The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Revised and Expanded Edition: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka

By Yitzhak Arad

Under the code name Operation Reinhard, more than one and a half million Jews were murdered between 1942 and 1943 in the concentration camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, located in Nazi-occupied Poland. Unlike more well-known camps, which were used both for slave labor and extermination, these camps existed purely to murder Jews. Few victims survived to tell their stories, and the camps were largely forgotten after they were dismantled in 1943. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps bears eloquent witness to this horrific tragedy.

This newly revised and expanded edition includes new material on the history of the Jews under German occupation in Poland; the execution and timing of Operation Reinhard; information about the ghettos in Lublin, Warsaw, Krakow, Radom, and Galicia; and updated numbers of the victims who were murdered during deportations. In addition to documenting the horror of the camps, Yitzhak Arad recounts the stories of those courageous enough to struggle against the Nazis and their "final solution." Arad's work retrieves the experiences of Operation Reinhard's victims and survivors from obscurity and exposes a terrible chapter in humanity's history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Release date: Jul 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9780253025791

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Reviews for The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Revised and Expanded Edition

[Peter Gaffney · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Every single person on Earth should be required to read this book. It captures in powerful, chilling, terrifying detail the utter inhumanity of the Nazi death machine that was unleashed on the Jews of Europe in the 1940s. Many awful and terrible things have been inflicted by human beings on each other throughout history, genocide included. Arad's study of these three Nazi extermination camps will help you understand why the Holocaust is unique and incomparable in its scale, brutality and psychopathic cruelty. He is painfully honest, too, about the varying degrees of complicity that ordinary people in Germany, Poland and other countries - as well as the military and political leaders of the Western Allies - had in letting this unspeakable crime unfold. It will challenge you hard to reflect on how the Holocaust happened and the role we all have in making sure nothing like it can ever happen again.

[karl6steel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Highly praised in all reviews, and deservedly so, Arad's book is notable both for its intercalation of primary documents into his narrative and for his condemnations of Western Powers, the Poles, and the Armia Krajowa for their indifference to and oftentimes active collusion in operations of Poland's ghettos and death camps. It virtually concludes with a record of the Poles returning to the grounds of Treblinka in November 1945 to dig in the ground at the cremated remains of hundreds of thousands of Jews, madly looking for concealed diamonds and gold.

A good introduction, then, for scholars (and probably intelligent non-scholars) introducing themselves to Holocaust scholarship.

[aulsmith · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book changed my entire view of the Holocaust. Until I read it, I was only really familiar with Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was both a labor and an extermination camp. While that was horrible enough, I also knew that some folks survived, which made things seem some how bearable. However, these three camps were completely extermination camps. Except for a few people needed to do things like retrieve gold from teeth, everyone who was shipped to these camps was gassed. The brutal mechanization and utter unsurvivability of the system finally penetrated my brain. I can't recommend this book enough to anyone not yet aware of the horror this time.