The camp 's first commandant , Christian Wirth , lived very close to the camp in a house which also served as a kitchen for the SS as well as an armoury . He later moved to the Lublin airfield site , to oversee Operation Reinhard till the end . After the German takeover of Italy in 1943 , he was transferred by Globocnik to serve along with him in his hometown of Trieste . They set up the San Sabba concentration and transit camp there , killing up to 5,000 prisoners and sending 69 Holocaust trains to Auschwitz . Wirth received the Iron Cross in April 1944 . The following month he was killed by partisans whilst traveling in an open-top car in what is today western Slovenia . After the camp 's closure , his successor there '' SS-Hauptsturmführer '' Gottlieb Hering was transferred to Poniatowa concentration camp temporarily until the massacres of the '' Aktion Erntefest '' , and later followed Wirth and Globocnik to Trieste . After the war ended , Hering served for a short time as the chief of Criminal Police of Heilbronn in the American zone , and died in autumn 1945 in a hospital . Lorenz Hackenholt survived the defeat of Germany , but disappeared in 1945 without a trace
Aktion Erntefest
Aktion Erntefest
Belzec extermination camp