"Aktion Reinhard" and other killing operations

Deportations in early 1942 - "Aktion Reinhard" and other killing operations In the spring of 1942 five deportation transports with altogether 5,000 people on board travelled from Vienna to Izbica or Wlodawa in Lublin district in the "Generalgouvernment", where the deportees were then distributed among the already existing ghettos. At this time the murder of Jews living in the "Generalgouvernment" had already begun, under the direction of the SS and police chief in Lublin district, Odilo Globocnik, an Austrian. Later, this campaign was called "Aktion Reinhard", in memory of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, who had been murdered by Czech resistance fighters in May 1942. The key positions in the carrying out of this extermination programme were all occupied by "seasoned" staff of the "euthanasia" programme "T 4". In order to carry out the mass murders, special extermination camps were set up by the end of 1941 in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, where by the end of 1943 almost all Jewish inhabitants of the "Generalgouvernment" as well as Jews from Austria, Slovakia and the "Protectorate" of Bohemia and Moravia had been murdered. Only one of the transports leaving Vienna went directly to Sobibor. The other Austrian victims of the "Aktion Reinhard" were transferred to the extermination camps from ghettos in the "Generalgouvernment", to which they were deported in 1941/42, or else from Theresienstadt ghetto. At the same time the deportation of the Jewish residents of "Warthegau" in North Poland took place, particularly from the Lodz/Litzmannstadt ghetto to the extermination camp in Chelmno/Kulmhof. 1942/43 further transports also went to the concentration and extermination camp Majdanek/Lublin. Already in July 1942, 1,000 people were deported from Vienna to Auschwitz. Subsequently the killing installations of this concentration and extermination camp were considerably enlarged, so that Auschwitz-Birkenau soon became the central place for the mass murder of the European Jews.
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