The goal of the project was to hide or destroy any evidence of the mass murder that had taken place under Operation Reinhard, the attempted (and largely successful)[1] extermination of all Jews in the General Government occupied zone of Poland.

Groups of Sonderkommando prisoners, officially called Leichenkommandos ("corpse units"), were forced to exhume mass graves and burn the bodies; inmates were often put in chains to prevent them from escaping.

[6][7] Meanwhile, the secret orders to exhume mass graves and instead to burn the hundreds of thousands of victims came directly from the Nazi leadership in April.

[8][9] The corpses that had been buried at Treblinka with the use of a crawler excavator were dug up and cremated on the orders of Heinrich Himmler himself, who visited the camp in March 1943.

[11] The operation also returned to the scenes of earlier mass killings such as Babi Yar, Ponary, the Ninth Fort,[2] and Bronna Góra.

[12] By 1944, with Soviet armies advancing, Wilhelm Koppe, head of the Reichsgau Wartheland, ordered that each of the five districts of General Government territory set up its own Aktion 1005 commando to begin "cleaning" mass graves.

[2] At the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, a deputy of Adolf Eichmann, Dieter Wisliceny, gave the following testimony on Aktion 1005:[13] In November 1942, in Eichmann's office in Berlin, I met Standartenfuehrer Plobel [sic], who was leader of Kommando 1005, which was specially assigned to remove all traces of the final solution of the Jewish problem by Einsatz Groups and all other executions.

The mission was constituted after it first became apparent that Germany would not be able to hold all the territory occupied in the East and it was considered necessary to remove all traces of the criminal executions that had been committed.

While in Berlin in November 1942, Plobel [sic] gave a lecture before Eichmann's staff of specialists on the Jewish question from the occupied territories.