Majority of the deaths during the single largest murder campaign of the 1940s Holocaust, called Operation Reinhard, occurred during a single three-month period, a new study has found.


The study, published in the journal Science Advances, indicate that the murder rate during Operation Reinhard has previously been greatly underestimated. It also provides new insights into the profound efficiency of Nazi death camps and the systematic manner in which Jewish communities were murdered.


During the Nazi-German campaign to eradicate Jews during the second World War, a great portion of the Holocaust killings occurred during Operation Reinhard, which lasted from 1942 to 1943.


However, detailed records of the killings were largely destroyed by the Nazis, making it difficult to investigate how quickly the genocide was carried out. Deutsche Reichsbahn, the German National Railway, played a critical role in transporting millions of Jewish victims to the death camps, and the "special trains" that transported the victims were kept on strict time schedules.


Yitzhak Arad, an Israeli historian specialising in the Holocaust, compiled Reichsban data on 480 train deportations from 393 Polish towns and ghettos to three key death camps -- Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka -- during Operation Reinhard and estimated the number of victims on each transport.


Here, using Arad's data, Lewi Stone estimated the rate at which the Nazis killed Jews during Operation Reinhard, showing that most of the murders occurred in only three months - August, September and October 1942. Of the 1.7 million victims of Operation Reinhard, 1.32 million (78 per cent) were murdered during these three months, or about 15,000 murders per day, every day.


The finding implies that roughly 25 per cent of all Holocaust victims were murdered during these three months of Operation Reinhard in 1942. -- PTI


Image: A still from the film, The boy in the striped pyjamas, on the unlikely friendship between a boy living in a concentration camp and the son of a concentration camp commandant.