This web portal on the "Operation Reinhard" and its camps provides a wealth of English language documents and information translated mostly into German, including historical written documents, photographic material and maps about the Operation Reinhard. This was the Nazi code name for the "Final Solution" through poison gas in three special death camps set up at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. Between March 1942 and October 1943 and during the "Operation Harvest Festival" on the 3rd and 4th of November 1943, 1.75 million Jews from Poland and other European countries as well as thousands of Sinti and Roma were murdered in the course of Operation Reinhard.
The portal includes individual pages about the death camps at Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka and the Majdanek concentration camp. Pages about the topics "The Lublin Headquarters of the Operation Reinhard", "Euthanasia" and the ghettos are also available.
The topics "Euthanasia", Operation Reinhard and " La Risiera di San Sabba" show the biographies of the perpetrators. SS men like Christian Wirth were murderers of sick people, deemed not worthy to live, at Hadamar and Grafeneck before they started organising the murder of the European Jews. When Operation Reinhard was over, they were deployed to Italy for the annihilation of the Jews in the Trieste Region.
The information provided by the portal is so complex that pupils with no previous information will almost inevitably get lost. However, the web portal can be recommended for the independent research work of senior high level students working on specific research questions, e.g. euthanasia, careers of Nazi perpetrators, collaboration (the so-called Trawniki-men) or research into the history of specific towns in Poland during German occupation. The portal is an important resource for teachers and multipliers as it provides a concise, yet differentiated, analysis of recent research findings on the Operation Reinhard, referring to English, German and Polish publications.
This ressource is available at http://www.deathcamps.org.
