On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, igniting the Second World War. After the Polish army was defeated, the Germans imposed a brutal occupation regime. In the weeks and months that followed, German SS, police, and army units targeted thousands of Polish civilians, while millions of others faced persecution, forced labor, deportation, and death. By 1942, Nazi Germany had begun implementing a plan code-named Operation Reinhard, which aimed at the systematic elimination of the Jewish population of the General Government, the German-administered zone in occupied Poland.
Three killing centers formed the heart of the operation: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Jews from across occupied Poland were deported to these camps, where very few survived. At Belzec, the operation reached its peak intensity in the second half of 1942. Within just a few months, hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children lost their lives.
The man commanding the camp during that period personally issued the orders that determined the fate of prisoners, terrorized inmates and guards alike, and oversaw one of the darkest chapters of Holocaust history. His name was Gottlieb Hering. Hering was born on June 2, 1887, in the village of Wambrunn, near Stuttgart, then part of the German Empire. Between 1907 and 1909 he completed his compulsory military service before voluntarily remaining in the army for three more years.
After leaving active military duty, he joined the police and served as a uniformed officer in the city of Heilbronn. In 1914 he married, and the marriage produced one child. World War I began in July 1914, and the following year Hering was recalled to the German army. He was sent to the Western Front, where he served until the conflict ended in November 1918.
In recognition of his courage in combat, he received several military decorations, including the Iron Cross First Class. During the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic that followed the fall of the German Empire in 1918, Hering sympathized with the Social Democratic Party and continued his career in the criminal police. He became an active opponent of the growing Nazi movement and took part in police operations directed against members of the Nazi Party and its paramilitary organizations, the SA and the SS. His hostility toward the movement became so well known that he earned the nickname Nazifresser, meaning Nazi-eater.
That reputation placed Hering in a dangerous position after Adolf Hitler assumed power in January 1933. Local Nazis demanded his dismissal from the police, and his past activities against the movement were investigated. Reports indicate that his career was saved by the intervention of an old colleague, Christian Wirth, a man whose path would cross Hering’s again under far darker circumstances. Hering’s political stance changed dramatically shortly afterward.
In May 1933, just months after Hitler’s rise to power, he joined the Nazi Party. The policeman once known as the Nazi-eater was now a member of the movement he had previously fought. World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. In December of that year, Hering and other senior police officials were sent to the Baltic port city of Gdynia in German-occupied Poland.
Their mission was to assist in resettling ethnic Germans from the Soviet sphere of influence into Polish territories recently annexed by Nazi Germany. In late 1940, Hering was transferred to the Nazi euthanasia program Aktion T4, which systematically killed people with mental and physical disabilities. He initially served at the killing centers in 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.
At the Aktion T4 killing centers, 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 program developed a system of organized mass killing that included victim transport, gas chambers, cremation facilities, forged documents, and systematic deception. In the summer of 1942, Hering was transferred to the Belzec extermination camp in German-occupied Poland, and on August 1 he replaced Christian Wirth as camp commandant after Wirth was appointed inspector of the Operation Reinhard extermination camps.
Hering assumed command at a time when the mass killing of Jews at Belzec was entering its most intense phase. Between July and October 1942, deportation transports arrived at an unprecedented pace. Jews were brought to Belzec from ghettos and communities throughout the General Government. Conditions inside the overcrowded railway cars were so terrible that many victims died of suffocation, dehydration, and exhaustion before even reaching the camp.
Those who survived the journey were forced from the trains and driven toward the gas chambers. Hering ordered that victims too weak or too sick to walk be taken to a separate execution site in the second section of the camp, where they were killed with a shot to the back of the head. Under Hering’s command, the killing continued on an enormous scale. During his tenure, at least 320,000 Jews were murdered at Belzec.
He quickly became notorious not only for overseeing mass murder but also for his exceptional brutality toward prisoners, guards, and even his own German staff. After the war, one of the few Belzec survivors, Rudolf Reder, recalled a particularly disturbing incident involving Hering. During one killing operation, the engine used to produce the gas stopped working while victims were already trapped inside the gas chambers. Instead of allowing them to leave, Hering ordered that the doors remain closed while the engine was repaired.
The men, women, and children inside were left waiting helplessly as efforts were made to fix the machinery. There was no escape and no hope of survival. Once the engine was back in operation, the process resumed, sealing the fate of everyone still inside. Another witness, the Polish railway worker Tadeusz Misiewicz, described a form of public torture that Hering allegedly used for his own amusement.
According to his testimony, Hering tied a Jewish prisoner to his vehicle with a rope and forced the victim to run behind it through the town of Belzec. At the same time, Hering set a dog on the prisoner, which attacked and bit him while local residents watched. Hering also ruled his own men through intimidation and violence. German staff members who angered him were locked in the camp cellar, and he was known to strike his subordinates across the face with a riding whip.
His treatment of Ukrainian guards was even harsher. During his command, several guards accused of attempted mutiny, desertion, or other disciplinary offenses were executed. In one such incident, Hering personally shot two Ukrainian guards. According to one account, the two men had expressed opposition to what was happening inside the camp, while another account held that they had been caught stealing valuables confiscated from Jewish victims.
The Nazi regime considered such property to belong to the Third Reich, and unauthorized theft by camp personnel was treated as a serious crime. Before killing them, Hering ordered the two guards to wear jackets stitched with Stars of David. They were then executed in front of their fellow guards. By mid-December 1942, Belzec had fulfilled its primary purpose and stopped receiving transports of Jewish victims.
Extermination gave way to a new operation aimed at erasing all evidence of what had happened there. Unlike Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec had no crematorium equipped with furnaces. Under Hering’s supervision, Jewish prisoners were forced to reopen the mass graves in which hundreds of thousands of victims had been buried. Under heavy guard, the prisoners exhumed bodies often in advanced stages of decomposition and carried them to massive pyres built from railway rails and concrete supports.
There, the remains were burned day and night in an attempt to wipe out every trace of the genocide. More than 400,000 corpses were burned on three or four enormous pyres that operated almost continuously between November 1942 and March 1943. Hering personally supervised this process, ensuring that every possible trace of the camp’s victims disappeared. Once the burning was complete, the remaining buildings were dismantled and the mass graves leveled, with the site camouflaged to appear as though the extermination camp had never existed.
In March 1943, at the urging of SS leader Odilo Globocnik, Hering, who was not a member of the SS, was commissioned directly with the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer, equivalent to captain in the US Army. Before leaving Belzec, Hering reportedly promised the remaining 300 Jewish prisoners 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 finished. Instead, in June 1943 they were taken to the Sobibor extermination camp, where they were all shot shortly after arrival. After Belzec was closed, Hering became commandant of the Poniatowa labor camp, which was later incorporated into the Majdanek concentration camp system as a subcamp.
Once again, he quickly gained a reputation for extreme cruelty. Prisoners later recalled that he sentenced Jews to death for the slightest reasons and personally participated in the killings. One survivor, Estera Rubinstein, remembered that Hering frequently rode through the camp on horseback accompanied by a 14-year-old Jewish boy riding a donkey. During these rides, he was said to amuse himself by randomly shooting at prisoners or trampling them with his horse.
He was also allegedly responsible for the death sentence imposed on an SS medic named Backhaus, who had engaged in forbidden sexual relations with a Jewish prisoner. In November 1943, Poniatowa was liquidated as part of Operation Harvest Festival, the largest single massacre of Jews carried out by the Germans during the Holocaust. Over two days, approximately 42,000 Jewish prisoners were killed throughout the Lublin region, including thousands at Poniatowa. The victims were forced to undress before being led to prepared trenches and shot.
After the massacre, Hering supervised the burning of the victims’ bodies. With the end of 1943, following Operation Reinhard, Hering was transferred to the area around 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 resistance fighters were killed. World War II in Europe ended on May 8, 1945.
With the collapse of the Third Reich, Hering retreated into Germany. After the war, he reportedly returned to Heilbronn, where his police career had begun over three decades earlier, and briefly headed the local criminal police. On October 9, 1945, he died after falling ill under mysterious circumstances at an emergency hospital in Ramstal, near Stuttgart.
He was 58 years old.