Operation “Reinhardt” killing of Polish Jews
On the night of March 16-17, 1942, the Germans began deporting Jews from the Lublin ghetto to the Belažek extermination camp. At the same time, Jews from Lviv began to emigrate there.
Thus began Operation Reinhardt, the aim of which was to kill the Jewish population of the five districts of the General Government (Warsaw, Radom, Kraków, Lublin and Galicia). At the end of 1942, the action spread to the Bialystok district, which was part of East Prussia.
The decision to kill all European Jews was made in the fall of 1941. In order to coordinate the activities of separate segments of the state apparatus of the Third German Reich, on January 20, 1942, a conference was organized in Wannsee, Berlin.
A representative of Governor General Hans Frank demanded that the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” begin in occupied Poland.
Himmler appointed Odilo Globochnik, head of the Lublin SS and Police, to this task. It was also the headquarters of the operation, codenamed “Reinhardt” after Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich's main security service, who was killed by Czech partisans. Adolf Eichmann directed the action from this office.
The Germans sent SS men who had previously participated in Operation T4 (The Killing of the Disabled) to carry out their criminal plan.
Its head, Christian Wirth, oversaw the activities of emergency extermination centers, which were set up specifically for Operation Reinhardt, where death was in the gas chambers.
The Belažek camp operated from March to December 1942, the Sobibor camp from May 1942 to October 1943, and the Treblinka II camp from July 1942 to August 1943.
They claimed more than 1.5 million lives. The victims of Operation Reinhardt were also killed in the Majdanek concentration and extermination camp.
From the spring of 1942, the Germans systematically exterminated the Jewish communities in the General Government (already in December 1941, they began to kill the Jews of the Wartgau in the extermination camp on the Chelmnoz Ner).
This meant not only the deportation of ghetto prisoners to extermination camps under inhumane conditions, but also mass killings and executions on the spot.
In small towns where the ghetto was not strictly isolated, this happened in front of the local Polish population.
The German staff of Operation Reinhardt was relatively small. It consisted of 450 SS men and over 1,000 auxiliaries recruited from captured Red Army soldiers (mostly Ukrainians, Latvians and Russian Germans).
They were trained in the Travnik camp in the Lublin region and were also used as guards in the extermination camps. Lacking people to help with the deportation actions and to participate in the fugitive gatherings, the Germans mobilized local forces, especially blue policemen, sometimes firemen or construction service boys (Baudienst).
In the larger ghettos, the responsibility for providing a contingent of men for the supposed “evacuation to work in the East” was transferred to the Jewish Councils and the Jewish Order Service.
Operation Reinhardt's chief of staff, Hermann Hofl, coordinated the movement. The largest took place in the Warsaw Ghetto, from which over two months (from July 22 to September 21, 1942) the Germans deported more than 250,000 people to Treblinka. people.
The economic dimension of Operation Reinhardt was also important to the Third German Reich. Globocnik employees managed more than 150 Jewish work camps.
The looting of property belonging to the murdered brought a huge income. According to Globocnik's final report, its value after deducting operating costs of 12 million marks amounted to 179 million marks.
Despite the opposition of war industries that benefited from Jewish slave labor, the SS's priority was to complete the “Final Solution.”
After the prisoner uprisings in Treblinka (August 2, 1943) and Sobibor (October 14, 1943), Globocznik's successor, Jakob Sporenberg, on Himmler's personal orders, organized an action codenamed “Erntefest” (“Harvest Festival”). On November 3 and 4, 1943, the Germans shot 42,000 people in the camps of Majdanek, Travnik and Poniatova. prisoners.
In total, during Operation Reinhardt, over 18 months – from March 17, 1942 to November 4, 1943 – the Germans killed approximately 2 million Jews.
Most of them died before the end of 1942. More than 100,000 were among the victims. Jews from France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Macedonia and Thrace who were deported by the Germans to Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka.