Die „Aktion Reinhardt“. Die Vernichtung der polnischen Juden in Bezirk Białystok in den Jahren 1942–1943

Abstract

In 2022 we celebrated 80. years when the German plan „to solve the Jewish question” was conducted in „Reinhardt Action”. Its realisation resulted in the genocide of the Polish Jews. The problem addressed in the following article is an attempt to summarise the previous research on the extermination of the Jews in Bialystok and its surroundings. Szymon Datner, Bernd Mark, Waldemar Monkiewicz, Daniel Boćkowski and Ewa Rogalewska dealt with the issue of extermination in this area. It is also important to analyse the events on the basis of the sources of the Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw (hereafter AŻIH), the Federal Archives in Berlin (hereafter BArch) and many diaries and memoirs published after 1945. The author divided the „Reinherdt Action” carried out by the German persecutors into two intensified stages: The first was the eradication of the areas in the Białystok region and the transport of healthy and able-bodied people to the main ghettos – Zambra, Prusjan, Augustów and Białystok; the second stage was the systematic continuation of extermination to the death camps Treblinka, Auschwitz, Majdanek. After these actions, the region of Bialystok became – in the jargon of German linguistics – a place „cleansed“ of Jews (Juden free).