Gross Aktion Warschau
| Grossaktion Warsaw | |
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Warsaw Ghetto, 'Search and interrogation'; photograph from the to Heinrich Himmler
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Location of Warsaw in Poland today
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| Location |
Warsaw, German-occupied Poland 52°08′41″N 20°35′40″E / 52.1446°N 20.5945°ECoordinates: 52°08′41″N 20°35′40″E / 52.1446°N 20.5945°E |
| Date | 23 July 1942 – 21 September 1942 |
| Incident type | Deportations to Treblinka, mass shootings |
| Organizations | Nazi SS |
| Camp | Treblinka extermination camp |
| Ghetto | Warsaw Ghetto |
| Victims | 265,000 Polish Jews |
The Grossaktion or Gross-Aktion Warsaw (German: Großaktion Warschau, Great Action) was a secretive Nazi German operation of the mass extermination of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto beginning 22 July 1942. During the Grossaktion Jews were terrorized in daily round-ups, marched through the ghetto, and assembled at the Umschlagplatz station square for the so-called "resettlement to the East" (Umsiedlung). From there, they were sent aboard overcrowded Holocaust trains to the extermination camp in Treblinka.
The largest number of Warsaw Jews were transported to their deaths at Treblinka in the period between the Jewish holidays Tisha B'Av (23 July) and Yom Kippur (21 September) in 1942. The killing centre was set up 80 kilometres (50 mi) from Warsaw only weeks earlier, specifically for the Final Solution. Treblinka was equipped with gas chambers disguised as showers for the "processing" of entire transports of people. Led by the SS-leader Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik, the campaign codenamed Operation Reinhard became the critical part of the Holocaust in occupied Poland.
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest World War II ghetto in all of Nazi occupied Europe, with over 400,000 Jews crammed into an area of 1.3 square miles (3.4 km2), or 7.2 persons per room. The Nazi police conducted most of the mass deportations of the ghetto inmates to Treblinka via pendulum trains carrying up to 7,000 victims each. Every day, trains consisting of overcrowded boxcars departed twice from the railway collection point (Umschlagplatz in German); the first in the early morning, and the second in the mid-afternoon. The extermination camp received most of them between 23 July and 21 September 1942. The Grossaktion (large-scale operation) was directed in the capital by SS- und Polizeiführer Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg, the commander of the Warsaw area since 1941.
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