Operation Harvest Festival, November 1943

Eighty years ago this month, on Nov. 3, 1943, what was arguably the largest single daylong mass murder operation of Jews to take place over the entirety of World War II happened.

Referred to by the Nazis as Operation Harvest Festival ( Aktion Erntefest ), it was ordered by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler to be a planned operation carried out in direct retaliation for a sequence of resistance activities in concentration camps and ghettos. The plan was put in the hands of SS officers Christian Wirth and Jakob Sporrenberg.

Wirth had already been closely involved in the Nazi “euthanasia” program known as Aktion T4, which murdered tens of thousands of Germans with intellectual and physical disabilities, before being transferred out of the program in the summer of 1941. He was the overall commander of the much larger murder program known as Operation Reinhard, of which Operation Harvest Festival was part.

Sporrenberg was SS and higher police leader (SSPF) in Lublin, Poland and was given the task of overseeing and implementing the mass shooting of Jews during Operation Harvest Festival.

Heinrich Himmler ordered the operation to take place following multiple expressions of resistance throughout the areas of Poland controlled by Germany in which revolts had taken place. Specifically mentioned were revolts at the Sobibór and Treblinka death camps as well as earlier revolts that had taken place in the Warsaw, Białystok and Vilna ghettos. Fearing further Jewish resistance, Operation Harvest Festival was planned and carried out with the intention of crushing any possibility of further resistance.

Operation Harvest Festival began at dawn on Nov. 3, 1943, when the concentration camp at Lublin-Majdanek, together with labor camps at Trawniki and Poniatowa, were surrounded by SS and German police. The inmates were taken out of the camps and shot, their bodies falling into massive ditches. At Majdanek, the operation took place under the watchful eye of an SS noncommissioned officer, Erich Muhsfeldt.

Originally, Muhsfeldt served at Auschwitz in 1940 but was transferred to Majdanek on Nov. 15. 1941. When that camp was liquidated after Operation Harvest Festival, he was transferred back to Auschwitz, where he worked supervising Jewish Sonderkommando prisoners in the gas chamber complex in Crematoria II and III.

At Majdanek, Muhsfeldt oversaw the day’s events on Nov. 3 as the Jews were separated from the rest of the prisoners and taken to be killed. Thus, he was closely involved in the mass shooting of the camp’s Jewish inmates.

During Operation Harvest Festival, the victims were initially ordered to dig massive trenches designed to combat oncoming Soviet tanks, but it was feint; instead, the trenches were used as mass graves. During the mass shootings at both Majdanek and Trawniki, music was played over loudspeakers to drown out the sounds of continuous gunshots. The process was completed in a single day at Majdanek and Trawniki; it took place over two days at Poniatowa, however, owing to prisoner resistance within the camp.

Operation Harvest Festival was responsible for the largest single number of causalities during a mass shooting conducted by the SS, resulting in the death of approximately 43,000 Polish Jews across the three locations. Unquestionably, it destroyed the Jewish population of the Lublin district of German-occupied Poland. It was part of the much larger Operation Reinhard ( Aktion Reinhard ), an organized mass murder of all Polish Jews in Germanoccupied Poland.

After Majdanek had been liquidated, Erich Muhsfeldt was transferred back to Auschwitz. Captured after the war, he was tried for war crimes by the U.S. military, found guilty of committing atrocities at the Flossenbürg concentration camp and sentenced to life in prison. He was, however, extradited to Poland, where he was retried by the Supreme National Tribunal at the Auschwitz Trial in Kraków, and sentenced to death by hanging for crimes against humanity. He was executed on Jan. 24, 1948.

After the war, Jakob Sporrenberg stood trial in Poland. Convicted in 1950 of war crimes and sentenced to death, he was executed in December 1952.

Christian Wirth, the overall commander of Operation Reinhard — of which Operation Harvest Festival was part — was also instrumental in developing what were known as the Operation Reinhard camps (Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka), the extermination camps specifically designed for the purpose of Jewish mass murder. He was killed by Yugoslav Partisans on May 26, 1944 in Hrpelje-Kozina (now part of Slovenia) near Trieste after the conclusion of Operation Reinhard.

It is a sobering reflection that not too much later in far-away Australia, the twelfth anniversary of Operation Harvest Festival coincided with this writer’s day of birth. Placed in this context, the Holocaust remains very much part of an ongoing history.

Paul R. Bartrop is Professor Emeritus of History and the former Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Research at Florida Gulf Coast University.