The Infrastructure of Operation Reinhardt

Railway ramps of the extermination camps in Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, where the trains with deportees arrived, quickly fell into oblivion after the end of World War II. Similar things happened to the camp sites themselves, where the Germans concealed their crimes by blowing up the gas chambers, dismantling the structures and levelling the grounds. As a result, the camps basically disappeared from the face of the earth and – for several decades – from the world’s collective memory.

The book stems from the academic conference held by the State Museum at Majdanek and is an attempt to emphasise the significance of infrastructural aspect in the persecutions, exploitation, and extermination of Jews in the General Government perpetrated within the framework of operation codenamed “Einsatz Reinhardt.” Analysing the Holocaust from this perspective is vital for the sake of restoring and sustaining the collective and spatially-anchored memory of the victims, particularly within the context of local communities.

Articles Authors:

Justyna Bajuk
Igor Bartosik
Jakub Chmielewski
Martyna Grądzka-Rejak
Bartłomiej Grzanka
Tomasz Hanejko
Ewa Koper
Tomasz Kranz

Stephan Lehnstaedt
Wojciech Lenarczyk
Dariusz Libionka
Grzegorz Michalak
Marek Michalski
Tomasz Oleksy-Zborowski
Sebastian Różycki
Agata Stępnik
Anita Szkarłat
Krzysztof A. Tarkowski