Operation Harvest Festival

3 November 1943, at dawn

At dawn on 3 November 1943, German SS and police units began Aktion Erntefest, an operation to murder the remaining Jewish forced labourers in the Lublin district of German-occupied Poland.

At Majdanek, German personnel separated Jewish prisoners from non-Jews, marched them to trenches prepared behind the camp, and shot them.

Loudspeakers played music at Majdanek and Trawniki to mask the gunfire and the victims' screams.

Three camps, two days

The killings at Majdanek and Trawniki were completed on 3 November; the massacre at Poniatowa continued or principally occurred on 4 November. The victims were Jewish prisoners from Majdanek, Trawniki, Dorohucza and other Lublin-area labour camps, shot in pits prepared for the operation.

Approximately 18,000 people were shot at Majdanek on 3 November — the largest mass execution in the history of the German concentration-camp system, according to the Majdanek Museum. At least 6,000 more were murdered at Trawniki and Dorohucza the same day.

Why Himmler ordered it

After armed Jewish resistance at Warsaw, Białystok and Treblinka, and especially the October 1943 Sobibór uprising, Himmler ordered the remaining Jewish forced labourers in the Lublin district murdered to prevent further resistance.

The shootings were carried out by German SS and police units with Trawniki-trained auxiliaries — police recruited largely from Soviet prisoners of war and trained under SS authority, not simply local volunteers of one nationality.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the State Museum at Majdanek put the two-day toll at approximately 42,000, the largest German-perpetrated mass-shooting operation of the Holocaust.