Operation Reinhard

Operation Reinhard
Condemned Jewish families board the Holocaust train to Treblinka during liquidation of the Ghetto in Siedlce. Action Reinhard, 1942.
Also known as	German: Aktion Reinhardt or Einsatz Reinhard
Location	Occupied Poland
Date	October 1941 – November 1943
Incident type	Mass deportations to extermination camps
Perpetrators	Odilo Globocnik, Hermann Höfle, Richard Thomalla, Erwin Lambert, Christian Wirth, Heinrich Himmler, Franz Stangl and others.
Participants	Nazi Germany
Organizations	Schutzstaffel, Orpo Battalions, Sicherheitsdienst, Trawnikis
Camp	Bełżec Sobibór Treblinka Additional: Chełmno Majdanek Auschwitz II
Ghetto	European, and Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland including Białystok, , Kraków, Lublin, Łódź, Warsaw and others
Victims	Approximately 2 million Jews
Memorials	On camp sites and deportation points
Notes	This was the most lethal phase of the Holocaust.

Bełżec
Sobibór
Treblinka
Additional:

Operation Reinhard or Operation Reinhardt (German: Aktion Reinhard or Aktion Reinhardt also Einsatz Reinhard or Einsatz Reinhardt) was the codename given to the secretive German Nazi plan to mass-murder most Polish Jews in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland, during World War II. The operation marked the deadliest phase of the Holocaust with the introduction of extermination camps.

As many as two million Jews were sent to Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, extermination camps set up specifically for Operation Reinhard, to be put to death in gas chambers built for that purpose. In addition, mass killing facilities using Zyklon B were developed at about the same time within the Majdanek concentration camp, and at Auschwitz II-Birkenau near the existing Auschwitz I camp for Polish prisoners.

The first concentration camps in Nazi Germany were established in 1933 as soon as the National Socialist regime developed. They were used for coercion, forced labour, and imprisonment, not for mass murder. The camp system expanded dramatically with the onset of the Second World War, in 1939. The new network of Nazi concentration camps built by SS in Germany, Austria, Poland, and elsewhere in Europe began exploiting foreign captives in war industry. The prisoners locked into forced labour began dying by the tens of thousands from starvation and untreated disease, or summary executions meant to inflict terror as at Soldau concentration camp, or Stutthof, with 40 sub-camps set up contingently for maximum profit. Some of the most notorious slave labour camps included Mauthausen, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Gross-Rosen (with 100 subcamps),Ravensbrück (70 subcamps), and Auschwitz (with 44 subcamps eventually), among other locations.