The Extermination of Jews in the German Operation “Reinhardt”

Such codename was assigned to the programme of exterminating Jews in the General Government, which was part of genocide that the Third Reich implemented and referred to as the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” in Europe. It was preceded by other measures: executions perpetrated by the SS and police firing squads (Einsatzgruppen) from the summer of 1941, and deportations to the Kulmhof death camp in Chełmno on Ner in Warthegau that began in December.

On 12 May 1943, head of the central committee of the Bund and a member of the Polish National Council in London, Szmul Zygielbojm, committed suicide as a form of protest against the world’s indifference to the fate of Jewish people. In his letter to Władysław Raczkiewicz, the President of Poland, he wrote:

“I cannot stay quiet anymore. I cannot live while the very last Jewish people in Poland are being annihilated. And it is me who represents them. My comrades in the Warsaw Ghetto died with weapons in their arms during the last heroic battle. My destination was not to die like them or with them. But I belong to them and to their mass graves. By my death, I wish to express the strongest protest against the passiveness in the world, with which it looks on and allows the genocide of the Jewish people to continue.”

More than 1.5 million men, women and children were murdered in the death camps of operation “Reinhardt” and in KL Lublin. Among the victims, apart from Polish Jews who were the majority, there were also the citizens of Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, France, Greece, and other countries. Several hundred thousand Jews perished in ghettos, mass executions and “resettlement actions”, labour camps, concentration camps, street round-ups or were murdered while trying to hide.

The exhibition was created on the 80th anniversary of operation “Reinhardt”. It shows the perpetrators, the chronology of their crimes and the main places of extermination. The issues are divided into 20 sections. Historical texts are illustrated with photos, documents, maps and are supplemented with testimonies. Above all, the exhibition commemorates the victims of antisemitism and persecution conducted in the name of a racist ideology.

The exhibition was created in cooperation with the Jewish Historical Institute, the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, and the Association for Educational Projects (Towarzystwo Projektów Edukacyjnych). It was displayed in Warsaw, Przemyśl, Kielce and Białystok in 2022. A year later, in 2023, it was shown in Poniatowa, as a part of a conference and educational campaign marking the 80th anniversary of the operation “Erntefest”. Currently, the exhibition is displayed at the Museum and Memorial in Sobibór. We also present its shortened version at the State Museum at Majdanek in barracks no. 55.