On March 17, 1942, the first transports of Jews deported from the Lublin ghetto and Lvov arrived to the death camp in Bełżec. These deportations were the beginning of “Aktion Reinhardt” – a mass extermination of Jews in the General Government.

In the summer of 1941, after the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, special units of the German security police and security service known as Einsatzgruppen, under the orders of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Central Security Agency (RSHA), carried out mass executions of Jews. A few months later in Berlin, a decision was made to murder all the Jews under the German rule known as "The Final Solution to the Jewish Question" ("Die Endlösung der Judenfrage"). An integral part of that plan was the extermination of Polish Jews living in the area of the General Government, which SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler entrusted to the SS and Police Commanders in the Lublin District - Odil Globocnik.

Shortly afterwards, a special team of several hundred SS officers and auxiliary units created by Globocnik in Lublin launched the death camps in Bełżec (March), Sobibor (May) and Treblinka (July). The victims were murdered using carbon monoxide in stationary gas chambers. The operation of the extermination of Jews in the General Government was code-named "Aktion Reinhardt".

To carry out the "Aktion Reinhardt," 450 German SS officers were selected, of which about 100 participated in the murder of the disabled and mentally disordered people in the so-called "T4" action, which was conducted from 1939 to 1941. About 70,000 people were murdered as part of the "T4." An important role in the "Aktion Reinhardt" implementation was recruiting and training captives of the Red Army, mostly the Ukrainians and Soviet citizens of German origin, at the Trawniki concentration camp. They took part in the liquidation actions in the ghettos and formed guard crews in the extermination camps.

The list of the most important Globocniks' cooperates in "Aktion Reinhardt" is as follows:

- SS-Hauptsturmführer Hermann Höfle - the Chief of Staff, responsible for organizing deportations and securing and managing the possessions of the murdered;

- SS-Obersturmführer Christian Wirth - organizer of the "T4" center in Hartheim near Linz, from August 1942 the first commander of the extermination camp in Bełżec. From 1942 the Inspector of the SS-Sonderkommandos "Aktion Reinhardt";

- SS-Sturmbanführer Karl Streibel – the commander of the SS training camp in Trawniki.

"Aktion Reinhardt" covered the General Government area and, partly incorporated into Reich, the Białystok district. However, the Jews deported from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Slovakia, the Netherlands and other European countries were also killed in the "Aktion Reinhardt" camps. This extermination operation ended in autumn 1943 with the rebellion of the prisoners in the Sobibór camp and with the mass executions under the code name "Erntefest" carried out on November 3 and 4, 1943 at Majdanek and the largest labour camps in the Lublin districts.

Within several months of 1942 and 1943, about 1.5 million Jews were murdered in the extermination camps in Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka alone. Tens of thousands of victims died as a result of disastrous living conditions in ghettos, were murdered in executions accompanying liquidation actions of Jewish centres or while hiding on the "Aryan" side. It can therefore be assumed that the Nazi extermination operation on the territory of the General Government took a total of about 2 million victims.