In spring 1942, five deportation transports with a total of 5000 individuals left Vienna for Izbica and Wlodawa in the Lublin district in the »General Gouvernement.« By then, the systematic killing of Jews living in the »General Gouvernement« had already begun under the command of the SS and Police Chief of the Lublin district, the Austrian Odilo Globocnik. Later on it was named »Operation Reinhard« in memory of the head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) Reinhard Heydrich, who had been assassinated by Czech resistance fighters in May 1942.

Already at the end of 1941, construction of extermination sites had started in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, where until the end of 1943 almost all Jewish inhabitants of the »General Gouvernement« as well as Jews from Austria, Slovakia and from the Bohemia-Moravia »Protectorate« had been murdered. Only one transport leaving Vienna went straight to Sobibor. The remaining Austrian victims of »Operation Reinhard« were taken to the extermination camps from the ghettos of the »General Gouvernement,« to which they had been deported in 1941/42, and from the Terezìn ghetto. At the same time the Jewish inhabitants of the Warthegau, especially from the Lodz ghetto, were deported to the killing center Chelmno/Kulmhof. In July 1942 a transport of 1000 persons went from Vienna to Auschwitz. The killing equipment of this concentration- and annihilation camp had already been expanded before the end of »Operation Reinhard,« so that subsequently Auschwitz-Birkenau became the central site of the mass murder of the European Jews.