A quarter of all victims of the Holocaust lost their lives in just three months – in the course of the “Aktion Reinhard”. The findings of a study by Lewi Stone, Professor of Mathematical biology at Tel Aviv University and RMIT University in Melbourne, which has now been published in the scientific magazine “Science”. Accordingly, the historical research has underestimated the Aktion Reinhard, so far, not least because the Nazis wanted to keep the Operation secret and all the documents it destroyed and only a few witnesses survived.
With the action Reinhard should be destroyed all the Jews and Roma in the Generalgouvernement, i.e. the German-occupied Poland and the Ukraine. The action began in March 1942 and lasted 21 months, until November 1943. In the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were set up gas chambers, which made the industrial mass murder possible in the first place – together with the rail network and the efficiency of the railway, about 1.4 million workers such as Stone highlights.
most were within three months
killed While it is already known that in the case of the Aktion Reinhard, a total of about 1.7 million Jews were murdered, Stone, show that most of them died in just three months, in August, September and October 1942. Alone in August and September, Nazi Germany had gassed nearly half a million people, or shot. This Stone is based on data from the Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad, the statistics of the reichsbahn, as well as data from the three extermination camps.
The action Reinhard has not been according to the Stone so only the largest murder action during the Holocaust. She was also been carried out very much faster than previously thought. The high speed is especially after Himmler’s order of March 19. July 1942 was a beat that already by December of 1942, all the Jews should be destroyed in the territory of the General government. From the 22. July rise in the Numbers of the deportees, with the beginning of resolution of the Warsaw ghetto.
In the extermination camp is far more transports than in the past
The calculations are close to the testimony of Rudolf Reder from the year 1944. Reder was one of the few Survivors of Belzec. He said that it had arrived in September, October and November of 1942, far more transports than before, sometimes three times a day, 50 cars had arrived, each with a hundred prisoners. At least 10,000 victims a day were killed.
Stone writes, the high pace of destruction have done to the Jews is also impossible to organize resistance. In December 1942 the number of deportees to fall. Because many of the Jews in the occupied territories, it was difficult, so many people to drive in the bearing. The Nazis decided to destroy the remaining European Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The Holocaust as a singular event
The scientists, politicians, or scientists is the often-repeated claim that no genocide of the 20th century. Century, so many people had been so quickly killed, as in Rwanda in 1994, is after all not tenable, writes Stone. In Rwanda, about 800,000 Tutsi were murdered, 75 percent of their share of the population, within 100 days, so about 243.300 per month, he says. The action Reinhard were, however, 100 days 1.47 million to the victims, 445.700 per month. The murder rate was therefore 83 percent of the in Rwanda. This is particularly noteworthy, because the Tutsi had been concentrated during the genocide are already on a relative small area, while the Jews had to be brought in the Holocaust only from outlying areas to the extermination camps.
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book about Auschwitz In the innermost circle of hell
Bernhard Schulz
The Holocaust remain so not only in terms of the total number of his victims, but also in terms of the intensity of the destruction is different as a common and unchallenged a singular event, says Stone.
