In November 1941 work was started on the first extermination camp of the »Operation Reinhard,« near the Polish village of Belzec on the southeastern border of Lublin district. The camp was 265 m long and 275 m wide and consisted of three zones: administrative zone, reception zone, and extermination zone, like Treblinka and Sobibor, the two other extermination centres.

Police Captain Christian Wirth who had already gained relevant experience with the »T4«-program, became the first commander of the large camp. A large proportion of the staff came from the personnel of the euthanasia program, supported by 60 to 80 Ucrainians, so-called »trawnikis« or auxiliaries. Between March 1942 and the following turn of the year (1942/43) altogether 600,000 people were murdered in two phases, after the murder capacity had been increased in June 1942 by installing new and bigger gas chambers. The victims who came mainly from the southeast of the »General Gouvernement,« but also from the Reich and the »Protectorate,« were divided according to sex after their arrival at the railway ramp. They had then to undress, the women had their heads shorn, and then the victims were driven through the »pipe,« a narrow, fenced-in corridor, into the gas chambers. There they were suffocated with motor exhaust fumes. The corpses were at first buried in mass graves, but from the end of 1942 burnt on piles of wood. In the spring of 1943 the camp was liquidated and all traces of it covered. On its site a farmhouse was built.

The number of people coming from Austria who met their death in Belzec cannot be established at the present state of research. Extermination transports ran from Izbica ghetto, to which 4000 Austrian Jews had been deported in 1942, from Modliborzyce, where 999 people had been sent from Austria in March 1941, and from Opole ghetto, which had taken in 2003 persons from Austria in 1941. Thus we must assume that several thousand Austrians became victims of Belzec.