Operation Reinhardt

For conference presentation, "Operation 1005: Nazi Attempts to Erase the Evidence of Mass Murder in Eastern and Central Europe, 1942–1944" June 15–16, 2009, Paris, France.
Aktion Reinhard is infrequently connected with the operation of Sk-1005, either by the methods it used to eradicate the evidence of mass crimes or by a decision making conjunction between the Blobel's Sk-1005 group and the Reinhard staff in Lublin. Instead, the method of disposal of the million or more corpses accumulated at the Reinhard killing centers at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka is usually viewed as a derivative of locally devised and executed initiatives, independent of the Sk-1005 process, per se. Postwar Soviet investigations of perpetrators unwittingly showed that the process of corpse disposal at Reinhard camps had earlier systematization and resourcefulness than did concurrent Sk-1005 experiments. The operation of Jewish Sonderkommando in these places followed requirements of the specific site where they worked. These methods allowed, in Hilberg's view, a potentially unlimited capacity for disposal of the evidence of genocide. As early as the beginning of April 1942, rumors of corpse burning at Belzec were publicly circulating among Poles in the Zamosc area of southeastern Poland – months earlier than is usually credited. The Trawniki-trained guard force at Belzec, then Sobibor, and finally Treblinka  witnessed these developments first hand. After 1947, Soviet interrogators, more concerned with treason than genocide, recorded the former guards' stories of body burning, without giving it an apparent second thought. This naive testimony is a unique source for describing and evaluating the obliteration of evidence of mass murder.

I describe the ways disposal of corpses in the Reinhard camps can be dated and how they evolved, according to the divergent organization and capacities of the camps. The pit burning operations in Bug River killing centers were carried out, as elsewhere, by Jewish prisoners themselves destined in short order to vanish without trace. How they worked and the size of the prisoner detachments at each site is one basis for comparison among Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Using former camp guard interrogations taken by the KGB, I will date the beginning of disposal and track the evolution of form. I will argue that Sonderkommando 1005 was less a discrete unit or Aktion than a concept – a conscious conspiracy – for obliterating the evidence of mass murder and that it dated from spring 1942 at the latest – independent of any central control or operation.

In 1942, the regime of Hlinka's Slovak People's Party deported more than 57,000 Jews to territory under the control of the Third Reich. Of these, 40,000 Jews were deported to the General Government´s Lublin District, where Operation Reinhardt, one of the biggest extermination operations of the Holocaust, was just beginning. Its central elements were Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka death camps. Therefore, the vast majority of Jews deported from Slovakia in 1942 fell victim to extermination Operation Reinhardt. The article presents a set of documents that characterize deportations of Slovak Jews to the Lublin District, as well as Operation Reinhardt itself.

In the article, I intend to situate the Trieste’s terror/traumascape through the topography of terror/trauma places put in place during the Nazi occupation of the city (1943–1945). I will do this by showing how some of the elements in such a network of topoi – especially the extermination camp Risiera di San Sabba in the industrial outskirts of the city and the casemates of Kleine Berlin in the inner city – are decisively semantically interconnected and interdependent. Inside of the Nazi semiosphere and its semiosis, oblivion with its lethal erasure, concealments of crimes, silence complicities and perpetual discontinuities (and not memory as a guarantee of duration) becomes a principal driving force and takes over everyday practices. Totalitarian Nazi cosmology, complex but visible through the traces and relations, based on detachment from reality, deception and perverted pleasures, is an
inverted social structure in comparison with democratic societies.

KEYWORDS: Risiera di San Sabba (Trieste), Kleine Berlin, KZ, extermination camp, places of memory, politics of memory/oblivion, ritual practices, semiosis, semiosphere (J. Lotman)

The focus of this paper is on a particular manifestation of collaboration that occurred in the historical framework of Operation 'Reinhard', the Nazi SS plan to kill the Jews of occupied Poland. That collaboration unequivocally constituted armed assistance to the enemy, on top of perpetration of mass crimes. The initial consent to serve and then a tacit, on-going agreement to remain in service – a day to day decision not to flee – arose from different impulses and could extended over a period of years, months, or even simply days. The population on which this study is based was as complex as its Motherland: two waves of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) that filled the SS’s training camp at Trawniki, Poland, men captured in the opening weeks of ‘Barbarossa’ and during spring 1942 operations in the vicinity of Kerch. Under SS leadership, they went on to participate in the murder of one and a quarter million Jews in the course of about nine months. Soviet interrogations of some of these former Soviet POWs in the 1960s and 1970s are the source material. The pathway from prisoner of the Germans to armed collaboration in a major criminal enterprise (Aktion 'Reinhard') was less a "decision to collaborate" than a perpetual dialogue between Soviet man and SS man .

Between 1942 and 1991, law enforcement and security authorities in the Soviet Union employed an evolving set of edicts to prioritize their investigation and prosecution of citizens for individual activities during the German occupation. Particularly during postwar processes, the breath-taking effectiveness with which security organs identified, located and tried citizens under Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code represented the most thorough accountability effort undertaken by any European power. With very few exceptions, the proceedings were closed and secret; after 1960, occasionally the outcome would appear in a short press account. Yet for the government, the pursuit of individual accountability remained of sufficient domestic and international importance to justify commitment of resources, Union-wide, until the demise of the Soviet Union. A representative subset of the many hundreds of thousands of Article 58 prosecutions were the cases brought against Soviet citizens who participated in "Operation Reinhard" (AR), the Nazi's effort to murder all the Jews in Poland. Soviet investigations and trials against men who served in the so-called Trawniki system, named for the training camp where all were inducted, trained, and deployed to AR sites, demonstrate the comprehensiveness of state security's efforts and the potential high value of those records for completing a modern historical reconstruction of the crimes committed during "Reinhard" between 1941 and 1945.