Operation Harvest Festival

Operation Harvest Festival was the largest single massacre of Jews by German forces during the Holocaust. Up to 43,000 Jews were murdered at the Majdanek, Poniatowa and Trawniki concentration camps by the SS, the Order Police battalions, and the Ukrainian Sonderdienst. In 1942, 360,000 of the Jews who lived in the Lublin District of the General Governorate of German-occupied Poland were murdered during Operation Reinhard.

About Operation Harvest Festival in brief

Operation Harvest Festival was the largest single massacre of Jews by German forces during the Holocaust. Up to 43,000 Jews were murdered at the Majdanek, Poniatowa and Trawniki concentration camps by the SS, the Order Police battalions, and the Ukrainian Sonderdienst on 3–4 November 1943. The killings began on the morning of 3 November, and encompassed the Lipowa 7 and Lublin airfield camps, which imprisoned Jews in the city. In all three camps, Jews were forced to strip naked and walk into the previously dug trenches, where they were shot. Loud music was played to cover the sound of gunfire. The bodies of the victims were burned by other Jews, who had been spared temporarily from death. In 1942, 360,000 of the Jews who lived in the Lublin District of the General Governorate of German-occupied Poland were murdered during Operation Reinhard. After a series of Jewish uprisings in ghettos and extermination camps, Heinrich Himmler ordered the murder of the remaining Jewish forced laborers. In order to avoid further resistance, he decided to exterminate the Jewish prisoners in a single decisive blow using overwhelming military force. The murder operation was planned as a military operation, with the code name Erntefest. Two loudspeakers were installed on police cars, near the trenches and other by the entrance of the camp. The leadership of Lublin 7, which held Jewish prisoners of war, queried whether they should violate the Geneva Convention by allowing the prisoners to be executed without liquidation.

At 5:00 on November 5, 1943, Werner Grothmann replied that Jews are subject to liquidation without exception. The commandants of Majdaneks and Poniatowsi agreed. The operation was due to begin at dawn the next day, and was planned by SS and Police Leader Jakob Sporrenberg, who was in charge of the operation. After the operation, about 10,000 Jewish prisoners were left alive in various labor camps in the Lublin District. The prisoners were ordered to dig zigzag trenches, supposedly for air defense, in late October. Although the trenches were supposedly for defense against air raids, the prisoners guessed their true purpose. By the end of the year, only 20,000. Jews were living in German camps and ghetto, and no more than another 20,.000 were in hiding. Historians believe that it was in response to the uprising at Sobibór extermination camp on 14 October 1943. Thousands of the Jewish. prisoners in the camps of the Lubli District had been transported there from the Warsaw Ghetto after the failure of the uprising there. On 2 November, 2,000 to 3,000 SS and police personnel arrived in Lublin: Waffen-SS from as far away as Kraków, Police Regiment 22, Police. Regiment 25 and the Lubling Security Police. That day, SS and. Police Leader Jakob Sporrenberg held a conference to plan it.

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