The Izbica ghetto was a Jewish ghetto created by Nazi Germany in Izbica in occupied Poland during World War II, serving as a transfer point for deportation of Jews from Poland, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to Bełżec and Sobibór extermination camps.
Between March and May 1942, approximately 12,000 to 15,000 new Jews were transported to Izbica from across Europe as part of secretive Operation Reinhard; among them engineers, doctors, economists, army generals and professors from Vienna, The Hague, Heidelberg and Breslau, including the vice-president of Prague.
[1] The foreigners, many of whom were proficient in German, had an easier time identifying with their Nazi oppressors than the Polish Jews from inside the ghetto.
The entire ghetto in Izbica was liquidated beginning November 2, 1942,[4] which led to a week of horrific killings at the cemetery.
Several thousand Jews (estimated at 4,500)[5] were massacred by the Sonderdienst battalion of Ukrainian Trawnikis in an assembly-line-style, and dumped into hastily dug mass graves.