Action harvest festival

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Aktion Erntefest was the National Socialists' cover name for the coordinated mass murder of more than 43,000 Jews from the three remaining extermination camps in the General Government of Poland : the Trawniki forced labor camp , the Poniatowa camp and the Majdanek concentration camp .

This mass shooting , carried out on November 3, 1943 by the SS and Reserve Police Battalion 101 , ended the Reinhardt campaign .

execution

The background of the harvest festival was the heavy losses battle of Stalingrad , the weakening military forces on the entire Eastern Front and the growing military resistance of the Soviet Union. The National Socialist leadership, namely Heinrich Himmler , then ordered the extermination of the camps and the murder of as many people as possible in one day, almost without warning, in order to avoid possible uprisings, such as those in the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943 and in the Treblinka extermination camp on April 2. August 1943 and in the Sobibor extermination camp on October 14, 1943.

Himmler passed the order for this mass murder on to Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger , the Higher SS and Police Leader of the General Government , who delegated these orders to Jakob Sporrenberg , the SS and police leader in the Lublin district .

Criminal proceedings

The highest-ranking SS officer at the site and organizer of the massacre, Lieutenant General of the Police Jakob Sporrenberg , was sentenced to death by a Polish court in 1950 for planning and participating in the harvest festival and was executed on December 6, 1952 in Warsaw.

On October 20, 2017, the Frankfurt am Main public prosecutor's office announced that they had brought charges against a former member of the 5th Company of the SS Totenkopfsturmbann, who was 96 at the time, for aiding and abetting murder . On December 20, 2018, the Frankfurt Regional Court dropped the proceedings because the defendant was permanently incapable of standing. The man is no longer able to follow the main hearing appropriately.

literature

  • Yitzhak Arad : Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Indiana University Press, Indianapolis 1987.
  • Martin Gilbert : The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York 1985.
  • Jozef Marszalek: Majdanek: The Concentration Camp in Lublin. Interpress, Warsaw 1986.
  • Wojciech Lenarczyk, Dariusz Libionka: Harvest Festival 3-4 listopada 1943 - zapomniany epizod Zagłady. Państwowe Muzeum na Majdanku, Lublin 2009.
  • Helge Grabitz, Wolfgang Scheffler : Last traces. Warsaw Ghetto, Trawniki SS labor camp, harvest festival. Photos and documents about victims of the final delusion as reflected in historical events. Ed. Hentrich, Berlin 1988.
  • Christopher Browning : Just normal men. The Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the “Final Solution” in Poland. Rowohlt Taschenbuch, Hamburg 2011 (first 1993).
  • Stefan Klemp : “Aktion Erntefest”: With music to death. Reconstruction of a mass murder (= current volume 19). Villa ten Hompel , Münster 2013.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Oliver Teutsch: Majdanek concentration camp guard accused. In: Frankfurter Rundschau , October 20, 2017.
  2. ^ Anja Laud: charges brought against former SS security guard. In: Frankfurter Rundschau , October 20, 2017.
  3. ↑ Former SS guard too sick to be tried