Antisemitism: A Dark History and a Growing Threat: Operation Reinhard
The Nazi preoccupation with racial purity ultimately led to the systematic and deliberate mass murder of European Jews. The vast majority of European Jews were murdered after 1941 in what was called the Final Solution.
Not every camp in Nazi territory was a death camp- many acted as a combination of labor, deportation, transit, and death camps. The Nazi government implemented Operation Reinhard named after Reinhard Heydrich, who convened the Wannsee Conference and implemented the Final Solution (and who was assassinated by Czech partisans in Prague,1942).
Operation Reinhard death camps included the notorious killing centers of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. These camps existed between 1942 and 1943, and together killed an estimated 1.7 million people.
The Operation Reinhard Death Camps by Call Number: D 805 P7 A727 2018Publication Date: 2018More than one and a half million Jews were murdered between 1942 and 1943 in the concentration camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, located in Nazi-occupied Poland. Unlike more well-known camps, which were used both for slave labor and extermination, these camps existed purely to murder Jews.
Final Solution: the fate of the Jews 1933-1949 by Call Number: D 804.3 C434 2016Publication Date: 2016The persecution of the Jews, as Cesarani sees it, was not always the Nazis' central preoccupation, nor was it inevitable. He shows how, in German-occupied countries, it unfolded erratically, often due to local initiatives. For Cesarani, war was critical to the Jewish fate.
