Today marks the 80th anniversary of Aktion Erntefest. (German: for Operation Harvest Festival) a mass murder by the SS conducted at the Majdanek concentration camp and its subcamps, Poniatowa and Trawniki. The purpose was to liquidate the remaining Polish Jews in the Lublin reservation and the Lublin Ghetto, including its entire slave-labour camp workforce.
After the Sobibor uprising, Heinrich Himmler worried that the Jews might
attempt to revolt elsewhere. He thus ordered the execution of all Jews in the labour camps by the General Government.
The operation took place on the 3rd and 4th of November 1943—leading to the approximate murder of 43,000 Jews on the orders of Christian Wirth and Jakob Sporrenberg.
At Majdanek, near Lublin, the SS shot them in large prepared ditches outside the camp fence near the crematorium. Jews from the other labour camps, in the Lublin area, were also taken to Majdanek and shot. Music was played through loudspeakers at both Majdanek and Trawniki to drown out the noise of the mass shootings.
One of the killers described the murders in a TV documentary in 1984:
“There were young ones, too. Many young women came up to us and said, “Why? What have we ever done to you?” I said, ‘I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do.’ There were men, women and children. They were separated, the men and women. And they did curse us. They cursed us, and some came at us with raised fists. And they yelled, ‘Nazi pigs.’ You can hardly blame them. We might have done the same thing, if we’d been the ones feeling the heat.”
Operation Harvest Festival was the single largest German massacre of Jews during the Holocaust. At Majdanek, they separated the Jews from the other prisoners, then brought them over to long, deep trenches and shot them one by one under the leadership of pathological killer Erich Muhsfeld.
The main camp, as well as the Trawniki and Poniatowa subcamps of the Majdanek Extermination Camp, were surrounded by SS and the Reserve Police Battalion 101 (a unit of the German Order Police from Hamburg) augmented by a squad of Hiwis called Trawniki Men, from Ukraine.
Removing all traces of the killing was a priority of the Nazi leadership because of Soviet military victories on the Eastern Front. After the German defeat at Stalingrad, Soviet forces recaptured most of Ukraine, Russia, and eastern Belarus by the end of 1943. At Majdanek, the cleanup took two months under the supervision of Erich Muhsfeldt, previously an executioner at Auschwitz.
The 600 men and women from the airfield camp had to sort the clothing of the Jews murdered at Majdanek.
Then, the women were deported to Auschwitz and murdered in the gas chambers.
The men had to cremate the bodies, and they were either murdered or recruited into Sonderkommando 1005. Witnesses recalled that for months, the stench of burning flesh hung around the vicinity. The ditches were filled with soil and levelled.
I cannot remember all of the 43,000 souls murdered, but I can remember one—Fanny Landsmann was born in Gelsenkirchen, Germany (near the Dutch border). She was murdered on 1 November 1924 in Majdanek, Lublin. She reached 19 years of age.
Sources
https://www.joodsmonument.nl/en/page/221947/fanny-landsmann
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/aktion-erntefest-operation-harvest-festival
http://www.camps.bbk.ac.uk/documents/082-majdanek.html
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