Operation Reinhardt HQ
Operation Reinhardt was the codename for the Nazis’ plans to murder all the unproductive and superfluous Jews in General government. To murder the Jews, Nazis built three extermination camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Belzec was later replaced by Majdanek. The head of Operation Reinhardt was Lublin’s chief Police and SS chief, Odilo Globocnik. For practical and geographical reasons, Globocnik located the operation’s headquarters in Lublin. From here, Globocnik and his staff administered and organized the killing of the Jews, which resulted in the murder of about 1.5 million Jews. Next to the headquarters lay indoor shooting ranges, casinos and SS guest houses. Globocnik’s private villa was just a few hundred meters away. In proximity to headquarters there were also several warehouses where SS kept stolen goods from the murdered Jews.
Current status: Preserved (2009).
Address: 1 Spokojna, 20-400 Lublin.
Get there: Walk from central Lublin.
Follow up in books: Arad, Yitzhak: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka – The Operation Reinhardt death camps (1987).
The former headquarter is nowadays a Catholic medical college and there is nothing, inside or outside, that informs about Operation Reinhardt. This is a little bit strange as this building has same historical value as the house where the Wannsee conference took place. The difference is that at Wannsee there is a museum with research opportunities. Had its headquarters been in Western Europe, it would have been a large-scale museum with excellent research opportunities, like Wannsee. But Eastern Europe is not Western Europe and if Operation Reinhardt HQ had been in Western Europe and the Wannsee conference had taken place in Eastern Europe, the circumstances would probably have been the reverse. Casino and guest houses reamins and are owned/rented by alternative youth groups. Globocnik’s villa houses a company.