Reasons why the Nazis shave people's heads at Treblinka and the other Reinhard Camps

If it was to prevent lice... why would they do that to people they planned on gassing immediately?

It had nothing to do with the removal of lice. That's only what they were told. Generally for extermination camps, which is what the Reinhardt camps were, the Nazis did not want prisoners to realize they were going to be gassed until the very last moment. As you can probably imagine, it's much easier to transport a large quantity of people if they are not under mass hysteria trying to prevent their impending death.

Their heads were shaved, they were told they were getting a bath to remove lice, etc. As mostly Polish Jews stripped down they were told what to do by sonderkommandos who were also prisoners that helped the officers do the dirtier parts of mass genocide; aiding the young and elderly in getting undressed, calming prisoners and leading those who had figured out they were going to their death and subsequently panicking away to be shot somewhere else.

Shaving of heads also gets rid of what's generally the most amount of hair on a body at once. After the gassings were finished, the sonderkommandos would come in and remove any excess body hair to cut down on the very pungent and noticeable smell of burning human hair when the corpses were then burnt. So having their heads shaved prior to their death eliminated a step in the post-death process.

I would argue for other concentration camps, shaving would be to prevent lice and to demoralize the prisoners while also dehumanizing them in the eyes of the officers working there. However, in the Operation Reinhardt camps that you've mentioned specifically, they were all death camps and save sonderkommandos prisoners came in and were dead in hours.

Sources: currently in a Modern Germany class at my university and previously took a Nazi Germany in the Holocaust class, willing to provide the book list of both classes and even lecture notes. I'm no

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