Aktion 1005 Was Not What It Is Believed to Be

Not initially, to be more precise. According to mainstream Holocaust historians, the sole objective of infamous Aktion 1005 (Sonderaktion 1005, to be more precise) was to destroy all physical evidence of serial mass murder that had taken place under Operation Reinhard – extermination of all Jews in Poland.

Ultimately, it did become the objective of Aktion 1005 but initially it had a very different objective. Aktion 1005 was ordered by RSHA chief Reinhard Heydrich in March of 1942, when all Operation Reinhard killing centers were operating at warp speed and when the probability of the Red Army ever getting to them was remote, to put it mildly.

Heydrich ordered Aktion 1005 because mass graves (which ultimately contained up to 800,000 bodies at Treblinka, 600,000 at Belzec, 320,000 at Chelmno and 250,000 at Sobibor) would create a very serious (to put it mildly) health hazard for Germans in occupied Poland.

For reasons still unknown, none of the abovementioned killing centers (unlike Auschwitz, Majdanek and death factories of Aktion T4) was equipped with crematoria – bodies were simply buried. Which – to be blunt – poisoned the environment to kingdom come.

Heydrich put in charge of Aktion 1005 recovering alcoholic Paul Blobel… and it appeared to be the right choice, because the latter did a reasonably good job. Prior to assuming command of Aktion 1005, SS-Standartenf;hrer Blobel was allegedly responsible for killing 60,000 Jews as the commanding officer of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C operating in Ukraine.

At Einsatzgruppen trial in 1948, he claimed that his unit killed “only” 15,000 – and most likely, was telling the truth. Which means that the actual death toll of “Holocaust by bullets” in the Soviet Union was even lower than 450,000 estimated by using the “Nebe adjustment”.

He was accused of pioneering the use of the gas vans in occupied Soviet territories, and developing the gas chambers for the extermination camps… however, none of these charges are true. At Einsatzgruppen trial he was convicted, sentenced to death and executed – and got what he deserved for murdering 15,000 civilians.

Aktion 1005 was initially scheduled to commence in late May or early June of 1942, but it was delayed indefinitely after Heydrich was attacked by British commandos on May 27 and subsequently (on June 4) died from reasons yet unknown.

Given that on the day of the attack Heydrich was to meet Hitler for a major reassignment (rumors were that he was become Protector of either occupied France or occupied Soviet Union) the possibility that he was murdered on Himmler’s orders (Heydrich was treated by Himmler’s personal physician Karl Gebhardt who declined to give Heydrich antibiotics essentially killing him) can not be excluded. True cause of death is still unknown.

It was only in the beginning of July that Heinrich M;ller, head of the Gestapo, finally gave Blobel the order to proceed with Aktion 1005. Blobel started in August at Chelmno (which made sense as it has been in operation longer than any other killing center) and initially tried to use incendiary bombs (apparently obtained from Luftwaffe).

However, these attempts were unsuccessful, as the weapons set fire to nearby forests… and these bombs were in short supply anyway. The most effective way was eventually found to be giant pyres on iron grills.

The method involved building alternating layers of corpses and firewood on railway tracks. After the pyre burned down, remaining bone fragments could be crushed by pounding in a grinding machine and then re-buried in pits.

After his job at Chelmno was completed, Blobel moved his operations to Sobibor. Able-bodied Jewish prisoners exhumed the bodies from mass graves around the camp and then burned them; their work done; they were then executed. The process then moved to Belzec in November 1942 and then to Treblinka.

The “health care” operation became the criminal conspiracy to destroy evidence of serial mass murder in April of 1943, when mass graves of Polish officers murdered by NKVD in 1940 were discovered in Katyn forest.

Two months earlier, the Stalingrad disaster happened; so now the possibility of Red Army occupying Poland and discovering mass graves became very real. Now orders to complete Aktion 1005 came directly from Hitler.

By 1944, with Soviet armies advancing, each of the five districts of General Government territory was ordered set up its own Aktion 1005 commando to begin “cleaning” mass graves of murdered Jews and Poles. The operations continued until September 1944 but were not entirely successful, as the advancing Soviet troops reached some of the sites before they could be cleared.