The Shoah (1939–1945)
Operation Reinhard
Mars 1942 – 1943·Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
Bełżec (450,000–600,000), Sobibor (170,000–250,000), Treblinka (700,000–900,000). Liquidations of the ghettos of Lublin, Kraków, Lwów (~50,000), Radom, Kielce, Częstochowa, Tarnów, Rzeszów, Przemyśl, Zamość…
Operation Reinhard is the name given to the killing of the Jews of the General Government, conducted from Lublin by Odilo Globocnik with personnel transferred from the German "euthanasia" programme. It rested on three camps built for that purpose and nothing else: Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. These were not concentration camps but installations for immediate killing, without registers, without labour, without any planned survival — only a few dozen detainees were kept alive to serve the apparatus.
The ghettos of the General Government were emptied one by one toward these three stations: Lublin, Cracovie, Lwów, Radom, Kielce, Częstochowa, Tarnów, Rzeszów, Przemyśl, Zamość. The camps were then dismantled, the pits reopened, the bodies burned, the grounds planted and entrusted to farmers, so that nothing would remain. It is this will to erasure, as much as the scale of the crime, that makes the operation an object without equivalent.
- Period :
- The Shoah (1939–1945)
- Type :
- Shoah
- Region :
- Central and Eastern Europe
- Country :
- Pologne
Yitzhak Arad, *Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka* ; Sara Berger, *Experten der Vernichtung* ; Raul Hilberg, *La Destruction des Juifs d'Europe* ; Bogdan Musiał (dir.), *Aktion Reinhardt*.