Operation Harvest Festival

On the morning of Wednesday 3 November 1943 several thousand SS men and policemen surrounded the Majdanek concentration camp outside Lublin, the labour camps in the city itself and the camp at Trawniki. Jewish prisoners were separated from the others, ordered to undress and led in groups to trenches dug a few days earlier, supposedly as air-raid shelters. There they were killed with shots to the back of the head, layer upon layer, until late afternoon, while music blared from loudspeakers to drown out the shooting. The next day the same was repeated at the camp in Poniatowa. The Germans gave the operation the codename “Erntefest” – “Harvest Festival”. In two days, according to historians’ estimates, they murdered between about 39,000 and 43,000 people; the figure most often given is around 42,000. It was the largest single massacre of Jews carried out by the Germans during the Holocaust.

The last Jews of the Lublin District

From the spring of 1942 the Lublin District of the General Government had been the centre of Operation Reinhard, in which the Germans murdered most of the Jews of occupied Poland in the extermination camps at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. It was directed from Lublin by the district’s SS and Police Leader, Odilo Globocnik. Historians estimate that in 1942 alone about 360,000 Jews from the district were murdered, and by the end of the year some 20,000 remained alive there in camps and the last ghettos, with at most as many again in hiding.

In 1943, however, the number of Jewish prisoners in the Lublin region rose again. These were forced labourers whom the SS considered useful for the time being. The clothing and armaments workshops of the firms Schultz and Többens were moved from the Warsaw Ghetto to Trawniki and Poniatowa together with thousands of workers; after the outbreak of the ghetto uprising in April 1943 many people dragged out of the Warsaw bunkers were sent there and to Majdanek. Jews from the Białystok Ghetto, liquidated in August, were also deported to Majdanek. In Lublin there were labour camps at 7 Lipowa Street, where among others Jewish prisoners of war – soldiers of the Polish Army from 1939 – were held, and at the so-called Old Airfield, where the property of the murdered was sorted. In 1943 some of these workshops were taken over by Ostindustrie, a company set up by the SS to profit from slave labour.

The survival of these people depended on a calculation that could be revised at any moment. Heinrich Himmler had long wanted all the Jews of the General Government to disappear, including those working for the military, and regarded keeping them alive as a wartime concession. In his own understanding, 1943 gave him a security argument. The Warsaw Ghetto had resisted in January and April, the prisoners of Treblinka had revolted on 2 August, the Białystok Ghetto had fought in August, and on 14 October an uprising broke out at Sobibór, after which some 300 prisoners escaped into the forest. Partisan activity in the area was growing. For Himmler the tens of thousands of Jews in the camps of the Lublin region had become a threat to be eliminated in a single blow.

The order and the preparations

Himmler’s written order has not survived, and the exact date it was issued is unknown. Most historians link it to the Sobibór uprising: the German scholar Sara Berger writes that Himmler gave the instruction “a few days after the revolt”, Andrej Angrick calls the massacre the Reichsführer-SS’s furious reaction to Sobibór, and Helge Grabitz and Wolfgang Scheffler conclude that the reasons had been accumulating all year but that Sobibór was the immediate trigger. The order went to the Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government, Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, who entrusted its execution to the SS and Police Leader of the Lublin District, Jakob Sporrenberg. Sporrenberg, who had previously organised anti-partisan warfare in Belarus, had taken over in Lublin in August 1943; in September Globocnik left for his native Trieste, taking most of the extermination camp personnel with him. For this reason some historians, such as Stephan Lehnstaedt, regard Harvest Festival not as the last act of Operation Reinhard but as a separate operation, carried out after Reinhard had been wound up.

At the end of October prisoners at Majdanek, Trawniki and Poniatowa were ordered to dig trenches. At Majdanek, beyond Field V near the crematorium, some 300 men worked in three shifts, at night under searchlights; the three trenches were each about 100 metres long and two to three metres deep. Their zigzag shape lent credibility to the assurances that they were air-raid trenches, but many prisoners guessed the truth.

On 2 November, by various counts, between two and three thousand men were brought into Lublin: Ordnungspolizei units from the 22nd and 25th Police Regiments, including Reserve Police Battalion 101 from Hamburg, Police Battalions 41 and 67, a motorised gendarmerie battalion, mounted police squadrons, men from the 5th SS Panzer Division “Wiking”, SS men from Kraków, Warsaw, Radom, Lwów and Auschwitz, and the Lublin Sicherheitspolizei under Karl Pütz. Guards from Trawniki completed the cordons around the camps. In the evening Sporrenberg assembled the camp commandants and unit commanders and went through the course of the action with them, planned like a military operation. Two vehicles with loudspeaker equipment were brought to Majdanek. When the management of the Lipowa Street camp asked whether the Jewish prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Convention, were also to be shot, Himmler’s adjutant Werner Grothmann reportedly replied that “all Jews without exception” were to be liquidated.

Majdanek, 3 November

On the night of 2–3 November more than 500 additional policemen surrounded the camp at Majdanek. After morning roll call the SS men ordered the Jews to step out of the ranks; the sick were taken from the infirmaries by lorry. Everyone was gathered on Field V, from which prisoners of other nationalities had been moved beforehand. From about 6 or 7 a.m. columns from the Lublin camps began to be marched to Majdanek: several thousand prisoners from the airfield and the prisoners of war from Lipowa Street, as well as Jews from the city prison. On the way the prisoners from Lipowa Street threw themselves at their escort; according to accounts they shouted “Long live freedom!”. Almost all of them were shot before they could get away.

On Field V the victims had to undress and then passed in groups through a gap in the fence to the trenches. There they lay face down on the bodies of those killed before them, and execution squads of a few men shot them in the back of the head. The marksmen were relieved every few hours. Dance music and marches were played all day from the two loudspeaker vans, one standing by the trenches and the other by the gate. The shots could be heard in the camp and around it all the same; residents of nearby houses watched the execution from their roofs, while Sporrenberg circled over the camp in a Fieseler Storch liaison aircraft. According to some sources the action on the spot was directed by Hermann Höfle, formerly chief of staff of Operation Reinhard.

The shooting went on without a break until about 5 p.m. According to the findings of historians at the State Museum at Majdanek, some 18,000 people were killed (English-language literature gives 18,400), including about 8,000 prisoners of the camp itself, among them more than 1,600 women; the rest came from the Lublin camps. It was the largest single-day execution in the history of the German concentration camps. The next day several dozen people found hiding in the barracks were killed near the crematorium. About 300 women and 300 men were left alive and forced to sort the clothing of the murdered. The prisoners called that day “Bloody Wednesday”.

Trawniki

That same morning the killing began at the Trawniki labour camp, where the workforce consisted mainly of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto sewing uniforms for the Wehrmacht in the relocated Schultz workshops. Only a few months earlier the historian of the ghetto Emanuel Ringelblum had been held there, until couriers of the Polish and Jewish underground got him out of the camp in August 1943. The Polish residents of neighbouring houses had been evicted beforehand or forbidden to go outside. From 5 a.m. the prisoners were led to trenches in the grounds of the SS training camp (PL), where music played from loudspeakers. At about 7 a.m. Jews from the nearby camp at Dorohucza were brought in by rail. The men were killed first, then the women and children. The shooting continued into the afternoon; only a handful of people managed to hide and survive. The death toll at Trawniki is the least certain: figures of 6,000 to 10,000 are given.

Poniatowa, 4 November

Some of the units that had finished their work at Majdanek moved on to Poniatowa, about 50 kilometres away. Some 14,000–15,000 Jews, most of them from Warsaw, worked in the camp there in the Többens workshops. On 3 November, after roll call, they were sent back to their barracks and the telephone lines were cut, and in the evening 1,000–1,500 German and Ukrainian soldiers and policemen surrounded the camp in a double or triple cordon.

From 7 a.m. on 4 November the prisoners were led out of the hall in which they had been locked, in groups of fifty, starting with the men. They had to leave their valuables, undress and run between rows of guards to two trenches by the gate. The marksmen, with bottles of vodka beside them, killed them on top of the bodies already lying there; here too music was played. Around midday the executions were paused for a meal and the drunken marksmen were replaced. There was a clandestine resistance group in the camp that had obtained a few weapons. A group of about a hundred people set fire to a barrack full of clothing and barricaded themselves in another; the Germans set that barrack alight, killing everyone inside. Polish firemen called in to fight the fire saw SS men throwing the wounded into the flames. Finally the trenches were searched and those still alive were finished off. About 14,500–15,000 people were killed at Poniatowa. Among them were the Yiddish poet Josef Kirman (PL), the camp underground activist Melech Fajnkind, the musician Izrael Fajwiszys, the actresses Dora Fakiel and Chana Lerner, the actors Ajzyk Samberg and Dawid Zajderman, and the trade unionist Meir Przedecz. During the night three wounded women climbed out of the trench; hidden with the help of the Council to Aid Jews, “Żegota”, they survived the war, and their testimonies are today one of the main sources for that day.

How many victims

In those same days people were also being killed in smaller places: in the Lublin region, among others, at the camp in Annopol-Rachów, while on 3 November police shot the Jewish prisoners of the labour camp at Szebnie in the Kraków District. Some 10,000 Jews survived in a few camps working directly for the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe, including those at the airfields in Biała Podlaska, Puławy and Zamość, at Dęblin, and at the Budzyń camp near Kraśnik, which produced for the Heinkel works. According to the Israeli historian David Silberklang, Budzyń survived because of the interests of local German officials who wanted to go on profiting from slave labour.

The total number of victims of Harvest Festival is not known precisely. The 2009 monograph of the State Museum at Majdanek, edited by Wojciech Lenarczyk and Dariusz Libionka, gives about 42,000; the American historian Christopher Browning regards 30,500 killed at Majdanek and Poniatowa as a firm minimum, plus 6,000 to 10,000 at Trawniki; other studies give figures from 39,000 to more than 43,000. Popular chronologies speak of “about 43,000 Jews shot in three camps in two days”. That is the upper end of the estimates; it should also be added that the victims were not only prisoners of Majdanek, Trawniki and Poniatowa but also people brought from several other camps and from the prison in Lublin, and that killing continued for several more days in smaller places. Measured by the number of dead, it was the largest single massacre of Jews committed by the Germans, exceeding the shooting of more than 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar in September 1941. Only the Odessa massacre of October 1941, carried out by Romanian troops, was larger.

Erasing the traces

The Germans immediately set about removing the evidence. After their defeats in the east, with the front approaching the Dnieper, the SS leadership attached great importance to this, and Harvest Festival flowed seamlessly into Aktion 1005 – the exhumation and burning of corpses from mass graves. At Majdanek the work was directed by Erich Muhsfeldt, formerly an executioner at Auschwitz. For two months the prisoners from the airfield who had been left alive sorted the clothing of the murdered and burned the bodies on pyres; the women were later taken to Auschwitz and murdered in the gas chamber, and the men were killed or drafted into Aktion 1005 work squads. Local residents recalled that the stench of burning bodies hung over Lublin for weeks. The trenches were filled in and levelled.

At Trawniki the corpses were searched for valuables and gold teeth by Jews brought on 5 November from the camp at Milejów; the men were killed after a few days or weeks. At Poniatowa about 150 people who had been kept alive to work on the bodies refused to do so and were shot on 6 November. The corpses were then burned over several weeks by a squad of a few dozen prisoners under police guard; when the work was finished they too were murdered. Ostindustrie, which had not even been warned of the action although it lost most of its workers in it, was also wound up. The economic calculation that had protected these people for several months had lost out to ideology and an obsession with security.

The perpetrators on trial

Jakob Sporrenberg was arrested by the British in Norway in May 1945 and handed over to Poland. A court in Warsaw sentenced him to death, among other things for Harvest Festival; he was hanged on 6 December 1952. Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger committed suicide in May 1945, and Karl Pütz also took his own life. Gottlieb Hering, the commandant of Poniatowa and formerly commandant of the Bełżec extermination camp, died in 1945 without standing trial. Hermann Höfle, arrested in Austria in 1961, hanged himself in a Vienna prison in August 1962 before his trial. Erich Muhsfeldt was convicted at the Kraków trial of the Auschwitz staff and executed in 1948.

Most of the rank-and-file perpetrators escaped punishment. Investigations into members of Police Battalion 101, conducted in Hamburg in the 1960s, ended in a handful of lenient sentences. The records of these proceedings enabled Christopher Browning to write his 1992 book Ordinary Men, about how a few hundred ordinary middle-aged Hamburg policemen became the murderers of tens of thousands of people. Participation in the Majdanek execution was also the subject of the trial of the camp staff before a court in Düsseldorf, which lasted from 1975 to 1981, and as late as 1999 a German court convicted a former SS man, Alfons Gotzfrid, for taking part in it.

Its place in the history of the war

Harvest Festival ended the existence of the large concentrations of Jewish forced labourers in the Lublin region and was the last great killing operation in the district from which the extermination of the Jews of the General Government had been directed in 1942. It showed that, in German thinking, a revolt by a few hundred Sobibór prisoners was enough to condemn to death tens of thousands of people who had nothing to do with it, and that no economic usefulness could protect Jews from the sentence pronounced by Himmler. In those same weeks Jews were being killed in the camps of the Kraków District and Galicia, and by the end of the year only remnants of the former community remained alive in the General Government – in labour camps for the arms industry, in hiding and in partisan units.

Majdanek continued to operate for several more months. In July 1944, during the fighting for Lublin, the Red Army entered it, and the evidence of the crimes described by a commission and by the press became one of the first tangible proofs of German mass murder shown to the world; a museum was set up on the site of the camp in 1944. Despite the scale of the massacre, Harvest Festival remained little known for decades, overshadowed by Auschwitz and the Operation Reinhard camps. Tellingly, the Lublin museum’s 2009 monograph was entitled Erntefest: A Forgotten Episode of the Holocaust. Today, on 3 November, the anniversary of “Bloody Wednesday”, commemorations of the victims are held at the State Museum at Majdanek.