Aktion Reinhard or Aktion Reinhardt; alsoknown as Einsatz Reinhard or Einsatz Reinhardt
Operation Reinhard or Operation Reinhardt was the codename of the secret German plan in WW2 to exterminate Polish Jews in the General Gouvernement district of German-occupied Poland & this deadliest phase of the Holocaust was marked by the introduction of extermination camps - Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka. The operation proceeded from March 1942 to November 1943; about 1.47 million or more Jews were murdered in just 100-days from late July to early November 1942;
July to October 1942, the overall death toll, including all killings of Jews and not just carbon monoxide gassings of Operation Reinhard, amounted to over 2-million killed in those 4-months alone.
No totals for those murdered are accurate - as it will never be known.
People were deliberately exterminated in the freight wagons, (exposure, starvation, lack of water) on the way to the mass-murder destinations and some freight wagons never made it to their destinations as the cadavers of those transported were disposed of enroute.
All these Reinhard murder sites looked more like temporary builders yards, with rail sidings, built in forests and that is what they were: constructed for expediency, to efficiently murder tens of thousands of Jews every day from the Generalgouvernement and elsewhere, whereas the fixed sites like Majdanek & Auschwitz II-Birkenau KL, near Auschwitz I KL initially operated as forced-labour camps were planned to be more longterm facilities.
Reinhard murder sites were staffed predominantly by German personnel from the “euthanasia” Aktion T4 programme ending in August 1941, during which more than 70,000 Polish and German disabled men, women, and children were murdered. The SS officers responsible for the Aktion T4, including Christian Wirth, Franz Stangl, and Irmfried Eberl, were all given key roles in the implementation of the “Final Solution” of the Reinhard murder sites which was managed out of an HQ in Lublin. 13 October 1941, SS and Police Leader Odilo Globočnik received an oral order from Himmler – anticipating the fall of Moscow – to begin the construction of the first extermination camp at Bełżec (operational from March 17, 1942. The murder facilities were to be self-funding paid for by the personal effects and clothing brought by those unfortunate murder victims - they returned a huge profit