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The Operation Reinhard Death Camps
(Tablet) David Bezmozgis - Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec were created as part of Operation Reinhard - named for Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the German Reich Main Security Office (including the Gestapo) and one of the main proponents and architects of the Holocaust. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps were intended for the annihilation of the Jews of the General Government, the eastern part of occupied Poland that the Nazis didn't annex to Germany. Home to an estimated 2,284,000 Jews, the General Government included the districts of Warsaw, Cracow, Lublin, Lvov, and Radom. Unlike Auschwitz, which provided slave labor to various German industries, the sole purpose of the Operation Reinhard camps was the rapid murder and plunder of Jewish men, women, and children. Within hours of arrival at these camps, the people would be dead and anything of value they had with them - including the women's hair - would have been sorted for shipment to the Reich. The death camps were designed to spare the rank and file SS the distress associated with the mass shootings they had been conducting in the Soviet Union after the German army invaded. Ultimately, Jews from all over Europe were murdered in the Operation Reinhard camps, most significantly from Holland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, France, and the Soviet Union. Of the 450,000-600,000 Jews brought to Belzec, only two survived; of the 850,000-880,000 brought to Treblinka, 50 survived; of the 170,000 Jews brought to Sobibor, 57 survived.