Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience

Aktion Reinhardt was the Nazi operation to exterminate Polish Jews, named after Reinhard Heydrich, one of the Holocaust’s architects. This operation, which spanned from October 1941 to November 1943, marked the deadliest phase of the Holocaust, during which the Nazis murdered an estimated 2 million Jews. This saw the establishment of four camps in Poland used exclusively for murder: Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka. As the commandant of Sobibor for two months and Treblinka for almost its entire operation, Stangl likely oversaw the murder of 1.3 million Jews. His organizational zeal played an outsize role in increasing the killing efficiency at Sobibor and Treblinka, both of which were in disarray before his command.

The Nazis introduced extermination camps in 1941 under Aktion Reinhardt as camps designed solely for the systematic murder of Jews. In contrast to concentration camps, in which prisoners were worked to death (or immediately gassed if they were deemed unfit for work), all prisoners at extermination camps were gassed within hours of arrival. The only people who weren’t immediately killed were the few Jews selected to sort the goods plundered from the other prisoners. Only 87 people sent to these camps during their 17-month operation survived—between 1941 and 1943, an estimated 2 million Jews were murdered in the camps.

The Final Solution was the Nazi euphemism for their overarching plan to exterminate European Jewry. The “solution” referred to “the Jewish question,” or “Jewish problem”—a debate in 19th and 20th-century European society about the place of Jews in Europe. Nazi leadership secretly decided on the Final Solution in 1941 after dismissing less-extreme alternatives.

Named for the address of its secret headquarters in Berlin, Tiergartenstrasse 4, the T4 “euthanasia” program was the systematic murder of people with mental and physical disabilities in Nazi Germany. The nominal aim of the program was to improve the “health” of the nation.

The T4 euthanasia program was in some ways a precursor to the Holocaust. T4 doctors developed gas chambers as a killing method, which the SS would later use at concentration and extermination camps. All of the SS men assigned to extermination camps had previously worked in SS security units at one of the euthanasia institutes.

During the official run of the program from 1939 to 1941, an estimated 90,000 Germans were murdered at numerous facilities across Germany. Stangl administered one of these facilities, Schloss Hartheim, and helped close another, Bernburg, after Hitler ordered T4 officially stopped in 1941. Unofficially, this campaign of forced euthanasia continued in Germany and its occupied territories until the end of the war, killing an estimated 250,000 people.

The Treblinka extermination camp, also known as Treblinka II, was a Nazi extermination camp in rural Poland. It’s estimated that 1.2 million Jews were murdered there, making it the largest and deadliest of the extermination camps. Stangl was largely responsible for making the camp so efficient at killing after he assumed command in 1942; his organizational zeal and managerial talent dramatically increased the number of people the camp was capable of killing and burning in a day. At Treblinka, Stangl received an official commendation as the best extermination camp commandant.

In August 1943, the Jewish workers at Treblinka (who the SS spared to sort the vast quantities of plundered goods) revolted, damaging much of the camp. By this time, the Nazis had already murdered almost all of the Polish Jews, and Treblinka was obliterated months later to destroy evidence of the crimes.