This incident witnessed by Ilse Hackenholt occurred on 3 November 1943 and marked the beginning of a two-day massacre, code-named 'Erntefest' (Harvest Festival), during which over 42,000 Jewish prisoners were murdered by SS and police units at the nearby Majdanek concentration camp and in the labour camps at Poniatowa and Trawniki. This massacre, the biggest single mass execution of Jews during the entire Holocaust, marked the end of an empire of extermination and slave labour camps in the Lublin region previously ruled by SS-Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik and his satrap SS-Hauptscharführer Christian Wirth. By this time, anyway, both SS-officers and many of the men who had staffed the Aktion Reinhard camps had already been transferred to other duties in northern Italy. Globocnik was Hohere SS-und Polizeiführer for the Adriatic Coastland Region, based in Trieste, and Wirth in the southern Istrian port of Pula organizing an office of the Kriminalpolizei. [66] The few members of Aktion Reinhard who had remained in Poland, including Lorenz Hackenholt, were allowed home on leave at the end of the year in time to spend Christmas with their families. However, one day before Christmas they received telegrams from Wirth ordering them to report to him immediately in Trieste. Most considered it a 'dirty trick' by Wirth to spoil their Christmas. [67]

In Trieste, the men were formed into three special SS and police units, designated as R-I based in Trieste; R-II based in Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia), and R-III in Udine; all three units came under the overall command of Wirth who had his command post in a disused rice mill in the suburb of San Sabba. Their main task was the seizure of the few thousand remaining Italian Jews and their property, carried out under the code designation 'Einsatz R' (Operation R) and was merely an extension of their work in Poland. [68]

SS-Hauptscharführer Hackenholt was attached to the R-I unit in San Sabba, which was used as a holding centre for the Italian Jews before they were handed over to the Trieste Sicherheitspolizei for deportation by train to concentration camps in the Reich. Wirth, however, turned the San Sabba rice mill into a mini death camp in which Jews as well as Yugoslav partisans were interrogated and executed. Their bodies were burnt in a crematorium constructed by Erwin Lambert. [69] The executions and cremations, unauthorised by SS-Gruppenführer Globocnik, were finally stopped on his orders in early May 1944 and the Einsatz R units switched to anti-partisan duties on the Istrian peninsula. [70] Wirth nevertheless was promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer.