SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 243
The construction of any camps for the alleged total extermination
within “Aktion Reinhardt” where even able-bodied Jews are said to
have been murdered contrasts starkly with Himmler’s and Pohl’s search
for Jewish manpower to be employed for “Generalplan Ost.”
The crucial contradiction is Globocnik’s claimed second “appointment”
by Himmler to be the head of “Aktion Reinhardt.” In this respect,
J. Schelvis writes: 708
“Globocnik was personally appointed by Himmler to lead Aktion
Reinhard. It is certain that on 13 October 1941 Hitler ordered the
Be��ec extermination camp to [be] built, and probably the one at Sobibór
as well.”
Leaving aside the fact that “certainty” in this case stands for mere
conjecture, how can we explain that Himmler made Globocnik commissioner
for the installation of SS and police agencies in the new eastern
region on 17 July 1941 and then, on 13 October of the same year, asked
him to build an extermination camp while still retaining his former
function?
With an unusual lack of consistency, the Enzyklopädie des Holocaust
states: 709
“When he visited Lublin in July of 1942, Himmler charged Globocnik
with the planning and erection of SS and police agencies on
the territory of the Soviet Union to be occupied in the future, and
soon thereafter with the erection of extermination camps.”
Globocnik thus would have had to simultaneously carry out a task
that needed a very large supply of Jewish manpower – within his tasks
as commissioner for the installation of SS and police agencies in the
new eastern region – and a task which required him, as head of the future
“Aktion Reinhardt,” to arrange for the complete extermination of
these very same Jews.
Such mutually contradictory functions would call for an order by
Himmler, which is even more mysterious and ambiguous than the
Führerbefehl.
8.2.2. “Aktion Reinhardt”
The Enzyclopedia of the Holocaust has this to say under the heading
“Aktion Reinhard”: 710
708 J. Schelvis, op. cit. (note 70), pp. 33f.
709 I. Gutman, E. Jäckel, P. Longerich, J. Schoeps (eds.), op. cit. (note 15), vol. I, p. 546.
710 Enzyklopädie des Holocaust, op. cit. (note 15), vol. I, p. 14.