When Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, it ignited the Second World War and imposed a brutal occupation regime. In the weeks and months that followed, German special units, police, and military forces targeted thousands of Polish civilians, while millions more faced persecution, forced labor, deportation, and death.
By 1942, the Nazi regime had begun implementing a plan codenamed Operation Reinhard, aimed at the systematic elimination of the Jewish population of the General Government, the German-administered zone of occupied Poland. Three killing centers formed the core of the operation: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
Jews were deported to these camps from across occupied Poland, and very few survived. At Belzec, the operation reached its most intense phase during 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 both inmates and guards, and oversaw one of the darkest chapters in Holocaust history. His name was Gottlieb Hering.
Gottlieb Hering was born on June 2, 1887, in the village of Warmbronn, near Stuttgart, then part of the German Empire. Between 1907 and 1909 he completed his mandatory military service, then remained voluntarily in the army for three more 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 up to 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 received 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 German 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 measures directed against Nazi Party members 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 Gottlieb Hering in a dangerous position after Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933.
Local Nazis demanded Hering's dismissal from the police, and his earlier activities against the movement were investigated. Reports indicate that his career was saved through the intervention of his old colleague Christian Wirth, a man whose path would cross Hering's again later under far darker circumstances.
Hering's political position changed radically soon afterward. In May 1933, only 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.
The Second World War 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 coastal city of Gdynia in German-occupied Poland. Their task was to help resettle ethnic Germans from the Soviet sphere of influence into Polish territory recently annexed by Nazi Germany.
In late 1940, Hering was transferred to the Nazi euthanasia program known as Action 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. In the T4 killing centers, victims were killed in gas chambers using carbon monoxide, and 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 the transport of victims, 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 commander after Wirth was appointed inspector of the Operation Reinhard extermination camps.
Hering took 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 rate. Jews were brought to Belzec from ghettos and communities across the General Government.
Conditions inside the overcrowded railway cars were so horrific that many victims died of suffocation, dehydration, and exhaustion before reaching the camp. Those who survived the journey were forced off the trains and driven toward the gas chambers.
Hering ordered that victims too weak or too ill to walk be taken to a separate execution site in the camp's second section, where they were killed by a gunshot to the back of the head. Under Hering's command, the killing continued on a massive scale. During his tenure, at least 320,000 Jews were killed at Belzec.
Hering soon became known not only for overseeing mass murder but also for his exceptional brutality toward prisoners, guards, and even members of 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 the victims were already confined 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 attempts were made to fix the machinery. There was no escape and no hope of survival. Once the engine was running again, the operation resumed, sealing the fate of everyone still inside.
Another witness, the Polish railway worker Tadeusz Misiewicz, described a form of public torture that Hering was said to have used for his own amusement. According to his testimony, Hering tied a Jewish prisoner by rope to his vehicle 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 subordinates in the face with a riding whip. His treatment of the Ukrainian guards was even harsher.
During his command, numerous guards accused of attempted mutiny, escape, or other disciplinary offenses were executed. In one such incident, Hering personally shot two Ukrainian guards. According to one account, the two men had voiced opposition to what was happening inside the camp, while another account stated they were caught stealing valuable items seized from Jewish victims.
The Nazi regime considered such property the possession of the Third Reich, and unauthorized theft by camp personnel was viewed as a serious crime. Before killing them, Hering ordered the two guards to wear jackets with Stars of David sewn onto them. They were then executed in front of their fellow guards.
By mid-December 1942, the Belzec camp had fulfilled its main purpose and stopped receiving transports of Jewish victims. The extermination operation gave way to a new effort aimed at erasing the 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 vast mass graves in which hundreds of thousands of victims had been buried. Under heavy guard, the prisoners exhumed bodies that were often in an advanced state of decomposition and carried them to huge pyres built from railway rails and concrete supports.
There, the remains were burned day and night in an attempt to obliterate all traces of the genocide. More than 400,000 bodies were burned on three or four massive pyres that operated almost continuously between November 1942 and March 1943. Hering personally supervised this process to ensure that every possible trace of the camp's victims disappeared.
Once the burning operations were complete, the remaining buildings were dismantled, the mass graves were leveled, and the site was camouflaged so that the extermination camp appeared never to have existed. In March 1943, at the urging of SS commander Odilo Globocnik, Hering, who had not been a member of the SS, was commissioned directly with the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer, equivalent to a captain in the United States Army.
Before leaving Belzec, Hering was said to have promised the 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 finished. Instead, in June 1943 they were sent to the Sobibor extermination camp, where they were all shot shortly after arriving.
After Belzec was closed, Hering became commander 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 took part in killings. One survivor, Estera Rubinstein, recalled that Hering often rode through the camp on horseback accompanied by a 14-year-old Jewish boy riding a donkey. During these rounds, he was said to amuse himself by shooting randomly 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 a forbidden sexual relationship with a Jewish prisoner. In November 1943, Poniatowa was liquidated as part of Operation Harvest Festival, the largest massacre of Jews by the Germans during the Holocaust.
Over two days, approximately 42,000 Jewish prisoners were killed across the Lublin region, including thousands at Poniatowa. Victims were forced to undress before being led to prepared trenches and shot. After the massacre, Hering supervised the burning of the victims' bodies.
Toward the end of 1943, after Operation Reinhard, Hering was transferred to the area around the city of Trieste in northern Italy under German occupation, where he again served under Christian Wirth. He became commander of the Risiera di San Sabba detention camp, where as many as 5,000 Jewish and resistance prisoners were killed.
The Second World War in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. With the collapse of the Third Reich, Hering retreated to Germany. After the war, he was reported to have returned to Heilbronn, where he had begun his police career more than three decades earlier, and briefly headed the local criminal police.
On October 9, 1945, he died after falling ill under unclear circumstances at an emergency hospital in Ramstal, near the German city of Stuttgart. He was 58 years old.