Continuing with Wolf Gruner's so-called "cushioning" thesis, Gruner describes the launching of Aktion Reinhard in spring 1942 as the "mass annihilation of Polish Jews" commencing at Belzec, the death camp that began operating on 17 March with victims deported there from Lublin.
On that very day, a German official in Lublin, Fritz Reuter, summarized an order from Hermann Hofle writing that "1. It would be useful, at the departure station, to separate the Jewish transports destined for the Lublin district [location of Belzec] into Jews fit for utilization and those unfit for utilization. . . . 2. Jews unfit for utilization go to Belzec. . . . ," while those fit for labor would be sent to work camp.
In the latter part of March also about 15,000 Jews were sent to Belzec from Lwow (Lemberg) for extermination, according to Gruner. Deportations carried out by the SS in Galicia, however, paused in April as Jews in the area were assigned to various work assignments.
In May, as Aktion Reinhard continued, Himmler temporarily exempted Jews aged 16 to 35 from deportation to the death camps ("Jews and Jewesses aged 16 to 32 who are capable of work are to be excluded from special measures until further notice. These Jews are to be put to work en bloc KZ or labour camp," Himmler instructed in a general order). These Jews were held back from the general murder program and assigned for the time being to armaments projects or other work in support of the German war effort.
(By June 10s of 1000s of Jews were being deported to Belzec and Sobibor for extermination.)
Gruner cites a statement of the GG labor commissioner, Max Frauendorfer, at a meeting held 22 June that these working Jews were "not actually exempted from SS operations but [would be left] to work for the duration of the war." In other words, some work-capable Jews were held back from the SS extermination action in order to work supporting the war effort and to be dealt with later, when their labor would no longer be so important. Such workers were supplied to war critical industries, road construction, etc., as well as to the military.
In summer, on 19 July, Himmler went further, ordering that all Jews not taken to the death camps be moved by year's end into either a series of SS controlled labor camps or concentrated in working ghettos (Warsaw, Krakow, Lublin, Radom). This order made clear that Jews in the area were either to be killed in an Aktion Reinhard camp or put to work for as long as they were needed in a forced labor situation. (Conditions of labor were themselves nearly lethal, claiming many lives, in all such camps and other operations during this period, as Gruner makes clear.)
It is these considerations that lead Gruner to conclude that Aktion Reinhard "extended not only to annihilation of the Jews and resale of their property but also - and this has remained unnoticed - to exploitation of Jews workers," p 258, until such time they became either incapable of work, through exploitation, or were no longer needed.
By fall 1942, as Warsaw's ghetto was being stripped of all but essential workers, authorities in the GG estimated that there were 1 million "commercial workers," according to Gruner, and of these about a third were still Jews, of whom 100,000 were skilled craftsmen. The killing program in the GG proceeded, then, by means of planning among the authorities that recognized economic needs and provided for them, even while annihilating 100s of 1000s of Jews. And these surviving Jews were not planned to live for long, as the fall 1943 Harvest Festival Operation, in which the SS murdered over 40,000 Jewish laborers in SS work-camps, would show.
