Talk:Operation Reinhard

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Introduction

Dabljuh, "About 1.700.000 human beings were murdered, most of them Jews" expresses essential facts about the killing. Operation Reinhard was directed against Jews specifically, and while not every person killed was Jewish, most were. So this is an important factual detail to include in the first paragraph.

I believe you are reading meaning into the phrase which is not there. It does not have connotations about the morality of the act; it simply denotes an essential fact.

I'm restoring the post-comma phrase, but leaving "human beings" as "people," which I think both sounds more objectively factual, and may alleviate your concern about the connotations of the sentence.

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During the operation, about 1.700.000 human beings were murdered, most of them Jews.

... Who was the smartass who had the idea to point out that jews are human beings too? I mean seriously, "Oh, as long as most of the human beings were jews".... I'll change it to 1.700.000 people were murdered

====Zyclon-B Re: the last edits. I removed Zykonb B reference. The change of the number of victims comes from the Hoefle telegram and the info about the deportations in Arad's book.

Name of article

[I find this confusing? Was Operation Reinhard the assassination plot? Or was it the death camps? Or something else?]

I hope it is more clear now.

--Korpo

Killing programs

I am not happy with Korpo's conclusion: utilising gas for killing people to abstract the act of killing, goes for the Euthanasia programm (T-4) as well. But that already was done over two years before "Operation Reinhardt". T-4 was clearly the prototype for "Reinhardt", they developed the technology of stationary gas chambers by using carbonmonoxide gas from industrial pressure bottles, they transfered almost all of their male personnell including all commanders to the Reinhardt camps, for economic and transport reasons they adapted their killing method to the situation in the East by choosing petrol (not Diesel) engines of big lorries or tanks to generate the CO gas. If that is so (any scholar known who would object?), are we really entitled to talk about "Aktion Reinhardt" as "the start of an industrialized mass murder formerly not known to mankind"? P. Witte 16:52, 24 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Type of engine

Is there any evidence that petrol engines were used for the gassings? I thought the Russian tank engines (used for stationary gas chambers) and gas vans only used diesel as stated by the witnesses and in other transcribed documents that I have seen referred to.

Gas source

Another little problem. The description of what was the source of the CO in the gas chambers is not clear. Was it bottled CO manufactured elsewhere and pumped in, or was it directly from the exhaust of a stationary diesel engine on a static platform (as it appears to be decribed by Gerstein's account). The description on the page misses these details entirely. Also is the name Reinhard or Reinhardt?

The first vans used CO pumped in from a cylinder, later ones used engine exhaust. The first type was a development from the T4 'euthanasia' program. (sources: Allan Bullock, 'Hitler and Stalin', 1993, p 811 and 821-22). Most of the Reinhard camps used engine exhaust.

The name is properly Reinhard, after Reinhard Heydrich, but is occasionally spelled with a 't' in Nazi documents and elsewhere. --Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 08:58, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

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Where and when did operation Reinhard use Zyklon B? I do not believe it. Can somebody please provide references within in a week. Otherwise I will remove it. Andries 10:32, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Former Version

The former version of this article was rank with casual discourse and misplaced information. Therefore, I have redone most of the text. Someone should go over the information and make sure that nothing important is missing, as I removed a lot of things that just didn't make sense. - Barfooz 08:29, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

(today's value: around 700,000,000 USD or 350,000,000 Euro) This just doesnt add up

I just checked and the current exchange rate is $1.28 for every Euro. So yeah not anywhere near a 2:1 ratio. I would fix this but don't know the correct values. --Petahhhh 23:03, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Not a single citation - only one link ( to a report that seems either unavailable or untranslated, but there was a review of it - totally empty of content ).159.105.80.141 13:01, 11 May 2007 (UTC) The more I look the less I find. The Kaufmann report, thene Hoefle Report, etc all talk about rounding up Jews at best or trnaportation numbers - no smoking gun here. Is there some documentation on Operation Rienhard - it appears most people reading this are required to take a large leap of faith if they want to get into the spirit of the story. The opening sentence of the article says it all - starts with the required acceptance of the idea of code words ( that means no evidence that their even was a nefariuos Operation Reinhard ). Something this central to the holocaust must - has to - have more documentation than this.159.105.80.141 18:05, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

The description of Heydrich's assassins as "Czech underground resistance" people is not quite correct. The assassins were Czech agents trained by the British SOE and infiltrated by them to kill Heydrich. The operation came from outside Czechoslovakia rather than planned inside. The local resistance, when contacted by the agents, tried to dissuade them from the action. Also I wish the "Reinhardt/Reinhard" thing could be settled. I have seen scans of original German documents on the Web, which call it "Reinhardt." If this is the correct spelling, and it seems to be, all Wiki references should be standardized as "Reinhardt." Shirokuma1 05:19, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

Euthanasia?

The use of the term 'euthanasia killing centres' hardly seems appropriate? Maxplanar (talk) 18:23, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Stolen?

"Approximately 178,045,960 German Reichsmark worth of Jewish property (today's value: around 700,000,000 USD or 550,000,000 euro) was stolen."

The wording on this sentence needs to be changed. For the taking of property to qualify as stealing, the act must be illegal. It's a sad fact that the taking of the property as well as the murders were sanctioned by the goverment. Because the property was taken legally, "stolen" should be replaced with a different world like "confiscated". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.206.173.116 (talk) 22:08, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Exchange Rate / Euro and Dollar

The exchange rate has fluctuated so much between Euros and Dollars to approximate confiscated property estimates that it warrants changing. That cannot be right, but I don't know which takes primacy in adjusting it, because I don't know the original rates, and exchange ratios. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.248.195.90 (talk) 14:12, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Any attempts to relate currency values in different periods - even within the same currency - can only be very, very approximate, and there are a range of different methods which come up with widely differing results. I think the best you can manage here is "roughly 500 million to 1 billion dollars in 2009 equivalent". And in any case, the original figure can only be very approximate as well.(Don't confuse the issue even further by bringing in yet another currency, the euro.)78.147.28.242 (talk) 09:39, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

Need a new category

Look at categories Category:Operation Reinhard belongs to. I think we need a category for German operations that were targeting civilian populations (Jewish and otherwise), not military. What do you think? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 18:42, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

I Agree

This subject is NOT military - no military was involved in it. In fact, the entire article (except for subsection "Alternative Definition") is incorrect. There is no authentic documentation (not even the Höfle Telegram uses the name "Reinhard") for the content of this article.--Joe (talk) 15:42, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Yad Vashem Reference "Empty"

The link to Yad Vashem as a source lacks qualification or standing. The linked-to article, while its content agrees with much in the Wikipedia article, itself contains no further references to actual sources such as original documentation (I've seen nothing at all of this sort, anywhere on this subject) nor even to eyewitness or perpetrator testimony. Perpetrator testimony (Höss's) I've seen differs so much from the definition now shown that I would call it contradictory (see "Alternative Definition" in the article.

The article at German Wikipedia acknowledges a popular perception that the name is related to Reinhard Heydrich, but concludes (with citation) that the name originally came from that of Fritz Reinhardt. This goes a long way toward explaining the variations in spelling--Joe (talk) 16:16, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Article Image

Let's have a consensus on the most appropriate image for this article.

I personally think a contemporary image should be the first choice, after looking through Wiki Commons I have noted it's hard to find a suitable i.e. perfect image. The Holocaust is well documented but there does not appear to be an image showing deportations to these deaths camps during this period.

The next best choice is therefore a latter day image of a site. There have been several changes in recent months, but I don' think any have been satisfactory. Currently the new image shows a memorial at Treblinka, before that was an image of the road/sluice that led to Sobibor, and before that an incorrect image referencing Chelmo.

I personally would like to see an image of a site or a relic in situ (like a railway sign), rather than a memorial as that reflects on interpretation rather than the actuality of the crime. It may sound odd but something that was there at the time of mass killings, although an inanimate object, bore witness to those horrible events.

A picture of a memorial is an image of remembrance that came after the fact. What do other editors think regarding this point? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.166.70.112 (talk) 23:19, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

I agree with your thoughts in general, and with the railway sign idea in particular. I think that the Treblinka sign (below) would work in the infobox. Ericoides (talk) 22:02, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Well there is no consensus as there is no discussion so I have changed the picture to the Treblinka rail sign. Ericoides (talk) 09:03, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

Excessively biased language

I object to the line "...creation of camps that had only one purpose: to kill thousands of people quickly and efficiently." The article on the Holocaust says that clothes were confiscated, soap and towels given to the victims, and gold teeth removed after they were massacred. This suggest that these camps has at least two other purposes, in addition to the one above: raising of money and prevention of riots and unrest. I hope that most people can understand that my changes to the article are tasteful. --Acewolf359 (talk) 17:45, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

I think your POV has seriously undermined your own case, "raising of money and prevention of riots and unrest." That was a side issue to the real role and that was the extermination of people. The Nazis didn't send them to the death camps to fleece them, they sent there to die. And the riots and unrest, where did you get that from?

Utterly bogus, and smells a bit like Holocaust denial. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.155.67.92 (talk) 21:10, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

The above commentator may be a bit off, for indeed that was the purpose and did happen; however, I have to agree in part with the point insofar as the opening sentence. For some reason - perhaps being over-objective and a bit too PC here - the term "murder" doesn't sit well with me. While there is a legal precedent for using that term (the IMT for starters, not to mention the ICC), it does seem morally weighty for an encyclopedia article. A slight revision may be in order: "Murder" it most certainly was, but it at least should be linked to a section on the article itself to reference the definition in this context (perhaps "Genocide," or the section within the "Murder" article which would cover the subject); otherwise, however undesirably, the word itself should perhaps be changed to a more neutral term.

No denial here: just twitching about semantics. I don't intend to make any changes to the article; I'll leave that to Admin. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.246.162.187 (talk) 07:44, 1 December 2010 (UTC)