Sara Berger, Experten der Vernichtung.Das T4-Reinhardt-Netzwerk in den Lagern Belzec, Sobibor und Treblinka (Review in English)

Experten der Vernichtung. Das T4-Reinhardt-Netzwerk in den Lagern Belzec, Sobibor und Treblinka. By Sara Berger. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. 2013. 622 pp. € 28 (paperback).

During World War II, over one and a half million Jews were murdered in the three extermination camps of Operation Reinhard: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Indeed, these death factories figure prominently in the history of the Holocaust. Yet while there are a seemingly endless number of publications available on Auschwitz, researchers have largely neglected the three extermination camps of Operation Reinhard. Until recently, the more than 25-year-old standard work by Yitzhak Arad was the only high-quality monograph on the subject. That changed in 2013 with the release of a study by the recently deceased Polish historian Robert Kuwalek on the Belzec extermination camp and, that very same year, the publication of Sara Berger's work, which is based on a dissertation submitted to the University of Bochum, and is the subject of this review.
Berger's study focuses on the perpetrators in the three camps. She thus joins the ranks of a new generation of researchers seeking to shed light on the perpetrators of National Socialism (neue Täterforschung), and expands on this approach with a convincing use of the analytic tools of social science network research. This results in a collective biography of the 121 men, whom Berger identifies as the core of the Operation Reinhard network. Berger looks beyond the actions of the perpetrators in the three camps and conducts extensive research into what these men did before and after the war. What's more, she examines the history of the camps, producing research that often goes beyond the level previously achieved by Arad.
When Germany attacked the Soviet Union and immediately began to carry out mass executions of the Jewish population there, high-ranking Nazi officials realized that they could soon launch plans for the wide-scale murder of Polish Jews. According to Berger, by the fall of 1941 it was no longer a question of whether they would be murdered, but rather of when it would be done and what methods were to be used (p. 26). After Himmler personally witnessed a mass execution in August 1941, he issued an order to explore alternative killing methods. The General Government also urged a number of the German occupiers to push ahead and swiftly murder the local Jewish population. The SS leader and police chief of the Lublin district, Odilo Globocnik, particularly excelled in this respect. In mid-October 1944, Globocnik presumably reached an agreement with Himmler on the construction of an extermination camp. A few days later, the Chancellery of the Führer transferred the first men assigned to the so-called Operation T4, in which CO2 gas was used to murder thousands of patients from medical institutions in the Lublin district. Ever since Hitler announced the end of his euthanasia program in August 1941, the killing experts had a good deal of time on their hands, and both they and their superiors were looking for new avenues for their notorious skills. They found these in occupied Poland and, by mid-1942, 51 members of Operation T4 had been transferred to establish the three extermination camps of Operation Reinhard. At the same time, Globocnik set up the Trawniki training camp, where primarily Soviet POWs were trained as guards, creating a labor pool for the majority of the recruits who later worked in the three extermination camps.
As the first of the three extermination camps, Belzec went into operation in the spring of 1942. Fourteen T4 men had built the camp with the help of Trawniki men and local builders and, following a number of tests with various killing methods, decided to use engine exhaust to murder their victims. From mid-March to mid April 1942, the first deportation trains arrived and, within just four weeks, the relatively small staff managed to murder 70,000 Jewish people. Despite a range of setbacks and problems, in the eyes of top-ranking officials the method was a success. A number of staff members from Belzec were then transferred to Sobibor and Treblinka to direct the establishment of these new extermination camps based on the experience gathered in Belzec. The killers further refined their techniques and, by June 1942, all three camps were ready for operation. They were now available for Operation Reinhard, which aimed to systematically murder the Jews and Roma under the area controlled by the General Government. Within the scope of this operation, from July 1942 to October 1943, the German occupiers killed approximately 2 million Jews and 50,000 Roma, the majority of whom perished within the newly established camps. By the end of the year 1942 alone, over 1.2 million people were killed there. When the number of deaths subsequently dropped, Globocnik closed Belzec. By contrast, Sobibor and Treblinka were assigned additional responsibilities, such as managing the Jewish forced labor camps in the area. However, in view of the primacy of killing, the forced labor camps were of little use and the extermination camps had served their purpose, which explains why they were closed in the fall of 1943.
The closure of the camps occurred during the period in which Italy and the Allies signed a ceasefire and German troops occupied Italy. On September 13, 1943, Globocnik was appointed higher SS leader and police chief for the "Adriatic coast," with his headquarters located in his native city of Trieste. Seventy-eight T4-Reinhard men were then transferred to Italy, where they were used in the campaign against partisans, but also for the persecution of Italian Jews. Of the 121 men in the network, at least 44 had died by the time the courts began to address the legal consequences of their actions. Of the remaining 77, only 27 were ultimately put on trial. West German courts handed down lifetime sentences to nine of them, 10 received limited prison terms, seven were acquitted and one defendant committed suicide while in custody.
The book's appendix includes brief biographies of the T4-Reinhard men and tables that show all documented deportations to the three camps, along with their respective numbers of victims. The book also has an excellent selection of diagrams, tables, photos and maps. The sole shortcoming here is the lack of a registry, which would have definitely enhanced the book.
All in all, this is an outstandingly well sourced, comprehensive and methodically meticulous work. The only real criticism that comes to mind is that the author occasionally goes a bit too far in her attacks against the old proponents of the polycracy theory and their emphasis on the counter-productivity and inefficiency of the National Socialist regime. Hence, virtually everything is portrayed as efficient. By the same token, nearly every paragraph in the final chapter contains the word "efficient" at least once, but a precise definition of the term is not given in the book. This remains, however, a rather marginal objection to a thoroughly successful study, which is likely to remain the new standard work on the three extermination camps of Operation Reinhard for many years to come.

Marc Buggeln (Berlin)