On 3 November 1943, Nazi German SS and police forces began the systematic murder of tens of thousands of Jewish prisoners in the Lublin district of occupied Poland.
Within two days, more than 42,000 Jewish men, women and children had been killed at three locations: the Majdanek concentration camp and the forced-labour camps at Trawniki and Poniatowa.
The operation was given the German codename Erntefest, meaning “Harvest Festival”.
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It became the largest coordinated mass-shooting operation of the Holocaust and marked the final major phase of Operation Reinhard, Nazi Germany’s programme to murder the Jewish population of the General Government, the central and southern territories of Poland under German occupation.
Eighty-three years later, the massacre remains one of the most significant atrocities committed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
The decision to murder the remaining prisoners
By autumn 1943, Nazi Germany had already murdered most of the Jewish population of the General Government.
The extermination camps at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka had been central to Operation Reinhard, which began in 1942.
However, tens of thousands of Jews remained alive in forced-labour camps, particularly in the Lublin district.
Many had survived earlier deportations because German authorities considered their labour useful for military production and other economic activities.
Among them were Jewish survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, who had been deported to camps in the Lublin region following the destruction of the ghetto in spring 1943.
The German leadership increasingly feared further armed resistance.
Jewish prisoners had staged uprisings at the Treblinka extermination camp in August 1943 and at Sobibór on 14 October.
Against this background, SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the killing of the remaining Jewish forced labourers in the Lublin district.
The decision reflected Nazi Germany’s determination to complete the destruction of Jewish communities, including those people whom the occupation authorities had previously kept alive for labour.
Responsibility for coordinating the operation in the district fell to Jakob Sporrenberg, the SS and police commander in Lublin.
Preparations were made secretly, with SS and police units brought in from several locations.
3 November: mass murder at Majdanek
The killings began on the morning of 3 November 1943.
At Majdanek, a German concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin, armed SS and police units surrounded the camp.
During morning roll calls, Jewish prisoners were separated from those of other nationalities.
They were taken towards prisoner field V, near the camp’s crematorium.
In the preceding days, prisoners had been ordered to dig large trenches in this area.
The SS claimed that these excavations were intended for protection against air raids or military attacks.
In reality, they had been prepared as execution pits.
Jewish prisoners were forced to surrender their belongings and clothing before being marched to the trenches, where German personnel shot them in successive groups.
The killings continued for hours.
According to the State Museum at Majdanek, more than 18,000 Jewish prisoners were murdered there on that single day.
The victims included people already imprisoned at Majdanek and others brought from forced-labour camps and detention facilities elsewhere in Lublin.
The massacre was the largest single-day killing operation at one location in the history of the Holocaust.
German authorities attempted to conceal what was happening.
Vehicles equipped with loudspeakers were positioned around the camp, while additional speakers were installed on guard towers.
Marches and dance music were played at high volume throughout the executions, intended to drown out the gunfire and cries of the victims.
Non-Jewish prisoners were ordered to remain inside their barracks.
Nevertheless, witnesses later described how news of the mass shootings spread through the camp.
Among them was Polish prisoner Henryk Nieścior, whose recollections were subsequently documented by the State Museum at Majdanek.
Survivors remembered 3 November as Krwawa Środa — Bloody Wednesday.
Trawniki and Poniatowa: the killings beyond Lublin
The massacre was not confined to Majdanek.
On the same day, German SS and police forces carried out mass executions at the Trawniki forced-labour camp, approximately 30 kilometres southeast of Lublin.
Jewish prisoners were taken to prepared pits and shot.
As at Majdanek, loud music was used to conceal the sounds of the killings.
The operation also targeted Poniatowa, west of Lublin, where thousands of Jewish prisoners had been employed in industrial workshops, including facilities transferred from Warsaw.
The executions there continued into 4 November.
The precise distribution of victims between the three principal locations remains subject to differing historical estimates.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that between 11,000 and 16,000 Jews were killed at Poniatowa and between 4,000 and 6,000 at Trawniki.
The State Museum at Majdanek records more than 42,000 Jewish people murdered across all three locations on 3–4 November.
These figures represent the combined death toll of the operation, not the number killed at Majdanek alone.
The killings constituted the largest coordinated German mass-shooting operation of the Holocaust.
Destroying the evidence and silencing witnesses
The perpetrators also attempted to conceal the scale of their crimes.
Following the massacre at Majdanek, a group of approximately 300 Jewish men was temporarily kept alive and assigned to dispose of victims’ bodies.
They were forced to work as part of the German operation to destroy evidence of mass murder, known as Sonderaktion 1005.
Most were subsequently murdered.
A small number managed to escape and survive.
Among them was Józef Reznik, who escaped from a forced-labour detachment near Chełm in February 1944.
Other prisoners were also temporarily spared for specific tasks, including sorting belongings taken from the victims.
Their survival was generally temporary, and many were later murdered.
The State Museum at Majdanek has documented the experience of Estera Kerzner, one of the women initially spared, who ultimately survived the Holocaust.
The small number of witnesses who survived, together with post-war investigations and German perpetrators’ testimony, helped establish the circumstances of the operation.
Remembering more than 42,000 victims
Operation Erntefest brought the systematic murder of Jews in the Lublin district to its final major stage.
It also marked the conclusion of Operation Reinhard, under which Nazi Germany had murdered approximately 1.7 million Jews in German-occupied Poland.
Although most of the victims of Erntefest were murdered within two days, the operation followed years of persecution, deportation, forced labour and the destruction of Jewish communities.
Many of those killed had already survived earlier German attempts to murder them.
Their names and individual histories are not all known.
Today, the State Museum at Majdanek preserves the former camp grounds, including the site of the execution trenches, and commemorates the victims of Erntefest.
The killings at Trawniki and Poniatowa are also remembered as part of the same coordinated German operation.
The anniversary recalls not only the scale of the murders but the deliberate organisation behind them: the orders issued, the forces assembled, the trenches prepared and the systematic killing of prisoners across three locations.
On 3 and 4 November 1943, more than 42,000 people were murdered because they were Jewish.
Their deaths remain part of the documented history of the Holocaust and of Nazi Germany’s occupation of Poland.
