Aktion Erntefest

Aktion Erntefest
One of many mass graves of the Nazi German Operation Harvest Festival
Location	Majdanek concentration camp, occupied Poland
Coordinates	51°15′11″N 22°34′18″E / 51.25304°N 22.57155°E / 51.25304; 22.57155Coordinates: 51°15′11″N 22°34′18″E / 51.25304°N 22.57155°E / 51.25304; 22.57155
Date	November 3, 1943
Target	Primarily Jews
Attack type	Shooting
Deaths	43,000
Perpetrators	SS

Aktion Erntefest (German: for Operation Harvest Festival) was the World War II mass shooting action by the SS conducted at the Majdanek concentration camp and its subcamps, purposed to liquidate the remaining Polish Jews in the Lublin reservation and the Lublin Ghetto within the General Government territory, including its entire slave-labour camp workforce. The operation took place on 3 November 1943. Approximately 43,000 Jews were killed on the orders of Christian Wirth and Jakob Sporrenberg during Aktion Erntefest thus concluding Operation Reinhard.

Operation Harvest Festival was the single largest German massacre of Jews in the entire war. It surpassed the notorious massacre of more than 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar outside Kiev by 10,000 victims. It was exceeded only by the 1941 Odessa massacre of more than 50,000 Jews in October 1941, committed by Romanian troops.

The timing of the operation was apparently in response to several efforts by surviving Jews to resist the Nazis (for example, the uprisings at the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps, and armed resistance in the Warsaw, Białystok, and Vilna ghettos). The SS feared additional Jewish-led revolts in the General Government, ahead of the Soviet counter-offensive. To prevent further resistance the SS decided to kill most of the remaining Jews who were employed in slave-labor projects of the Ostindustrie (Osti) enterprise owned by the SS, while imprisoned at the Trawniki, Poniatowa, and Majdanek concentration camps with subcamps in Budzyn, Kraśnik, Puławy, Lipowa and others. The inmates were ordered to dig "anti-tank trenches" and were therefore unaware of their true purpose as mass graves.