Operation Reinhard

Operation Reinhard or Operation Reinhardt (Aktion Reinhard or Aktion Reinhardt; also Einsatz Reinhard or Einsatz Reinhardt) was the codename of the secret German plan in World War II to exterminate Polish Jews in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland. This deadliest phase of the Holocaust was marked by the introduction of extermination camps. The operation proceeded from March 1942 to November 1943; around 1.47 million Jews were murdered in just 100 days from July to October 1942, a rate approximately 83% higher than the commonly suggested figure for the kill rate in the Rwandan genocide. During the operation, as many as two million Jews were sent to Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka to be murdered in purpose-built gas chambers. In addition, facilities for mass-murder using Zyklon B were developed at about the same time at the Majdanek concentration camp and at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, near the earlier-established Auschwitz I camp. After the German–Soviet war began, the Nazis undertook their European-wide "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". In January 1942, during a secret meeting of German leaders chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, Operation Reinhard was drafted; it was soon to become a significant step in the systematic murder of the Jews in occupied Europe, beginning in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland. Within months, three top-secret camps (at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka) were built to efficiently murder tens of thousands of Jews every day. These camps differed from Auschwitz and Majdanek, because the latter operated as forced-labour camps initially, before they became death camps fitted with crematoria. Unlike "mixed" extermination camps, the extermination camps of Operation Reinhard kept no prisoners, except as a means of furthering the camps' sole purpose of industrial scale murder. Very few Jews successfully escaped death (notably, only two at Bełżec). All other victims were murdered on arrival.