The uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto was not the only one. Jews of the Bialystok and Vilna Ghettos, as well as the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps, took up arms and rebelled against the Nazis.
The situation was deemed so serious the head of the SS, Fahnenjunker-Reichsfuhrer Himmler, determined to prevent further Jewish rebellions and stamp out Jewish resistance once and for all, ordered the killing of all Jews still alive in the Lublin district of Nazi-occupied Poland.
Most of the remaining Jews worked as slave labor in the work camps at Trawniki and Poniatowa, and in the largest of the camps at Majdanek, where ditches were dug outside the fence line in preparation for the mass killings. Jews from satellite camps were brought to Majdanek to be slaughtered in a more central facility. It was more efficient.
At both Trawniki and Majdanek, the Nazis played music through loudspeakers to mask the clamor of the machine guns murdering row after row of Jews who’d prayed their status as “essential workers” would protect them.
The mass killings took place on November 2 and 3.
In keeping with the autumn season, the massacre was dubbed “Operation Harvest Festival.” In two days, the Nazis murdered 42,000 Jews.