Operation Reinhardt (German: Aktion Reinhardt) was a term used by the Germans to denote actions carried out with the intention to murder Jews residing in the General Government (‘GG’), i.e. in the areas of occupied Poland not incorporated into the Reich, between 1941 and 1943. The lack of documents makes it difficult to reconstruct the decision-making process that led to the start of the operation. In all likelihood, there was no single order for the Holocaust, but rather an accumulation of initiatives taken both centrally in Berlin and locally under the influence of the wartime circumstances and the development of anti-Semitic ideas within the circle of commanders.
The time of Operation Reinhardt is defined primarily in relation to the activity of the death camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka – from March 1942, when the Belzec camp opened, to the discontinuation of the operations at Sobibor in December 1943. However, the vast majority of the 1.8 million victims were murdered in 1942. In addition to Jews from the GG, Jews from other countries – Slovakia, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, the USSR or the Netherlands – were also killed in the camps. Among the victims of Operation Reinhardt were also the Roma and Sinti, who were murdered both in the death camps and during mass shootings.
A special role in the development of the operation was played by the administration of the Lublin district, where plans for the operation were prepared on Himmler’s orders by Odilo Globocnik, SS and police commander in the district, together with his numerous collaborators. It was here that the logistics of the mass murders was tested, including the development of a scheme for deportation to the death camps, and where work began on the gas chambers at Belzec. The solutions were gradually replicated in other districts, as well as in the other camps involved in the operation – Treblinka and Sobibor (within the GG, the Majdanek camp was also used for this purpose, and outside the GG, the already functioning Kulmhof and Auschwitz-Birkenau camps).
The deportation of Jews to death camps was made possible due to prior actions of local administrations. These consisted of the introduction of a succession of obligations and orders that reinforced the social isolation of Jews and made it impossible for them to live their daily lives: property looting, compulsory labour, wearing of armbands with the Star of David, creation of ghettos and resettling Jewish inhabitants of smaller towns there, their mandatory contributions, and terror.
The deportations were carried out by the gendarmerie and German police units, as well as the subordinate Polish Blue Police (in the Galicia district and in the eastern parts of the Krakow district also the Ukrainian police). Troops were also formed using Red Army soldiers held in prisoner-of-war camps (mainly Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Latvians), who were trained in the Trawniki camp. Other formations and services were also involved in the deportations, including fire brigades, border guards, Construction Service (Baudienst) workers, and Jewish police in the ghettos.
Deportations usually followed a similar pattern. On a fixed day, the Jews were to report to an assembly point. They were allowed to take a certain number of personal belongings with them. Those who were reluctant or not fit enough to leave their homes and be transported elsewhere were murdered on the spot. At the assembly point, a selection was usually made into a small group of those sent to work and others. Then, depending on the location of the village, the Jews were escorted to the railway station – on foot, by lorries or by horse-drawn carts, which had to be provided by residents of the surrounding villages. Usually, a group of Jewish residents from the deported town – sometimes the Jewish police or members of the Judenrats – would stay behind to sort out the property left behind and bury the dead. They were then transferred to other ghettos, labour camps, or murdered on the spot.
The problem of the logistics of Operation Reinhardt still requires much research. It seems to have depended on a wide variety of factors, such as the network of railway lines, the situation on the war front, the efficiency of killing in the death camps, the GG economy related to the demand for food and forced labour, the initiative of the local administration, and the availability of the troops needed to carry out the deportations.
In the ‘Holocaust Mass Graves’ project, we are primarily interested in the fate of the victims who did not make it into transports going to the death camps. In some localities, even entire communities were shot on the spot. These murders were similar to the mass executions carried out by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet Union in 1941. It also happened that people unfit for transport, the sick, children and the elderly were shot on the spot. Additionally, the deportations were always accompanied by a number of killings not directly related to the selection process. It is estimated that one in five people in the ghetto died on the spot.
Just like deportations, mass murders required a great deal of preparation on the part of the perpetrators. To carry out the shootings, it was necessary to choose a suitable location – often on the periphery (at a Jewish cemetery or outside the village or town), to designate people to dig and then cover the pits, or to sort the belongings of those killed. Minor arrangements were also necessary, such as providing an adequate quantity of slaked lime with which to sprinkle the bodies, providing trucks or horse-drawn carts, wood to fortify the pits or beams on which the victims stood when shot at. Looking at these details gives us a better understanding of the history of the Holocaust, the role of the perpetrators and their helpers, and the actions of non-Jewish local communities.
The deportation itself and the murders that accompanied did not result in the death of all Jews living in an area. Many of them chose to flee and go into hiding. In the autumn of 1942, 54 villages in the GG were designated where Jews who had survived the deportation could stay – so-called residual ghettos. Many people reported to them, unable to survive the winter and stand the atmosphere of hostility around them. Contrary to promises, residual ghettos too were liquidated in the following months of 1943 and their inhabitants sent to death camps or killed on the spot. Other escapees were caught, murdered in forests and Jewish cemeteries or sent to forced labour camps.
At the end of 1943, the perpetrators dismantled the death camps, destroyed their documentation and obliterated their traces. Similar processes were also applied to mass execution sites. Trees were planted on the mass graves. In some places – particularly in the Galicia district – special commandos dug up corpses and burnt them to hide evidence of the crime. Operation Reinhardt left in its wake countless smaller and larger graves in the GG – today’s Ukraine and Poland. Their exact number, and in many cases their location, remain unknown. We know of more than two hundred marked and commemorated mass graves. We suspect that the number of those unmarked and uncommemorated is much higher.