In the second half of 1941 the Third Reich authorities decided the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’ should be the physical annihilation of the entire Jewish population. On 20 January1942 a conference was held at Wannsee, where discussed were the logistic solutions regarding the murder of all the Jews in Europe. This plan was supposed to be realised in German-occupied Poland. Reasons therefore included the simple fact that closed ghettos were already there and therefore places of mass extermination should be located as near as possible to keep transport costs low. Therefore, what followed was the construction of mass extermination facilities with gas chambers for murder of people on an industrial scale in the eastern parts of the General Government (in Treblinka, Bełżec and Sobibór). The action of constructing camps for mass extermination of Jews was part of the plan code-named Operation Reinhard.
The first actions of liquidating the ghettos began in the spring of 1942. From overpopulated ghettos Jews were deported to places specifically set up for immediate mass extermination as well as already existing concentration camps adapted for this purpose, such as Auschwitz and Majdanek.
The ghetto liquidation scenario was always remarkably similar. The Warsaw ghetto liquidation began on 22 July and may serve as a general example. The Germans ordered the president of the Judenrat, Adam Czerniaków, to select every day from 6,000 to 10,000 Jews to attend to the Umschlagplatz holding area, from where they would be loaded into freight cars and deported ‘for resettlement in the East’ from. The German instruction stated that the deportees could take up to 15 kg of hand luggage and enough food for three days. As a form of encouragement, sometimes bread and marmalade were handed out to Jews attending for deportation. After arriving at their destination, the Jews were almost immediately sent to the gas chamber and murdered. It should be noted that Jews from smaller towns and villages were often first transported to larger ghettos. Alternatively, some Jews, especially the elderly ones and small children were shot dead on the spot. The inhabitants of small-town ghettos were also often executed in large numbers in nearby forests or cemeteries.
Operation Reinhard, i.e. the planned action of liquidating most of the Jewish ghettos in the General Government of occupied Poland, was one of the most terrible crimes committed in the Second World War. Although no single institution took responsibility for the entirety of the planning and execution, in fact the whole Nazi administration was engaged in the genocidal process. Thus, within a space of barely one and a half year the Germans were able to murder 1.5 million Jews.
