Operation Harvest Festival (German: Aktion Erntefest) was the murder of up to 43,000 Jews at the Majdanek, Poniatowa and Trawniki concentration camps by the SS, the Order Police battalions, and the Ukrainian Sonderdienst on 3–4 November 1943.

Jewish laborers in the camps had to dig zigzag trenches, supposedly for air defense, in late October.

That day, SS and Police Leader Jakob Sporrenberg, who was in charge of the operation, held a conference to plan it.

After finishing the Majdanek operation, several of the involved units proceeded to Poniatowa, where they murdered the camp's 14,500 prisoners on 4 November.

With around 40,000 victims, Operation Harvest Festival was the largest single massacre of Jews by German forces during the Holocaust.

In 1942, 360,000 of the Jews who lived in the Lublin District of the General Governorate of German-occupied Poland were murdered during Operation Reinhard.

[3][4] Although the proximate reason for ordering Harvest Festival is unknown, historians believe that it was in response to the uprising at Sobibór extermination camp on 14 October 1943.

[3] Thousands of the Jewish prisoners in the camps of the Lublin District had been transported there from the Warsaw Ghetto after the failure of the uprising there.

[5][6] To avoid further resistance, Heinrich Himmler decided to exterminate the Jewish prisoners at the Lublin camps in a single decisive blow using overwhelming military force.

[8][7][9] Jewish inmates were ordered to dig zigzag trenches along the perimeter of Majdanek, Poniatowa, and Trawniki concentration camps.

Although the trenches were supposedly for defense against air raids, and their zigzag shape granted some plausibility to this lie, the prisoners guessed their true purpose.

[15] At 5:00 on 3 November 1943, prisoners at Majdanek were awoken as usual in the dark, but the camp had been surrounded by an additional 500 soldiers during the night.

[19] Execution squads of 10–12 men each from police battalions and 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking were waiting,[18] and were replaced every few hours.

[19][16] Local Poles watched from the rooftops of nearby buildings outside the camp,[18][25] while Sporrenberg observed from a Fieseler Storch airplane.

At 5:00 on 3 November, the prisoners were mustered for roll call,[26] rounded up, and marched to the Hiwi training camp, where loudspeakers were playing music beside the trenches.

[21] Many of the SS and police soldiers who had been at Majdanek continued to Poniatowa, about 50 kilometres (30 mi) distant, after the massacre had finished.

[26] Most were held in Hall 3, except 200 prisoners who were temporarily spared at the insistence of commandant Gottlieb Hering, to clean up after the massacre.

Policemen searched the barracks and factory for anyone who was hiding, and then stood guard on both sides of the Lagerstrasse [de] (main avenue) in the camp.

[32][33] One soldier stood at the beginning of the trench with a whip to encourage the Jews to immediately lie down on top of the bodies of those who had already been shot.

Two shooters stood on each of the long sides of the trench, shooting alternately at the victims, each equipped with a bottle of schnapps and an assistant to reload their weapons.

[38] After the German defeat at Stalingrad, Soviet forces recaptured most of Ukraine, Russia, and eastern Belarus by the end of 1943.

Six women had to work in the kitchen while the men were ordered to extract gold teeth and hidden valuables from the corpses.

[49] The SS enterprise Ostindustrie, which employed many of the murdered prisoners, was not informed in advance; the company was liquidated later in the month.

[47] Measured by death count, Harvest Festival was the single largest massacre of Jews by German forces during the Holocaust.

[52] After the war, Sporrenberg was tried, convicted, and executed by a Polish court for his role in organizing the operation, while Pütz committed suicide.