A central element of the Holocaust in the General Government was the network of camps for Jewish forced labor. From the very beginning of the German occupation, various German institutions competed for control over Jewish labor. As the killing program intensified, the labor camps became the last places within the German system of extermination in which Jews still had a chance to survive. Work deemed militarily essential was maintained the longest. A decisive turning point came with the murder operation Aktion Erntefest in November 1943, when three large and numerous smaller camps in the district were liquidated. With 43,000 victims at different sites, it was the largest mass shooting operation of the entire Holocaust, yet one that remains largely unknown.

Before Operation Reinhard

In the small town of Poniatowa, 36 kilometers west of Lublin, a camp for Soviet prisoners of war was established in the autumn of 1941. The one-square-kilometer site of an unfinished factory was fenced with barbed wire, becoming Stalag 359. During the harsh winter of 1941–42, about 24,000 Red Army soldiers were interned there, with the first transport arriving on November 1, 1941. Housed in unfinished factory halls—some without roofs—they succumbed in massive numbers to hunger, cold, and disease. Only a few hundred survived the winter; some reports speak of a thousand deaths per week.

During Operation Reinhard

Transformation into a Jewish Forced Labor Camp

In late 1942, Odilo Globocnik, SS and Police Leader in Lublin, expanded SS-controlled industrial enterprises across the district. Poniatowa became the largest Jewish forced labor camp in the region. A key step was the transfer of the Walter C. Többens company from the Warsaw Ghetto to Poniatowa in spring 1943. By summer, the new Poniatowa Works GmbH in the SS Labor Camp was operational. Another industrialist, Schultz, relocated his operations to Trawniki.

The first Jewish prisoners arrived in October 1942 from the nearby Opole Lubelskie ghetto, including Jews from Vienna deported in 1941 to this “transit ghetto.” After the liquidation of the ghettos in autumn 1942, survivors were either sent to Sobibór for extermination or to labor camps. By the end of 1942, roughly 1,500 Jews from Opole, Bełżyce, and Staszów arrived in Poniatowa. By July 1943, after Többens completed his transfer, 16,000–18,000 Jews were imprisoned there. Smaller groups continued to arrive throughout the summer, including Jews from Poland, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Slovakia, and the Soviet Union.

The camp lacked a direct rail link. Prisoners arrived first at Nałęczów, 19 kilometers away, and were brought by narrow-gauge train to Poniatowa. Jews from nearby ghettos joined the Warsaw transports. Initially, prisoners built and expanded the camp. Some managed to trade with local Poles for food at inflated prices, allowing a few to survive. A number of early prisoners escaped—some before entering the camp, others later—but survival outside depended entirely on Polish help. Testimonies by survivors such as Ester Rubinstein and Ludwika Fiszerowa describe betrayals, violence, and the constant risk of exposure. Many other escape attempts likely failed.

Life and survival depended on work assignments. The largest group—14,000 to 15,000 Jews from Warsaw—worked in Többens’s textile and basket-weaving factories. They were housed in barracks adjacent to the production halls. Conditions were relatively tolerable, with limited smuggling providing extra food. Jews from surrounding towns worked in SS workshops and on construction projects, enduring harsher treatment. A smaller, “privileged” group, mainly Austrian Jews fluent in German, worked in administration and performed SS service tasks and lived in the so-called “settlement,” an empty housing complex near the factory.

In late summer 1943, weeks before Aktion Erntefest, several hundred prisoners were transferred to other camps—Budzyn, Zamość, Biała Podlaska, and Radom. These deportees would form the largest group of Poniatowa survivors, as their new camps were not targeted in the mass shooting of November 1943.

The Perpetrators

The camp was organized by Globocnik’s Lublin SS staff. Amon Göth, later infamous as commandant of Płaszów, oversaw the early construction phase. In spring 1943, Gottlieb Hering, former commandant of the Bełżec extermination camp, took over. Six other Bełżec staff members followed him—men previously involved in the Nazi T4 euthanasia program. After Bełżec closed, they were reassigned to Jewish labor camps in the Lublin district. Their arrival marked a sharp rise in brutality.

Heinrich Gley, responsible for the prisoners, was particularly cruel and directly involved in executions. Witnesses, including Ester Rubinstein, saw him shoot inmates. He had served under Hering at Bełżec and became sergeant major of Poniatowa. For external guard duty, over 500 Trawniki auxiliaries were deployed by mid-1943. The command staff lived in a building complex known as the “Hotel.”

With respect to the factory, Többens’s German employees managed production. The first director, Jahn, often clashed with the SS and may have been murdered after fleeing. His successor, Karl Bauch, later portrayed himself—and Többens—as uninvolved civilians; postwar investigations accepted much of their self-defense.

November 4, 1943—Aktion Erntefest

As at other sites, in late October 1943 Jewish prisoners were ordered to dig supposed “air-raid trenches” outside the camp. The killing in Poniatowa began one day later than in Trawniki and Majdanek because of limited available forces. On November 3, the camp was surrounded by police units, and phone lines were cut to block warnings. At dawn on November 4, additional SS and police forces arrived—many fresh from the previous day’s massacres.

Early that morning, Jews from all sectors were assembled and driven into barracks on the factory’s edge. Between those and the trenches stood SS guards forming a gauntlet. In groups of fifty, prisoners were stripped of money and valuables, forced to undress, and beaten toward the trenches. There, an SS unit with machine guns executed them. Loudspeakers blared popular songs and marches to drown out the gunfire. Each new group was made to lie atop the bodies of the previous victims before being shot.

Some resisted and were brutally forced through the gauntlet. In the afternoon, one group—likely members of the Warsaw Jewish Combat Organization—refused to leave a barracks and opened fire on the SS, setting buildings ablaze. The Germans retaliated with gunfire and set the barracks alight, burning the resistors alive. By the end of the day, an estimated 14,000 Jews had been murdered, and only three people survived.

Apart from Ludwika Fiszerowa and Ester Rubinstein, only one other survivor named Roza is known, though her fate remains unclear. The massacre was not hidden. Locals and factory workers heard gunfire throughout the day and saw devastation afterward. Firefighters from Opole Lubelskie responded to the burning barracks. One of them, Franciszek Furtas, later testified: “I saw barracks where Jews were burning. A young man leapt from the flames; two SS men struck him on the head with rifle butts, then threw him back into the fire.” His colleague added that the Germans ordered them to throw Jews into the flames; when they refused, they were told to leave.

After Operation Reinhard

After ten hours of killing, SS and police units organized Jewish “special commands” to exhume and burn the corpses. Reports differ on their origins. Some suggest 200–300 Jews were spared for this work, while factory manager Bauch claimed they arrived only afterward. Heinrich Gley brought about 80–120 Jews from Lublin to carry out the cremations, which lasted over two weeks under his supervision. Members of Police Battalion 101 guarded the site. Witness Wilhelm Kähler recalled that bodies were dragged by chains attached to horses from the graves to burning grids made of rails, roughly 8 by 4 meters in size. When he and his captain visited, they still saw the trenches and remnants of the cremation grids, but the Jewish workers had already been killed. After completing the gruesome task, the remaining prisoners were shot and the factory closed; the Germans evacuated before the Red Army’s arrival.

Like elsewhere, the perpetrators of Poniatowa were never held accountable. Members of Police Battalion 101 were proven only to have taken part in cordoning off the site. The execution squad’s identity—likely from the SD in Lublin or Auschwitz—remains uncertain.

A Forgotten Crime Scene

After the war, Polish authorities did not immediately investigate what took place at Poniatowa. Only in 1948–49 were a few witnesses questioned—civilian laborers or suppliers who had seen the camp from outside. When investigators inspected the site, they found it unprotected and looted. Grave robbers had dug through the burial pits soon after the Germans withdrew. In their report, officials confused execution trenches with cremation pits, describing a “zigzag trench 97 meters long and 18 meters wide…partly flooded, supposedly containing corpses and ashes.” Nearby they found “pieces of coke and human bones—skulls, arm bones, ribs.”