L’Aktion Reinhardt à la lumière de l’historiographie

Abstract

The mass murder of the Jews in the General Governement never earned as much attention by historians as Auschwitz. Nevertheless important publications were published by Polish-Jewish historians up til the 1960s, but widely ignored by western historiography. A similar fate occurred to the early research of Israeli historiography. Only during the 1980s international research developed, and after the opening of Eastern European archives and post-war investigation files it was possible to reconstruct and analyse “Aktion Reinhardt” in-depth. Nevertheless, due to the lack of broad documentation, there are still blank spots in the field, for example on the history of the three extermination camps, but also on lots of ghettos and forced labor camps, especially in victim perspective.