SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

236 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
er two camps where a total extermination is said to have been carried
out.
The fundamental problem of mainstream Holocaust historiography –
when, how, and why the National Socialist policy of emigration/evacuation
was abandoned in favor of extermination – remains thus unresolved.
Hence, the Führerbefehl, which would have to coincide with
this epoch-making change and clarify it, dissolves into subjective conjectures
which border on parapsychology.
This historical inconsistency is necessarily reflected by the genesis
of the alleged extermination camps in the East as well.
8.2. Origins and Significance of “Aktion Reinhardt”
Whereas the origin of the term Aktion Reinhard(t) is controversial
even among mainstream historians – leading to two different ways of
spelling it – they agree that it stood for the murder of Jews in the General
Government and the Bya�istok region, although the documents
clearly prove them wrong.
8.2.1. The “Generalplan Ost”
On 24 June 1941 Himmler ordered SS-Oberführer Prof. Dr. Konrad
Meyer-Hetling, his best specialist in this domain, to draw up plans for
the German colonization of the eastern territories recently integrated into
the Reich (primarily the Reichsgaue Danzig-West Prussia and Wartheland).
On 15 July Meyer-Hetling terminated a study entitled “Generalplan
Ost.” 675 The general lines of the project had already been
worked out for Poland by E. Wetzel and G. Hecht in the form of a secret
memorandum. In it the objective of the Ostpolitik was defined in
the following words: 676
“The objective of the German policy in the new territories of the
Reich must be the creation of a racially, spiritually, and mentally, as
well as ethnically and politically homogeneous German population.
675 Jan Erik Schulte, “Vom Arbeits- zum Vernichtungslager. Die Entstehungsgeschichte von
Auschwitz-Birkenau 1941/42,” in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 50(1), 2002, pp.
41-69, here p. 42.
676 “Die Frage der Behandlung der Bevölkerung des ehemaligen polnischen Gebietes nach
rassenpolitischen Gesichtspunkten,” PS-660, p. 16.