His Own Men Feared Him: Nazi Commandant of Belzec
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This documentary examines the life and career of Gottlieb Hering, the German police officer who became commandant of the Belzec extermination camp during one of the most destructive phases of Operation Reinhard. His story is marked by an extraordinary political transformation. During the Weimar Republic, Hering had opposed the Nazi movement so actively that he became known as the “Nazi eater”. Yet within months of Adolf Hitler coming to power, he joined the Nazi Party and later became deeply involved in the regime’s system of persecution and mass murder. The film traces Hering’s path from the German police to Aktion T4, where he worked within a programme that concealed the deaths of people with mental and physical disabilities through false documentation. In August 1942, he succeeded Christian Wirth as commandant of Belzec in German-occupied Poland. During Hering’s tenure, at least 320,000 Jews lost their lives at the camp. Survivor testimony describes a commandant who exercised author
Tags: World History, Christian Wirth, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Operation Reinhard, Holocaust, Aktion T4, Nazi euthanasia program, World War 2, Gottlieb Hering, First World War, WW1, Hitler, Adolf Hitler, Nazi party, Nazi Germany, Third Reich, German-occupied Poland, Bełżec
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