"... in the summer of 1943, Himmler issued an order to Gauleiter Erich Kock, the head of the Bialystok General District, and to the local commander of the Security Police to liquidate the Bialystok ghetto and deport its inhabitants to the General Government. [Civilian and army authorities argued that the Jews were vital to the war economy]. But Himmler did not accept this argument. He order the immediate implementation of the deportation, and, as he no longer relied on the local German authorities, he entrusted the mission to the Operation Reinhard staff and the police forces subordinate to them. Globocnik personally came to Bialystok to coordinate the liquidation of the ghetto with the local German authorities. <1>

"The deportations were carried out on August 18-19, 1943. From Bialystok 7,600 Jews were sent to Treblinka. Some other transports were deported to Majdanek and Auschwitz. The final liquidation of the ghetto met with stiff resistance from the Jewish Underground, which fought back, and many Jews found their death inside the ghetto during this uprising. But the Bialystok ghetto, the last ghetto in the entire district, was finally liquidated. The total number of Jews from ... Bialystok who were deported and murdered in Treblinka came to about 118,000..."

<1> Yad Vashem Archives, TR-10/1112, the Zimmerman trial, Band 1 (1-2), pp. 1-3, testimony of Otto Hellwig

Work Cited

Arad, Yitzhak. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka - the Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Indiana University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-253-3429-7

The original plaintext version of this file is available via ftp.

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