On November 3d and 4th, 1943, Aktion Erntefest, the "Harvest Festival", was ordained, marking the end of the action of extermination of the Jews of Poland, called Aktion Reinhardt. Under this hermetic name lie terrible mass killings: the "feast" of the harvest killed no less than 42,000 people (the largest mass slaughter of the Second World War) and was ordered by Heinrich Himmler to finish the Aktion Reinhardt, which saw about 1.7 million Jews perish in the gas chambers of Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka and Majdanek. The Jews who "escaped" from the gas chambers were shot in Majdanek, Trawniki and Poniatowa on those two fateful days of November 3rd and 4th, 1943.
Exactly 75 years after the events, the conference organized by the non-profit organization Mémoire d'Auschwitz - Auschwitz Foundation, aimed to take stock of current research on Aktion Reinhardt, a historical fact that has seen a resurgence of interest among Holocaust historians over the last ten years, thanks, among other things, to archaeological advances at the various sites concerned. A long way has been covered since the pioneering work of Yithzak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps in 1987. The conference also wanted to come back to what happened with the direct witnesses (survivors of the extermination centers and executioners) after the Aktion Reinhardt was finalized. Finally, apart from the genocide of Polish Jews and Gypsies it represents, this action had a less well known economic purpose that remains to be highlighted.
On the first day of the conference, macro-history and historiography were in the spotlight with the intervention of Stephan Lehnstaedt from Touro College Berlin, who painted a picture of thirty years of research on Aktion Reinhardt. This research is proving to be crucial for the understanding of the Shoah as well as for the preservation of its memory beyond the disappearance of contemporaries. In addition, for the general public, Aktion Reinhardt remains in the shadows - omnipresent when it comes to the Shoah - of Auschwitz.
After this more general overview, Melanie Hembera of the Institut für donauschwäbische Geschichte und Landeskunde in Tübingen focused on the key role that the Führer's Private Chancellery played in the extermination process in the General Government. Recent research shows that this role is more important than previously assumed and that names such as August Dietrich Allers (1910 - 1975) deserve to be better known and studied, if only for the crucial role he played in Aktion T4.
Finally, the first day ended with an emphasis on two specific characters who contributed to the implementation of the Final Solution at their level. Michael Tregenza, an independent researcher residing in Poland for more than a quarter of a century, spoke of Christian Wirth's exceptional “career” (1885 - 1944), which ranged from the Stuttgart criminal police to forced "euthanasia" of German patients in the so-called T4 operation, to Lublin in occupied Poland, where he became the backbone of Aktion Reinhardt alongside Odilo Globocnik (1904 - 1945).
His journey ended in Trieste in 1944, shot dead by Italian partisans against whom he had been fighting fiercely since September 1943. Wirth alone sums up the extent and diversity of Nazi crimes and Michael Tregenza is preparing the first in-depth biography of this unknown character for 2019. Christophe Busch, the current director of the Kazerne Dossin Museum in Mechelen, then reframed from his perspective as a criminologist the role played by Karl-Friedrich Höcker (1911 - 2000) in Majdanek and Auschwitz.
The rediscovery in 2006 of the photo album that now bears his name has in a way "shone the spotlight" on this character who had built his defense on his relative invisibility. Christophe Busch was nevertheless able to find in the archives of the Majdanek Museum written proof that Höcker was indeed present on the scene during the huge massacre of 3 and 4 November 1943 as part of the Aktion Erntefest, something that Höcker had always fiercely denied during his lifetime and which saved him a heavier sentence than the four years of imprisonment to which he had been sentenced in Germany in 1989.