Nazi death camps were designed for the mass extermination of people. Unlike concentration camps, which served primarily as prisons and penal servitude, death camps (also called extermination camps) were exclusive “death factories.” Operation Reinhard was named after the main organizer of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, Reinhard Heydrich, who was killed by Czech resistance fighters (Arad). This code name hides the Nazi operation to exterminate Jews and Roma, which began in late 1941 under the SS, Heinrich Himmler.
As part of Operation Reinhard, three extermination camps were established: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The Nazis organized the process of deportations primarily from the territories of Eastern Europe. The main task was to keep the victims in the dark about the destination until the very moment of arrival (Arad). After expelling Jews from the ghetto, the Germans took them to the nearest railway station and then drove them into carriages for transporting cattle. The path to the extermination camps sometimes took several hours, and sometimes it took several days. The length of the journey, the unbearable conditions of the trip, such as tightness, terrible heat in the summer months, cold in winter, lack of water, lack of sanitary conditions – all led to many deaths on the way.
The Auschwitz concentration camp complex was the largest of all the camps created by the Nazi regime. The complex consisted of three main camps, which contained prisoners who performed forced labor. One of these camps also acted as an extermination center for a long time. The camps were located about 60 km west of Krakow – near the pre-war Polish-German border in Upper Silesia.
The main camp, Auschwitz I, was the first camp organized near the city of Auschwitz. Construction work began in May 1940 on Auschwitz’s outskirts, in the abandoned artillery barracks previously occupied by the Polish army (Levi). The SS authorities continually expanded the territory of the camp, using forced labor of prisoners. During the camp’s first year, the SS and police cleared an area of ​​about 40 square kilometers, calling it a “built-up area” intended solely for use as a camp. The first prisoners of Auschwitz were German recidivist criminals transferred from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany and Polish political prisoners (Levi).
Thus, the main difference between Auschwitz and Operation Reinhard is that the latter was initially created for the mass extermination of Jews and Gypsies. Besides, medical experiments were carried out at the Auschwitz camp, including pseudoscientific experiments on newborns, twins, dwarfs, forced sterilization, castration, and experiments on adults’ strong cooling.
Works Cited
Arad, Yitzhak. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Revised and Expanded Edition: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Indiana University Press, 2018.
Levi, Primo. The black hole of Auschwitz. John Wiley & Sons, 2017.