After the prisonersΓÇÖ rebellion at Sobibor made the Germans fearful of further uprisings, Heinrich Himmler ordered Jakob Sporrenberg, the senior commander of the SS and the police in the Lublin district, to liquidate the Jewish forced labor camps. On November 3, "Operation Erntefest" began, in which 43,000 Jews were murdered. On November 5, more than 10,000 prisoners in Trawniki were taken to trenches outside the camp and murdered. On the night of November 3-4, massive SS forces and a special unit of Auschwitz camp guards came to the Poniatowa camp with instructions to murder the prisoners. The prisoners were driven out of the barracks and made to run in groups to pits that had been readied near the camp. There, all of them were murdered by machine-gun fire. Some of the prisoners refused to leave the barracks and put up resistance; the Germans torched the barracks with their inhabitants inside. The Germans then attempted to force 200 prisoners to cremate the bodies. They resisted, refusedΓÇöand were also murdered. That day, 15,000 Jewish prisoners were murdered in Poniatowa and 18,000 in Majdanek.
