page_title: Operation Reinhard
section_title: Operational name
hierarchical_section_title: Operation Reinhard / Operational name
context_page_description: Operation Reinhard or Operation Reinhardt was the codename of the secretive German plan in World War II to exterminate Jewish Poles in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland. This deadliest phase of the Holocaust was marked by the introduction of extermination camps.
  As many as two million Jews were sent to Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka to be put to death in purpose-built gas chambers. In addition, mass-killing facilities, using Zyklon B, were developed at about the same time at the Majdanek concentration camp and at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, near the earlier-established Auschwitz I camp for ethnically Polish prisoners.
context_section_description: The origin of the operation's name is debated by Holocaust researchers. Various German documents spell the name differently, some with "t" after "d" (as in "Aktion Reinhardt"), others without it. Yet another spelling (Einsatz Reinhart) was used in the Höfle Telegram. It is generally believed that Aktion Reinhardt, outlined at the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, was named after Reinhard Heydrich, the coordinator of the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish Question, which entailed the extermination of the Jews living in the European countries occupied by Nazi Germany. Heydrich was attacked by British-trained Czechoslovakian agents on 27 May 1942 and died of his injuries eight days later. The earliest memo spelling out Einsatz Reinhard was relayed two months later.
caption: Reinhard Heydrich, ca. 1940/41
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