[10] The organizational apparatus behind the new extermination plan had been put to the test already during the "euthanasia" Aktion T4 programme ending in August 1941, during which more than 70,000 Polish and German disabled men, women, and children were murdered.

[11] The SS officers responsible for the Aktion T4, including Christian Wirth, Franz Stangl, and Irmfried Eberl, were all given key roles in the implementation of the "Final Solution" in 1942.

[13] It is generally believed that Aktion Reinhardt, outlined at the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, was named after Reinhard Heydrich, the coordinator of the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish Question, which entailed the extermination of the Jews living in the European countries occupied by Nazi Germany.

[13] On 13 October 1941, SS and Police Leader Odilo Globočnik headquartered in Lublin received an oral order from Himmler – anticipating the fall of Moscow – to begin the construction of the first extermination camp at Bełżec in the General Government territory of occupied Poland.

All the secret orders he received came directly from Himmler and not from SS-Gruppenführer Richard Glücks, head of the greater Nazi concentration camp system, which was run by the SS-Totenkopfverbände and engaged in slave labour for the war effort.

[21] The SS pumped exhaust fumes from a large internal-combustion engines through long pipes into sealed rooms, murdering the people inside by carbon monoxide poisoning.

With two powerful engines,[a] run by SS-Scharführer Erich Fuchs,[21] and the gas chambers soon rebuilt of bricks and mortar, this death factory had murdered between 800,000 and 1,200,000 people within 15 months, disposed of their bodies, and sorted their belongings for shipment to Germany.

The use of gas vans had been previously tried and tested in the mass murder of Polish prisoners at Soldau,[32] and in the extermination of Jews on the Russian Front by the Einsatzgruppen.

[36] Each camp had an unloading ramp at a fake railway station, as well as a reception area that contained undressing barracks, barber shops, and money depositories.

Beyond the receiving zone, at each camp was a narrow, camouflaged path known as the Road to Heaven (called Himmelfahrtsstraße or der Schlauch by the SS),[37] which led to the extermination zone consisting of gas chambers, and the burial pits, up to 10 metres (33 ft) deep, later replaced by cremation pyres with rails laid across the pits on concrete blocks; refuelled continuously by the Totenjuden.

Both Treblinka and Bełżec were equipped with powerful crawler excavators from Polish construction sites in the vicinity, capable of most digging tasks without disrupting surfaces.

[40] The killing centres had no electric fences, as the size of the prisoner Sonderkommandos (work units) remained comparatively easy to control – unlike in camps such as Dachau and Auschwitz.

To assist with the arriving transports only specialised squads were kept alive, removing and disposing of bodies, and sorting property and valuables from the dead victims.

[41] During Operation Reinhard, Globočnik oversaw the systematic murder of more than 2,000,000 Jews from Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, the Reich (Germany and Austria), the Netherlands, Greece, Hungary, Italy and the Soviet Union.

This element had been developed in Aktion T4, when disabled and handicapped people were taken away for "special treatment" by the SS from "Gekrat" wearing white laboratory coats, thus giving the process an air of medical authenticity.

Mass deportations were called "resettlement actions"; they were organised by special Commissioners and conducted by uniformed police battalions from Orpo and Schupo in an atmosphere of terror.

[47] Even though death in the cattle cars from suffocation and thirst was rampant, affecting up to 20 percent of trainloads, most victims were willing to believe that the German intentions were different.

Once in the changing area, the men and boys were separated from the women and children and everyone was ordered to disrobe for a communal bath: "quickly – they were told – or the water will get cold".

[55] Although other methods of extermination, such as the cyanic poison Zyklon B, were already in use at other Nazi killing centres such as Auschwitz, the Aktion Reinhard camps used lethal exhaust gases from captured Soviet tank engines.

Reinhard still left a paper trail; in January 1943, Bletchley Park intercepted an SS telegram by SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle, Globočnik's deputy in Lublin, to SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in Berlin.

[66] Around March 1942, while the first extermination camp (Bełżec) began gassing, the deportation trains arriving in the Lublin reservation from Germany and Slovakia were searched for the Jewish skilled workers.

To cover up the mass murder of more than two million people in Poland during Operation Reinhard, the Nazis implemented the secret Sonderaktion 1005, also called Aktion 1005 or Enterdungsaktion ("exhumation action").

Leichenkommando ("corpse units") comprising camp prisoners were created to exhume mass graves and cremate the buried bodies, using giant grills made from wood and railway tracks.

Many others escaped conviction, such as Ernst Lerch, Globočnik's deputy and chief of his Main Office, whose case was dropped for lack of witness testimony.