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After the
prisoners’ rebellion at Sobibor made the Germans fearful of
further uprisings, Heinrich Himmler ordered Jakob Sporrenberg, the
senior commander of the SS and the police in the Lublin district, to
liquidate the Jewish forced labor camps. On November 3,
"Operation Erntefest" began, in which 43,000 Jews were
murdered. On November 5, more than 10,000 prisoners in Trawniki were
taken to trenches outside the camp and murdered. On the night of
November 3-4, massive SS forces and a special unit of Auschwitz camp
guards came to the Poniatowa camp with instructions to murder the
prisoners. The prisoners were driven out of the barracks and made to
run in groups to pits that had been readied near the camp. There,
all of them were murdered by machine-gun fire. Some of the prisoners
refused to leave the barracks and put up resistance; the Germans
torched the barracks with their inhabitants inside. The Germans then
attempted to force 200 prisoners to cremate the bodies. They
resisted, refused-and were also murdered. That day, 15,000 Jewish
prisoners were murdered in Poniatowa and 18,000 in Majdanek. |
