Aktion Reinhard and the Destruction of Polish Jewry

The monument at Bełżec.

This week marks the 75^th anniversary of the beginning of the campaign to annihilate Polish Jewry. After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the second-in-command of the SS and primary  architect of the Holocaust, it was given the code-name of Aktion Reinhard in his honor. Aktion Reinhard consisted of the extermination camps of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, all located in what is today eastern Poland. Its purpose was to murder the Jews of Nazi-occupied Poland (called the General Government) and to steal their belongings and ship them back to Germany.

The Nazis always desired a Final Solution to the “Jewish Question,” but stumbled into systematic mass murder. The Holocaust as we know it began in the summer of 1941 with the mass shootings of the Jews of the Soviet Union. At first, “only” military-aged Jewish men were shot, being conflated with Bolsheviks and partisans, as was de rigeur in Nazi ideology. Beginning in July/August 1941, women and children were murdered as well. 90 Jewish children were murdered at Bila Tserkva in August after their parents had been killed. 23,600 Jews were murdered at Kamianets-Podolsky over two days that same month. 33,771 were shot in two days in September at Babi Yar, a ravine outside of Kiev, on the specious accusation of arson. 

When it became clear that the shootings were psychologically taxing on the killers, the Nazis began to consider other methods of mass murder. They used vans in which the exhaust was rerouted into the rear of the vehicle, killing Jews who had been forced aboard. In a trial run, SS General Arthur Nebe forced inmates of an insane asylum near Minsk into a room and gassed them, also with car exhaust. Nebe also tried dynamiting another group, which left body parts all over the place, including in the high branches of nearby trees.

Aktion Reinhard was administered from Lublin, Poland, which was to be the crux of Nazi eastern policy. The SS and Police Leader of Lublin was Odilo Globocnik, a toady of Heinrich Himmler’s and a fanatical anti-Semite. Globocnik’s writ ran far beyond the scope of the Lublin district – it was his intention, with Himmler’s support, to remove Poles and Ukrainians (except for those to remain in a servile capacity) and then to establish so-called “strongpoints” consisting of fortifications manned by German “warrior-farmers” stretching all the way from the Baltic Sea to Transylvania. This was not just rhetoric – beginning in August 1942, 110,000 Poles and Ukrainians were forcibly removed from their homes in the Zamość region. They were replaced by some 9,000 ethnic Germans from further east. It went horribly, led to an uprising on the part of the Poles, and may have contributed to Globocnik losing his job. But I digress.

Odilo Globocnik, the head of Aktion Reinhard

The Jews, needless to say, had no role to play in the National Socialist utopia. The Nazis first intended to ship the Jews to Siberia after defeating the Soviet Union, but then decided, at some unknown point, to kill them in lands already under their control during the war. The Jews were the Nazis’ world enemy and there was to be no compromise with them. They could not remain, not even in a crushed, subservient capacity, as was to be the fate of the Slavs.

Another piece of the National Socialist ideological puzzle is necessary to contextualize Aktion Reinhard. Nazi ideology posited that the disabled were “useless eaters” who were a burden on society. A society could not thrive with such people “wasting” food and housing and “polluting” the gene pool, especially not during wartime. Beginning in 1940, German doctors began to kill the mentally and physically disabled in gas chambers. They told the victims that they were only taking a shower. After word got out and there was protest from the churches and many German citizens, Hitler ordered it shut down (it was continued in a more clandestine way and ultimately claimed 200,000 victims). Many of the men who staffed the gas chambers and the crematoria of this “euthanasia” program began to arrive in Lublin in the winter of 1941 after they had been decommissioned – they constituted the German staff of the Aktion Reinhard camps. They had been hardened by the sight and smells of mass death. 

In October, Globocnik met with Himmler and one of the two suggested the idea of a complex with stationary gas chambers at Bełżec, located in the Lublin district near the former demarcation line between Germany and the Soviet Union. It is unknown if the intent was to murder “only” the Jews of the Lublin district or of the entire General Government, which consisted of, in addition to Lublin, the Warsaw, Kraków, Radom, and Lwów districts. Bełżec was situated very close to the Lwów district (eastern Galicia) and the construction of its death facilities began on November 1, 1941.

The Jews of the General Government constituted the center of gravity of European Jewry. Warsaw’s Jewish population was the largest urban agglomeration in Europe, and second-most in the world after New York City. The Nazis could not, ideologically, accept such a large Jewish population in their midst and close to their front lines. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were concentrated in ghettos, where they died in enormous numbers due to disease and starvation. The Nazis were faced with a decision: where should they go? 

Despite Nazi euphemisms, the Jews could not be sent eastward across the Bug River into the occupied Soviet Union – the army would not accept this for fear of partisans behind its lines. Because of the absurd Nazi logic, this left but one choice: the Jews had to be killed. After the experience of mass shootings had proven to be too stressful on the killers, as discussed above, and other methods proved unsatisfactory, the Nazis settled on the extermination camp with the gas chamber, which has become the very symbol of the Holocaust. It would provide psychological relief to the killers and distance them from the victims. Secondarily, it would be a more efficient method that could be undertaken away from prying eyes (unlike the semi-public shootings in the east, where German soldiers and local civilians alike would gather to watch Jews being laid down in pits and shot). Nonetheless, this second reason was not as important to Himmler as his men’s nerves and consciences. Himmler had a warped sense of decency and wanted his men to remain decent to their fellow Germans while being hard, ruthless, and even inhuman to anyone unfortunate to be outside of that special circle. This was especially the case for Jews and those he considered subhumans.

Deportations to Bełżec began in March 1942, targeting the Jews of the Lublin Ghetto and the Lublin district more broadly. Construction on Sobibór began around the same time as that of Bełżec – this camp also served to kill the Jews of the Lublin district and began operations in May 1942. On July 19, 1942, Himmler ordered that the General Government be made free of Jews by the end of the year. Three days later, the Nazis launched Großaktion Warschau – the decimation of the Warsaw Ghetto, in which some 400,000 Jews led a miserable existence. Globocnik’s deputy and deportation expert, Hermann Höfle, told the head of Warsaw’s Jewish council, Adam Czerniaków, that 6,000 Jews were to be “resettled” each day. Czerniaków, realizing the implication of the order, committed suicide. The Jews' destination was Treblinka, the deadliest camp of Aktion Reinhard, which lay some 60 miles northeast of Warsaw. Its purpose was the destruction of the Jews of Warsaw, Radom, Częstochowa, Białystok, and other districts.

According to a telegram sent by Höfle, tallying the total of the Jews deported to (and murdered in) the camps in the General Government as of December 31, 1942, the figures were: Treblinka, 713,555; Bełżec, 434,508; Sobibór, 101,370; and Majdanek (a brutal concentration camp on the eastern outskirts of Lublin outfitted with gas chambers), 24,733, coming to a grand total of 1,274,166. Globocnik had not been able to satisfy Himmler’s order to completely destroy the Jews of the General Government by the end of 1942, but it was not for want of trying and he came alarmingly close.

All the Aktion Reinhard camps operated along similar, if not identical, lines. All were rather primitive installations. There was no need for extensive housing, as in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, because all the arriving Jews were to be gassed. When the Jews arrived, they alighted from the trains. If they were Polish Jews, as the vast majority of them were, they were whipped, shot at, and set upon by dogs. Western Jews, on the other hand, arrived in normal passenger trains, not cattle cars, and were dealt with calmly and politely, as they had no inkling of what lay in store for them. 

The Jews were told they had arrived at a transit camp and would need to be deloused before being sent further east. Their belongings were taken from them and brought to “sorting squares” where valuables, currency, and clothing were sent to the Reich. Many of the old, sick, and very young died on the trains; others who could not make the trip to the gas chamber were taken to a ditch and shot. A handful of carpenters, electricians, cobblers, blacksmiths, etc, as well as strong young men (to work in the death houses themselves), were held back. The rest were separated, men on one side and women and children on the other. 

Men were sent to their deaths first, to minimize the risk of revolt. All the victims were chased down what was variously known as “The Tube” or “The Road to Heaven” – the path to the gas chambers. Women had their hair shorn for use in mattresses back in Germany (in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the hair was cut after the women were gassed, but not in the Aktion Reinhard camps). The gas chamber building at Treblinka was cynically designed with a Star of David over its entrance. The Jews were forced into the chambers by Ukrainians and Germans wielding whips, iron pipes, guns, and even swords. Gas poured into the rooms from a captured Russian submarine engine (carbon monoxide was used in these camps, not Zyklon B). After the gassing, the victims’ bodies were dragged out by unfortunate Jewish prisoners and buried – later, at Himmler’s insistence, these were exhumed and burned. Later transports were burned straightaway.

The camps each had 90-120 Ukrainian guards (former Soviet POWs who agreed to volunteer as a way out of their terrible predicament – for context, 3.3 million out of 5.7 million Soviet POWs died in German captivity) and a German staff of only 20-30 SS men. With their newfound wealth (taken from the dead), corruption was rife among the Germans and the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians spent money on vodka and sex in the surrounding villages (they could communicate using pidgin Polish); whores from as far away as Warsaw would come to service their needs. Local farmers would pimp out daughters as young as 12.

These grotesque scenes of death, looting, and orgies are impossible to imagine and painful to describe. The first commandant of Treblinka, Dr. Irmfried Eberl, was removed for “inefficiency." Corpses lined the road to Treblinka and thousands lay in the camp itself, putrefying in the summer heat – the transports were coming faster than he could dispose of them. Christian Wirth, the first commandant of Bełżec and later inspector of all three camps, was known as the “Savage Christian” – standing atop a hill and peering down at the rotting corpses of thousands of Jews, he asked Franz Stangl, who commanded Sobibór and later Treblinka, what should be done with this “garbage.” Wirth was a vulgar man who terrified his own men – he was known to whip even them in the event the gas chambers broke down, which was a frequent occurrence. The deputy commandant of Treblinka, Kurt Franz, who was known as Lalke (“the doll” in Yiddish) because of his handsome looks, would sic his giant dog Barry on prisoners with the command, “Man, get that dog!” Franz would also box prisoners and, halfway through a bout, shoot them in the face with a gun hidden inside his boxing glove. Gustav Wagner, a notorious officer at Sobibór, would rip infants from their mothers’ arms and tear them to pieces with his bare hands. Ukrainian guards would pull aside attractive girls and women and rape them beside the gas chambers, sometimes to death.

Christian Wirth, the inspector of the Aktion Reinhard camps, known as "The Savage Christian"

Unlike at camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, Jews went to the camps of Aktion Reinhard (and Chełmno) strictly to die. This is why so much less is known about these camps. Auschwitz is (in)famous and weighs heavily on the Western consciousness because it was mostly Western and Central European Jews who were killed there and there were vastly more survivors (for context, while tens of thousands survived Auschwitz, only 70 people survived Treblinka and a mere two survived Bełżec). Furthermore, the Nazis had time to destroy the facilities at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, because the camps were relatively small in size, consisted of few structures, and the Russians were still far enough away when Aktion Reinhard was wrapped up in late 1943 after revolts in Treblinka and Sobibór in August and October of that year, respectively.

Nothing today remains of them. After the camps were demolished, the bricks of the gas chambers were used to build houses for Ukrainian guards, who were to stay there to ward off Poles digging for the murdered Jews’ treasure and to brush off any awkward questions about what had happened at these places (“Oh, there was no German death camp here – I lived here on my farm the whole time!”)

In the final analysis, the camps of Aktion Reinhard took the lives of at least 1.5 million Jews – they are the graveyards of Polish Jewry, which existed for a millennium and was the physical, though not spiritual, center of world Judaism (at the beginning of the 18^th century, three-quarters of the world’s Jews lived in Poland). There were world-renowned (among Jews, anyway) yeshivot in Lublin and Wilno (now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania). Jewish art, journalism, and literature flourished, most particularly in Warsaw, which saw dozens of Jewish periodicals in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish as well as a thriving Yiddish theater. 

Now one walks the ancient streets of Kazimierz, once the Jewish neighborhood of Kraków, and sees preserved Jewish shopfronts, kosher-style restaurants serving gefilte fish and featuring klezmer bands, synagogues, a cemetery, and souvenir shops selling figurines of Hasidic Jews (whose very dress was influenced by that of the Polish aristocracy in the 17^th century). But there are only a pitiful handful of Jews. Instead, in Zgody Square in Podgórze, where Jews were once assembled to be shipped to their deaths, there stand 40 silent chairs, each one representing 1,000 Cracovian Jews murdered during the Holocaust. They have no grave: their ashes lie 150 miles to the east, dumped unceremoniously underneath the earth of Bełżec.

The memorial at Zgody Square, Kraków. Photo taken by the author, October 2014