Operation Reinhard was the codename of the secret World War 2 plan to exterminate Poland's Jews in the General Government of Poland, the German occupation zone. Operation Reinhard was the deadliest phase of the beginning of the extermination camps.

The first concentration camps in Nazi Germany were made in 1933 as the National Socialist regime came into power. They were used for forced labor enslavement and as prisons, not for systematic killing.

After the war began, Nazis formed the Final Solution to the Jewish people. In January 1942, at a secret meeting with selected representatives of the SS and chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, Operation Reinhard was drafted to outline the systematic killing of Jews in Europe. This meeting was later termed the Wannsee Conference.

Within 3 months there were 3 camps, before they became death camps filled with ashes. 2,000,000 Jews were sent to Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, all located in the General Government, to be killed in the gas chambers. Unlike other camps, the Operation Reinhard camps kept no prisoners; the sole reason for Operation Reinhard was pure murder on a large scale.

It is fitting that the camps were named after Reinhard Heydrich, the coordinator of the Endlosung der Judenfrage (The Final Solution of the Jewish Question) which entailed the exterminations of the Jews living in Europe and Germany. It is perhaps also fitting that Heydrich died of wounds inflicted during an assassination attempt in May 1942.

Operation Reinhard ended in November 1943. Most of the staff and guards were sent to Northern Italy for further Aktion against Jews and local politicians. Odilo Globocnik, a leader of the Operation Reinhard camps, went to San Sabba, a new concentration camp in northern Italy where he supervised the detention, torture and killing of political prisoners. After the war, some of the SS officers and guards were tried and sentenced at the Nuremberg trials for their role in Operation Reinhard. Globocnik escaped trial by biting on a cyanide tablet after his arrest and before he could be questioned. However, many others escaped conviction such as Ernst Lerch, Globocnik's deputy and chief of his main office, whose case was dropped for lack of witness testimony.

Text by Miguel Nuncio