by Yitzhak Arad
The result was that 1.7 million innocent Jewish people were murdered by the Nazis in Operation Reinhard.
The silence that prevailed in the fields of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka after the dismantling of the camps did not last long. While the Germans still controlled the area, and, to a greater extent, immediately after the liberation, in the summer of 1944, shameful scenes occurred on the sites of the former death camps. Rumors spread among the local population in the areas close to the camps, and even in more distant places, that not all the bodies had been burned and that some of the victims had been buried with their clothes without having undergone a search. The informants claimed that in the seams and folds of the garments were hidden money, gold, and diamonds; there were also gold teeth that had not been removed. It was further said that the Jews who had been prisoners in the camps had buried great treasures. This was more than enough to bring farmers swarming all over the sites of the former death camps, digging and searching.
Rachel Auerbach, who visited Treblinka on November 7, 1945, as part of a delegation of the Polish State Committee for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes on Polish Soil, described what she saw:
Masses of all kinds of pilferers and robbers with spades and shovels in their hands were there digging and searching and raking and straining the sand. They removed decaying limbs from the dust [and] bones and garbage that were thrown there. Would they not come upon even one hard coin or at least one gold tooth? They even dragged shells and blind bombs there, those hyenas and jackals in the disguise of man. They placed several together, set them off, and giant pits were dug in the desecrated ground saturated by the blood and the ashes of burned Jews. . . .
Scenes of this kind also took place in the fields of Belzec and Sobibor. The search for treasures continued. The area was dug up again and again, and each section of the land was checked thoroughly by local people and people from afar who tried their luck. These acts ceased only when the Polish government decided to turn the camp areas into national memorial sites. These memorials bear witness to the tragedies and massacres that were carried out on these sites and will remain for generations a mark of shame and disgrace, a reminder of the brutality and inhumanity that were the essence of Nazi Germany, and a warning to all peoples of the deadly dangers of racism and hatred.
Appendix A
The Deportation of the Jews from the General Government, Bialystok General District, and Osland
The exact number of Jews who were deported to the Operation Reinhard death camps is difficult to determine because of the prevailing conditions at the time and the method employed by the Nazi extermination machine in expelling the victims to Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The number of Jews who lived in the towns and townships of Poland before the war is known from the population census carried out there in 1931. Some demographic changes took place during the years 1931–1939, but these did not basically alter the number of Jews living there on the eve of the German occupation.
Substantial demographic changes did occur during the war, during the years 1939–1942, until the onset of the deportations to the death camps. In these years, tens of thousands of Jews escaped from one place to seek refuge in another. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled and resettled, sent to labor camps, or concentrated in larger ghettos. Thousands of Jews were murdered in shooting Aktionen in the vicinity of their homes—before, during, and after the deportations to the death camps. Thus, on the eve of the expulsions, there were many small localities in which Jews no longer lived and other localities in which the number of Jews was much higher than before the war.
The deportation method, as carried out by the German authorities in the General Government, was en masse, without lists of names or even exact numbers. Usually ghettos were totally liquidated, and only the killing capacity of the camps and the volume of the trains dictated the number of people who were deported. In places where some Jews were temporarily left behind, the Germans counted the few who remained, while all the others were pushed into the trains.
Documents of the German railway authorities, which were found after the war, provided some data on the number of trains and freight cars. If we take into account that each fully packed freight car carried 100–150 people, we can arrive at an approximate indication of the number of Jews in each transport.
Another source of information was the census of the ghetto inhabitants carried out by the Judenrats in some of these places. A census of this type was usually undertaken by order of the German authorities for purposes of forced-labor requests or in preparation for the deportations. Sometimes the Judenrats also took a census for their own purposes, for example, for food rationing or housing problems. Documents containing these data and sometimes even the number of Jews who were deported, as collected by the Judenrat, were found after the war. Sometimes they were mentioned in diaries written by ghetto inmates and left behind.
Numerous memoirs written by survivors, as well as the memorial books (Yizkor books), contain important data about the deportations, including dates and the number of deported. Testimonies by survivors, statements by local people who witnessed the deportations, and evidence given by members of the German administration at the war-crimes trials serve as significant sources of information.
Together, all these documents and sources enable us to arrive at an estimation that comes very close to the actual figures and dates of the deportations to the Operation Reinhard death camps.
An extremely valuable research study undertaken to establish the timetable and number of deported Jews from the General Government and to which death camp they were sent was carried out by Tatiana Berenstein and published in Poland in the Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego (Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute), Warsaw, No. 3/1952, No. 21/1957, No. 3/1959, No. 59/1966, No. 61/1967. Another source is the “Luach Hashoa (Holocaust Calendar) of Polish Jewry” prepared by Rabbi Israel Schepansky and published by “Or Hamizrach,” New York, 1974. A most important and more up-to-date source is the Pinkas Hakehillot (Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities), Poland, Vol. II, Eastern Galicia, and Vol. III, Western Galicia, published by Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, in 1980 and 1984. The following tables of the deportations are based on all the aforementioned primary sources and research studies.
Table 1 Deportations to Belzec
A. District of Lublin
B. District of Galicia (Lvov)
C. District of Cracow
D. District of Radom
Table 2 Deportations to Soblbor
A. District of Lublin
As this table shows, according to existing information, close to 100,000 Jews from the District of Lublin were deported to Sobibor. Based on the number of Jews who lived in small townships and villages in these areas before the war, and considering the thousands of Jews who were expelled or fled from territories in western Poland, which was annexed to Germany, and who found refuge in the Lublin area, the actual number of those who were deported to Sobibor is much higher. We may assume that the total number of Jews from the District of Lublin who were exterminated in Sobibor was about 130,000 to 140,000.
B. District of Galicia
About 15,000 to 25,000 Jews were deported from Lvov and the other ghettos in the District of Galicia to Sobibor in the period between December 1942 and June 1943, after Belzec was closed.
Table 3 Deportations to Treblinka
A. The District of Warsaw
B. The District of Radom
C. District of Lublin
Table 4 Deportation of the Jews from Bialystok General District to Treblinka
Table 5 The Deportations from Relchskommissarlat Ostland to Sobibor
Appendix B
The Fate of the Perpetrators of Operation Reinhard
• Hans Frank, the head of the General Government, was arrested by the American army and sentenced to death by the Nuremberg International Military Court. He was hanged on October 16, 1946.
• Josef Bühler, the Secretary of State of the General Govern
ment, was sentenced to death by a Polish court and hanged in 1948.
• Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, the Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government, disappeared after the war. According to unconfirmed sources, he died on May 10, 1945.
• Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader in the district of Lublin and in direct charge of Operation Reinhard, served from the autumn of 1943 in northern Italy as the Higher SS and Police Leader. After the capitulation of Germany he was taken by the British army to a prisoner-of-war camp, where he committed suicide on May 31, 1945.
• Herman Höfle, who was in charge of the “Main Department” of Operation Reinhard, was arrested in Austria as late as 1961. A year after his arrest, while incarcerated in a prison in Vienna, he committed suicide by hanging himself on August 21, 1962.
• Christian Wirth, the inspector of the three death camps, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, commanded the “SS Task Force R,” which was composed of former Operation Reinhard members from the autumn of 1943. This unit was engaged in antipartisan and anti-Jewish actions in northern Italy in the area of Trieste-Fiume-Udine. All the Jews in these areas were to be concentrated in San Saba near Trieste and eventually executed. At Wirth’s initiative a crematorium was even built there. Wirth was killed by partisans, near Trieste in May 1944.
• Franz Stangl, the commander of Sobibor and Treblinka, was stationed in northern Italy, in the areas of Fiume and Udine, from the autumn of 1943 and engaged in actions against partisans and local Jews. After the war he escaped to Brazil; in 1967 he was discovered there, arrested, and extradicted to the Federal Republic of Germany. He was tried in Düsseldorf in 1970 and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison a few months after the end of the trial.
• Franz Reichleitner, the commander of Sobibor, was stationed in the area of Fiume in Italy from the autumn of 1943 and engaged in actions against partisans. He was killed by partisans.
• Gottlieb Hering, the commander of Belzec and afterwards of the Poniatowa camp, was in northern Italy, in the area of Trieste and San Saba, from the end of 1943. He did not survive the war.
Some of the SS men who had served in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were arrested in the Federal Republic of Germany and were brought to trial there.
• A group of ten SS men who served in Treblinka, among them the deputy commander of the camp, Kurt Franz, were tried in Düsseldorf between October 12, 1964, and August 24,1965. Kurt Franz and three other defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment; five defendants were sentenced to three to twelve years of imprisonment; one was acquitted.
• The Sobibor trial, against twelve SS men who served in Sobibor, was held in the Court of Hagen and lasted from September 6, 1965, to December 20, 1966. During the trial, one of the defendants, Kurt Bolender, the former commander of Camp III—the extermination area—committed suicide. Of the other defendants, only six were sentenced to imprisonment: Karl Frenzel to life imprisonment and the others to three to eight years.
• The Belzec trial in Munich lasted only three days, from January 18 to 21, 1965. The defendant was Josef Oberhauser. Some other SS men who had served in Belzec had also served in Sobibor and therefore had been defendants at the Sobibor trial. Oberhauser was sentenced to four and a half years’ imprisonment.
• In the Soviet Union, some trials of Ukrainians who had served in Operation Reinhard camps were held. At one of the trials, in Kiev, in 1962–1963, ten of the defendants were sentenced to death. The eleventh defendant received fifteen years’ imprisonment. At a second trial, held in June 1965 in Kiev, three of the Ukrainian guardsmen who had served in Sobibor and Belzec were sentenced to death.
The majority of the SS men and Ukrainians who served in the death camps of Operation Reinhard were never brought to trial.
Bibliographic Key to the Notes
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