsified  documentation, and systematic deception.

In the summer of 1942, Hering was transferred to  the Bełżec extermination camp in German-occupied   Poland and on 1 August, he replaced  Christian Wirth as commandant of the   camp after Wirth was appointed inspector of  the Operation Reinhard extermination camps.  Hering assumed command at a time when the mass  murder of Jews at Bełżec was entering its most   intensive phase.

Between July and October 1942,  deportation transports arrived at an unprecedented   rate. Jews were brought to Bełżec from ghettos  and communities across the General Government.   The conditions inside the overcrowded railway  wagons were so appalling that many victims   died from suffocation, dehydration, and  exhaustion before reaching the camp.  Those who survived the journey were forced from  the trains and driven toward the gas chambers.

Hering ordered that victims who were too weak or  ill to walk there should be taken to a separate   execution site in Camp Section II, where they  were killed with a shot to the back of the neck.  Under Hering’s command, the killing process  continued on an enormous scale. During his tenure,   at least 320,000 Jews were murdered  at Bełżec.

Hering soon became known   not only for overseeing the mass killing  operation but also for his extraordinary   brutality toward prisoners, guards, and  even members of his own German staff. After the war, one of the few survivors of Bełżec,  Rudolf Reder, recalled one particularly disturbing   incident involving Hering.

During a killing  operation, the engine used to produce the gas   stopped working while victims were already trapped  inside the gas chambers. Rather than allowing them   to leave, Hering ordered that the doors remain  locked while the engine was repaired. The men,   women, and children were left inside, waiting  helplessly as attempts were made to restore   the machinery. There would be no escape and no  reprieve.

Once the engine was functioning again,   the process resumed, sealing the  fate of everyone still inside. Another witness, Polish railway worker  Tadeusz Misiewicz, described a form of   public torment that Hering reportedly used for  his own amusement. According to his testimony,   Hering had a Jewish prisoner tied by a rope to  his vehicle and forced the victim to run behind   it through the town of Bełżec.

At the same time,  Hering set a dog on the prisoner, which attacked   and bit him as local residents watched. Hering also ruled his own personnel through   intimidation and violence. German staff  members who angered him could be confined   in the camp bunker, and he was known to strike  subordinates across the face with a riding crop.   His treatment of the Ukrainian guards was even  more severe.

During his command, several guards   accused of attempted mutiny, desertion, or  other disciplinary offences were executed.  In one such incident, Hering personally shot  2 Ukrainian guards. According to one account,   the men had expressed opposition to what was  taking place inside the camp, while another   version stated that they had been caught stealing  valuables confiscated from Jewish victims.

Such possessions were regarded by the Nazi  regime as property of the Third Reich,   and unauthorized theft by camp personnel  was treated as a serious offence. Before   killing them, Hering ordered the 2 guards to  be dressed in jackets bearing sewn-on Stars   of David. They were then executed  in front of their fellow guards.

By the middle of December 1942, Bełżec  had fulfilled its primary purpose,   and the camp stopped receiving transports of  Jewish victims. The extermination process gave   way to a new operation aimed at eliminating  the evidence of what had taken place there.   Unlike Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec had  no crematorium equipped with furnaces.

Under Hering’s supervision, Jewish  prisoners were forced to reopen the   enormous mass graves in which hundreds  of thousands of victims had been buried.  Working under constant guard, the prisoners  exhumed bodies that were often in an advanced   state of decomposition and carried them to  enormous pyres built from railway tracks   and concrete supports.

There, the remains  were burned day and night in an attempt to   erase all traces of the genocide. More than  400,000 corpses were cremated on 3 or 4 massive   pyres that operated almost continuously  between November 1942 and March 1943.  Hering personally supervised this operation,  ensuring that every possible trace of the camp’s   victims disappeared.

Once the cremations had  been completed, the remaining buildings were   dismantled, the mass graves were levelled, and  the site was disguised to make it appear as   though the extermination camp had never existed. In March 1943, at the urging of SS-Gruppenführer   Odilo Globocnik, Hering, who had never  been a member of the SS, was appointed   directly to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer,  equivalent to captain in the U.S. Army.

Before leaving Bełżec, Hering reportedly promised  the approximately 300 remaining Jewish prisoners,   who had been forced to exhume and burn the  victims’ bodies, that they would be transferred to   the city of Lublin and given food once their work  was complete. Instead, in June 1943, they were   transported to the Sobibór extermination camp,  where all of them were shot shortly after arrival.

After the closure of Bełżec, Hering became  commandant of the Poniatowa labour camp, which was   later incorporated into the Majdanek concentration  camp system as a subcamp. Once again, he quickly   earned a reputation for extreme cruelty.  Prisoners later recalled that he frequently   condemned Jews to death on the slightest  pretext and personally took part in killings.

One survivor, Estera Rubinsztejn, remembered  that Hering often rode through the camp on   horseback accompanied by a 14-year-old Jewish  boy riding a donkey. During these rides,   he reportedly amused himself by randomly shooting  prisoners or trampling them beneath his horse.   He was also allegedly responsible for the death  sentence imposed on an SS medic named Backhaus,   who had engaged in prohibited sexual  relations with a Jewish female prisoner.

In November 1943, Poniatowa was liquidated as  part of Operation Erntefest, meaning “Harvest   Festival,” the largest German-perpetrated  massacre of Jews during the Holocaust.   Over the course of 2 days, around 42,000 Jewish  prisoners were killed across the Lublin District,   including thousands at Poniatowa.

The victims were  forced to undress before being taken to prepared   trenches and shot. After the massacre, Hering  supervised the burning of the victims’ bodies. Towards the end of 1943, after Operation  Reinhard, Hering was transferred to the   region around the city of Trieste  in German-occupied northern Italy,   where he again served under Christian Wirth.

He became commandant of the Risiera di San   Sabba concentration camp, where up to 5,000  Jewish prisoners and partisans were murdered. The Second World War in  Europe ended on 8 May 1945. As the Third Reich collapsed, Hering  retreated to Germany. After the war,   he reportedly returned to Heilbronn, where he  had begun his police career more than three   decades earlier, and briefly headed the  local criminal police.

On 9 October 1945,   he died following an illness under unexplained  circumstances at an emergency hospital in   Stetten im Remstal, near the German  city of Stuttgart. He was 58 years old. Thanks for watching the World History  Channel. Be sure to like and subscribe   and click the bell notification  icon so you don’t miss our next   episodes. We thank you and we’ll  see you next time on the channel.