Operation Reinhard

Preparations began in the autumn of 1941, when Heinrich Himmler ordered Globocnik, SS and police leader in the Lublin district, to build a camp at Bełżec. The killing began in March 1942, and most of the victims died in the second half of that year. The camps were run by a few hundred Germans and Austrians, most of them veterans of Aktion T4, assisted by guards trained at Trawniki. The victims' property was sorted and sent to the Reich.

The operation was named, according to most historians, after Reinhard Heydrich, who was killed in 1942. Around one and a half million Jews were murdered in the three camps, and in the operation as a whole, including Majdanek and shootings during ghetto liquidations, close to two million by various estimates. After the Sobibór revolt the camps were closed and their traces covered up; in November 1943 Operation Harvest Festival (Erntefest) killed the last Jews in the labour camps of the Lublin region.