The Holocaust Sites of Europe
The Holocaust – the murder of approximately six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators in World War Two – is the gravest crime in recorded history, committed on a human and geographical scale which is almost unimaginable. To try to bridge this gap and better understand the true significance of the Holocaust, as well as its scale and magnitude, millions of people each year now travel to the former camps, ghettos and other settings for the atrocities. The Holocaust Sites of Europeoffers the first comprehensive guide to these sites, including much practical information as well as the historical context. It will be an indispensable guide for anyone seeking to add another layer to their understanding of the Holocaust by visiting these important sites for themselves.
Here, Martin Winstone picks out a sample itinerary, exploring the sites of the Nazi operation Aktion Reinhard, the most deadly phase of the Holocaust, which employed extermination camps across Poland to murder thousands of Polish Jews. The itinerary covers the major sites of Aktion Reinhard, while accompanying extracts from The Holocaust Sites of Europe provide an introduction to each.
Aktion Reinhard (Poland)
View a more detailed map for Aktion Reinhard itinerary
1 | Belzec
Belzec, the first Aktion Reinhard camp, was the template for those that followed. There is some uncertainty about when exactly the decision to create the camp was taken – the most common belief is that Himmler gave the order to Globocnik in October 1941 – but construction began in November. The location refl ected Belzec’s position on the main Lublin to L’viv railway (unlike Sobibór and Treblinka, the site was not isolated). The village had also been the site of labour camps for Jews and Roma in 1940 (by some estimates, the largest complex of such camps in the Generalgouvernement at the time) but they were abandoned in October of that year and were not related to the death camp either in location or personnel. Instead, Belzec established what were to become the key features of Aktion Reinhard. The SS men were T4 veterans, most notably Christian Wirth, who commanded the camp until his promotion to inspector of Aktion Reinhard camps in August 1942, and Gottlieb Hering, his replacement. The relatively small number of SS were supported by Ukrainian ‘Trawnikis’ as guards whilst groups of selected Jewish prisoners were forced to work, forever at risk of being killed themselves. It also established the basic layout of the death camps – the ramp, the undressing areas, the ‘tube’ to the extermination facilities in a separate area – although modifications were later made at both Belzec and the other camps.
2 | Sobibor
Construction of the second Aktion Reinhard camp began in March 1942 in an area of dense forest near the Bug River. After experimental gassings of Jews from nearby labour camps in April, Sobibór offi cially commenced its murderous work in May under the command of T4 veteran Franz Stangl. In the fi rst stage of operations, from early May to late July, close to 100,000 people were murdered; most were from the Lublin region but there were also large-scale arrivals from the Reich. There was then a temporary cessation whilst the railway line was repaired although more than 3,000 Jews from nearby communities were still murdered in August. The hiatus was used to increase the camp’s killing capacity, the original three gas chambers being replaced by a new block with six chambers. In the same period, Stangl was transferred to Treblinka and replaced by Franz Reichleitner. Large-scale transports resumed in October 1942 and, as the number of Jews in the Generalgouvernement dwindled, Himmler ordered in early 1943 that Sobibór should also receive deportations from France and the Netherlands to relieve pressure on Birkenau. In fact, the latter formed the only group for which more or less precise fi gures exist such was the effi ciency of the Dutch bureaucracy: 34,313 people were brought to Sobibór from Westerbork and Vught; 18 survived. Unlike the Polish Jews, who not infrequently resisted on the ‘route to heaven’, the westerners generally went peacefully to the gas chambers, believing the welcoming speech from an SS man (often dressed as a doctor to enhance the eff ect) that they were to be bathed and quarantined before being sent to work in Ukraine; some even applauded. The total number of victims of Sobibór is generally believed to have been around 250,000.
3 | Treblinka
Although it existed for little more than a year, Treblinka was the deadliest of the Aktion Reinhard camps. It was constructed in late spring 1942 in readiness for the planned destruction of Warsaw Jewry, the location chosen being close to a branch line of the main Warsaw to Bialystok railway. The dense forest which surrounded the site further suited the Nazis’ purposes as did the fact that there was already a labour camp for political prisoners (and Jews) nearby, known as Treblinka I. It was these prisoners, together with Jews from surrounding communities, who were forced to build the extermination camp which was designated Treblinka II. The first transports arrived on 23 July 1942; amongst the victims were the fi rst of hundreds of thousands of Warsaw Jews.
Historians generally believe the death toll to have been at least 800,000 and possibly more than 900,000. Most victims were from Poland; others came from Slovakia, Greece and Theresienstadt. A few prisoners were kept in Treblinka after the rebellion and cessation of transports (the last – from Bialystok – arrived on 21 August 1943) to carry out the dismantling of the camp; when this was completed, they were deported to Sobibór in October 1943 and murdered. All of the buildings were demolished and trees planted on the site whilst a Ukrainian guard was settled in a cottage to create the impression that it was a farm and to prevent any intrusions. After he fled, local peasants thronged to the site to dig for ‘Jewish gold’; they found decomposing human remains. So effectively did the Nazis destroy the camp that next to nothing remained and it was left rather deserted until its transformation into a memorial site in the 1960s.
Photograph, above left: Treblinka (Martin Winstone)
4 | Warsaw
Poland’s capital was, by the twentieth century, Europe’s greatest Jewish metropolis. Although a presence was fi rst established in the fourteenth century, Jews were forbidden to live in the city between 1527 and 1768. Warsaw’s rise to pre-eminence was thus rapid, its Jewish population growing from barely 10,000 at the start of the nineteenth century to more than 300,000 a hundred years later largely as a result of migration from other areas of the Russian Empire. By the early twentieth century, there were around 300 synagogues and prayer houses in the city. Warsaw also became the leading centre of secular Jewish culture, the home of writers such as I.L. Peretz and Isaac Bashevis Singer and the heartland of the Bund. Only New York had a larger Jewish population and probably only New York exceeded the diversity and vitality of Jewish life.
Even though the Germans began their assault on the city on 8 September 1939, it held out for three weeks before capitulating. The Jewish population was immediately subjected to attacks and acts of humiliation by the occupiers. As in every major Polish city, a Judenrat was established; its leader was Adam Czerniaków, an assimilated Jew who had previously been a member of the city council and the Polish Senate. Although Czerniaków was later to be criticised by many ghetto inhabitants, not least for his background and poor command of Yiddish, his diaries reveal a man of transparent good faith placed in an impossible situation. His sense of duty led him to refuse offers to flee in the early months of the occupation, unlike some of his colleagues, and he was to pay a heavy price for his responsibilities.
The Nazis had first discussed establishing a ghetto as early as November 1939 but tensions within the administration had stalled the plan; the order was finally issued in October 1940 (on Yom Kippur) and the ghetto sealed in November. Although most Jews already lived in the area, the ghetto’s creation entailed an enormous population transfer involving tens of thousands of Jews and Poles. By March 1941, the ghetto contained 445,000 people, the city’s pre-war population having been swelled by voluntary or often forced migration of Jews from the provinces, the Warthegau especially.
5 | Lublin
Lublin, home to one of the oldest and most celebrated Jewish communities in Poland, was arguably the most important city in the history of the Holocaust. Jewish settlement was first recorded in the fourteenth century and Lublin was soon renowned as a centre of learning, nicknamed the ‘Jewish Oxford’ or the ‘Polish Jerusalem’. It was also one of the principal bases of the Council of the Four Lands, the governing body of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth’s Jewish communities. Like most of southern Poland, the city was affected by the rise of Hassidism in the eighteenth century and became one of the movement’s leading centres outside Ukraine whilst, as elsewhere, industrialisation in the late nineteenth century brought a significant increase in the Jewish population. Lublin’s reputation as one of the great Jewish cities of eastern Europe was illustrated by the opening of what is believed to have been the world’s largest yeshiva in 1930.
Photograph, right: Lublin: Aktion Reinhard headquarters (Martin Winstone)
6 | Majdanek
Majdanek, now surrounded by Lublin’s post-war suburbs, was the largest camp in the Generalgouvernement and the first major Nazi camp to be liberated. Construction began in the autumn of 1941 under the command of Globocnik thus linking it to Aktion Reinhard. Until the spring of 1943 it was designated as a POW camp (it did indeed house thousands of Red Army soldiers) but this rather hid its true nature which reflected Himmler’s demographic fantasies. Inmates were to become a massive pool of slaves (plans approved in March 1942 envisaged a camp population of 250,000) who would build SS complexes in Poland and the USSR around which permanent German communities would eventually develop. Although military realities rather limited these ambitions, Majdanek was a large site even before it was offi cially declared a concentration camp. After the early transports of Soviet POWs, most of those sent there were Jews and Poles. The Jews were generally skilled workers who had been at least temporarily spared during Aktion Reinhard; their numbers were swelled in 1943 with the fi nal liquidation of the ghettos. Majdanek also handled plundered Jewish property from the death camps.