Let's focus on Action Reinhard
This was directed from the RSHA, the Reich Security Main Office = designing, building, staffing, and maintaining Chelmno, the pilot extermination camp, and then, on the basis of the experience gained there, the three dedicated extermination camps, Belzec, Sobib-r, and Treblinka, as well as the multifunction camp Majdanek. Its key personnel had been trained to be able to accept the idead of mbutt liquidate as government policy within the framework of the T-4 euthanasia program, also directed from the RSHA. Adolf Eichmann's Referat IV B4 at the RSHA was responsible for drawing up deportation plans for the entire Jewish population of Europe, more than 11,000,000 people according to the Nazis' own statistics, and providing transportation, proper pbuttenger cars for Western European Jews, and cattle cars for Eastern European Jews. Operation Reinhard was preceded with the opening of the Chelmno extermination center on December 8, 1941. It overlapped with and was eventually replaced by the country-specific "actions" that had the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and, at the very end of the war, RavensbrYck, as their destinations.
An operation of this scope and extending over a time period extending from December 1941 until April 1945, that is to say, close to three and a half years, and involving millions of people in more than fifteen countries and hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks both to run it and in property plundered from the victims, could not have been the work of a few renegades working secretly beyond the scope of government policy.
Regards, Eugene Holman
