Operation Harvest Festival

Common card · No. 276555

Operation Harvest Festival (German: Aktion Erntefest) was the murder of up to 43,000 Jews at the Majdanek, Poniatowa and Trawniki concentration camps by the SS, the Order Police battalions, and the Ukrainian Sonderdienst on 3–4 November 1943. After a series of Jewish uprisings in ghettos and extermination camps, Heinrich Himmler ordered the murder of the remaining Jewish forced laborers in the Lublin District of German-occupied Poland. In late October, Jewish laborers in the camps were ordered to dig zigzag trenches, supposedly for air defense. By 2 November, thousands of SS and police personnel had arrived in Lublin. That day, SS and Police Leader Jakob Sporrenberg held a conference to plan the operation. The killings began at Majdanek, including the Lipowa 7 and Lublin airfield camps, which imprisoned Jews in the city. On the morning of 3 November, Jewish prisoners were separated from non-Jewish prisoners, and by early that evening, a total of 18,400 people had been shot. The same day...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Bronislaw Wesolowski mailto:alians@mm.pl, Public domain