[ t h e f i n a l s o l u t i o n ]
[ 1 9 4 1 - 4 5 ]

Jewish men await death in a gas van.
[Photo credits: Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes]
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introduction | operation barbarossa |
the final solution: the decision the final solution in the ussr | the fate of the german jews | the start of gassing the wannsee conference | operation reinhard
| economic considerations
auschwitz | end of auschwitz | other deaths | forced labour in germany | the situation in 1945 | conclusion
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[ t h e f i n a l s o l u t i o n ]
1 9 4 1 - 4 5

A Nazi about to shoot the last Jew left alive in Vinica, Ukraine
[Photo Credit: Library of Congress]
|
The Final Solution | 1941-5
1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Source: Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust
Introduction
On 22 June 1941 Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa - the attack
on the USSR. He was now fighting the war he had always wanted.
Victory, as well as giving him control of all Europe, would provide the
opportunity to destroy 'Jewish Bolshevism' and win lebensraum for the
German master race. Defeat, on the other hand, would mean disaster.
Given the colossal stakes involved, the war against the USSR was to be
different in kind from the war in the west: it was to be a brutal and
uncompromising war to the death. At first everything went well for
Hitler. His forces won a series of major battles, capturing millions of
prisoners and occupying huge swathes of land. As German troops
penetrated deeper into Russia, special units of police and SS waged
an unprecedented campaign of murder against Communist officials
and Jews. This was the prelude to the Holocaust - the systematic extermination of all European Jews. A great deal of controversy surrounds
this 'Final Solution', not least the question of when, but also the
process by which, the genocide decision was made.
Operation Barbarossa
American historian Richard Breitman has recently claimed that Hitler
made the fateful decision to exterminate all European Jews not later
than January 1941, as the planning for Operation Barbarossa went
ahead: the Final Solution thereafter just became a matter of 'time and
timing'. However, Breitman has provided little but circumstantial
evidence to support his case. Given the lack of hard evidence, most
Holocaust historians think that the genocide decision came later. Yet
there is absolutely no doubt that Hitler was determined to defeat and
destroy 'Jewish-Bolshevists'.
On 3 March 1941 he issued a secret directive to his army high
command insisting that 'the Bolshevik/Jewish intelligentsia' in the
USSR 'must be eliminated', in the same way that the Polish elite had
been annihilated. While some army leaders had opposed the
massacre of Polish civilians, all seem to have accepted Hitler's call for
unprecedented brutality in the USSR. In part, this reflected the
army's increased faith in Hitler after the military successes of 1939-41.
In part, it reflected the fact that most German officers shared Hitler's
hatred of Bolshevism and Judaism (which they saw as one and the
same) and his belief that the demonised enemy had to be beaten,
whatever the cost. In early March the army high command accepted
that the SS should be entrusted with 'special tasks' in the conquered
areas of the USSR, and that Himmler should have special independent powers. Army directives, issued on 19 May, proclaimed that the
war against the USSR would require 'ruthless and energetic action
against Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, and Jews, and the
total elimination of all active or passive resistance'. On 6 June 1941,
army leaders ordered that political commissars (Communist Party
officials), 'the initiators of barbaric, asiatic methods of combat', were
to be shot after being taken prisoner.
Army leaders, while accepting the need for brutal measures, were
happy to leave implementation of most of the dirty work to the SS and
to the Einsatzgruppen. In June 1941 there were four Einsatzgruppen - A
to D - attached to the four army groups that would invade the USSR.
Each Einsatzgruppen, roughly 1,000 men strong, was divided into
smaller units called Einsatzkommandos. Most men in the Einsatzgruppen
were ordinary policemen, hurriedly seconded from various police
departments. The officers, on the other hand, were carefully selected.
Well-educated, ambitious, and successful, they were committed Nazis.
Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppen D, was typical. A tall,
handsome 34-year-old lawyer, he held degrees in both economics and
law.
Although the commanders had been briefed by Heydrich in Berlin
(on 17 June 1941) and knew in general terms what was expected of
them, the precise content of their orders is a matter of controversy.
After 1945 surviving Einsatzgruppen leaders gave conflicting evidence
about the orders they had received. At the Nuremberg trials,
Ohlendorf and several other Einsatzkommando leaders, testified that
an order to kill all the Jews had been given shortly before the start of
the campaign by Bruno Streckenbach, chief of the personnel for the
Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), on instructions from Himmler.
However, other Einsatzgruppen leaders later testified that they had
received no such order until some time in August or September 1941.
Furthermore Streckenbach, who was thought to be dead in 1945,
emerged from a Soviet prison camp in the mid-1950s and denied
having given the order. Three of the Nuremberg defendants then
retracted their statements, saying that they had been made in an
attempt to save Ohlendorf from the gallows.
To further complicate matters, it seems that different
Einsatzgruppen did slightly different things at slightly different times in
the summer of 1941. Generally, after entering Russian towns, they
rounded up and shot Communist leaders and Jews. In some areas,
especially the Baltic States and the Ukraine, where anti-Semitism was
deep-rooted and where Jews were seen as representatives of the USSR,
the Einsatzgruppen were helped by the local populace who enthusiastically joined in pogrom-style killings. After a year under Soviet rule,
many people in the Baltic States had their own scores to settle. Some
Ukrainians had the scores of many years to settle.
The Einsatzgruppen leaders had certainly been given the task of
liquidating potential enemies. However, by no means all Jewish men
and relatively few Jewish women and children were killed in
June/July. This very much suggests that there was no pre-invasion
genocide order. Swiss historian Philippe Burrin has also pointed out
that 4,000 policemen, not specially trained in mass killing techniques,
were hardly likely to be thought sufficient to kill five million Russian
Jews. While most historians accept that the extensive shootings of Jews
in June/July marked a 'quantum leap' in the direction of genocide,
there is a world of difference between savage violence and cold-blooded, systematic genocide. In the first weeks of Operation
Barbarossa, Soviet commissars were more likely to be shot than ordinary Jews. Moreover some of the first (and worst) outrages against
Jews were committed not by the Einsatzgruppen but by local people.
On 2 July Heydrich (pictured) issued written instructions to the Einsatzgruppen commanders. Leading Communist officials, 'Jews in the
service of the Party or the State' and other extremist elements were to
be executed and pogroms by local people should be 'encouraged'.
On 17 July Heydrich issued an order that all Jews among Russian prisoners of war were to be executed by the SS. While neither of these
directives is proof of the existence of a genocide order, both show that
Nazi attitudes were hardening. Nevertheless, Alfred Rosenberg, head
of the occupied Soviet territory (the Eastern Territories), was still not
preparing for genocide. For Rosenberg, the final solution was still the
resettlement of the Jews in indeterminate territory somewhere in the
east. If an extermination programme for Soviet Jewry existed, he
seems to have known nothing about it. It seems unlikely that Hitler
would not have informed Rosenberg of a decision of such magnitude
and of such vital concern to him. There is also evidence that not even
Himmler was preparing for genocide. A July 1941 plan suggests that,
while he expected a brief period of killing, he then envisaged massive
population movement. Over a 30-year period, some 31 million people
from the Eastern Territories were to be expelled to Siberia and
replaced by 4.5 million Germans. The deportees would include
Soviet Jews. This does not suggest that the Holocaust had yet been
planned. The final evidence is statistical. Up until mid-August 1941,
about 50,000 Soviet Jews are thought to have been killed: this was a
modest figure given that 500,000 were to be killed in the next four
months.
Browning thinks that an elated Hitler, confident that victory over
the USSR was at hand, gave signals to carry out 'racial cleansing' in
mid-July 1941. Apparently master of all of Europe, he no longer had
to worry about world opinion. Interestingly, both Himmler and
Heydrich were in close proximity to his headquarters from 15-20 July.
Here was an opportunity for Hitler to have confided new orders.
Certainly events now began to gather momentum. In late July Hitler
committed two SS brigades (over 11,000 men) to assist the overburdened Einsatzgruppen. This was only the start of the build-up. By the
end of 1941 there were some 60,000 men in Einsatzgruppen or police
battalions on Soviet territory - sufficient manpower to kill on a
massive scale.
In August 1941 Himmler (pictured) travelled through much of the Eastern
Territories and was thus in a position to confirm the new policy. The
fact that he issued personal instructions probably explains why
different Einsatzgruppen leaders learned of the new turn in policy at
different times. Whatever the precise time-scale, there is no doubt
that by late August the killing of Jews was on a different scale. Jewish
women and children were now routinely massacred. In June/July
most of the victims were shot individually by firing squad. By August,
however, hundreds at a time were forced to lie in or kneel at the edge
of a trench (which they had often dug themselves) before being shot
in the back of the head.
The Final Solution: the Decision
By September 1941 the mass slaughter of Russian Jews was well
underway. However, what Hitler had in store for Jews in other parts of
Europe remains unclear. Browning is convinced that Hitler was
considering killing all Jews in July 1941 and asked Himmler and
Heydrich to come up with a genocide 'feasibility study': after all, it was
illogical to kill Russian Jews and then transport Polish Jews into the
vacuum thus created. In Browning's view, the mass murder of Jews was
the first use to which German victory was going to be put: 'in the
euphoria of seeming victory [in July 1941] Hitler solicited a plan to
extend the killing process already underway in Russia to the rest of
Europe's Jews'.
On 31 July Goering sent the following document to Heydrich:
I hereby charge you with making all necessary preparations with regard
to organisational, technical and material matters for bringing about a
complete solution of the Jewish question within the German sphere of
influence in Europe. ... I request you further to send me, in the near
future, an overall plan covering the organisational, technical and material
measures necessary for the accomplishment of the final solution of the
Jewish question which we desire.
Goering (pictured) did not initiate but only signed this authorisation, which was
actually prepared by Heydrich's office. (Heydrich was thus essentially
giving orders to himself) Nevertheless, historian Raul Hilberg
regards the Goering document as a critical 'turning point'. Browning
agrees. Given that the SS already had far-reaching authority, Heydrich
did not need Goering's authorisation to continue expulsion/extermination activities. The 31 July document thus suggests that Heydrich
now knew he faced a new and awesome task that dwarfed even the
Einsatzgruppen massacres.
However, other historians are not convinced. Some think the 31
July document simply represented an extension of Heydrich's responsibility for the Jewish question beyond Germany's borders. They point
out that neither Heydrich nor Goering, in fact, behaved in the days
following 31 July as if the decision to kill all Europe's Jews had been
taken. There are no signs in August of frenzied activity to organise a
genocide programme.
Historians like Burrin and Kershaw are not convinced that the
surge of killings in the USSR meant that Hitler had yet decided to kill
all of Europe's Jews. They think that Hitler's decision came later -
- either in September or October 1941 - and had little to do with the
euphoria of victory. 'Everything seems to suggest that there was a
decision-making process lasting several weeks before the fatal verdict
was handed down in September', thinks Burrin. Kershaw stresses that
'unequivocal signs of actual planning of systematic genocide in
Poland, the key area, are not to be found before October'. Burrin
and Kershaw believe that Hitler finally decided on genocide more out
of a sense of desperation than of elation. By September 1941
Operation Barbarossa was not going to plan. The campaign, which
the Germans had anticipated would last no more than four months,
was far from over. By August, Hitler was increasingly anxious. The
longer the USSR kept up the fight, the greater the danger of guerrilla
war. Thus there was a need for even harsher methods to keep the
occupied areas under control. Moreover, German casualties
continued to mount. According to Burrin, Hitler decided that the
Jews would have to foot the bill for the spilling of so much German
blood. The central decision in late September or early October,
claims Burrin, 'had arisen from a murderous rage increasingly exacerbated by the ordeal of the failure of his campaign in Russia'. By
killing his archetypal enemies, he was demonstrating his will to fight
to the end.
It is, of course, possible that Hitler gave two extermination orders:
one concerning Russian Jews in July 1941 and another later in 1941
affecting the rest of European Jewry. This is Browning's view. Having
ordered the killing of Russian Jews and the setting up of a feasibility
study, Browning believes that Hitler vacillated between July and
September - his mood fluctuating as the fortunes of war in the USSR
fluctuated. From mid-September 1941 until mid-October 1941,
however, the fighting suddenly swung in Germany's favour. At some
stage in September/October 1941, with the second peak of German
military success, Browning thinks Hitler unleashed the second great
intensification of the Holocaust.
Given that documentation is scarce and that most of the chief
people responsible for the Holocaust died before the end of the war,
the debate about the precise timing of the Final Solution looks set to
continue. But most Holocaust historians now accept Burrin's view
that the pieces of the Holocaust fell into place between 18 September
and 18 October 1941. The vast majority also believe that it was Hitler
who initiated the Holocaust. Nothing so radical could have begun
without his approval. Admittedly the factors which led to his decision
remain speculative, but events do seem to have been propelling him
towards a violent solution to the Jewish problem. The slaughter of
Soviet Jews would enable Hitler to break out of the vicious circle in
which military success brought millions more Jews under German
control. Once he resolved to kill all Russian Jews it was but a small step
to decide to kill all Jews. Just as with the euthanasia programme,
Hitler seems to have been anxious to avoid associating himself too
closely with the Holocaust. Thus he probably left it to Goering and
Himmler to sort matters out between themselves, having given them
the go-ahead in general terms. It is possible that Hitler authorised
Himmler to produce a solution to the Jewish question without
enquiring too closely into what would be involved. But since any genocide solution required the involvement of numerous state agencies,
some form of authorisation from Hitler was necessary. At no stage
were local officials acting on their own initiative. They were obeying
orders from Himmler, who in turn was obeying Hitler's orders.
Himmler later said: 'I do nothing that the Fuhrer does not know.'
The Final Solution in the USSR
By mid-August 1941 all the Einsatzgruppen interpreted their task as the
extermination of all Soviet Jews. Karl Jager, head of Einsatzkommando 3
of Einsatzgruppen A, kept extensive execution records. In July 1941,
the kommando killed 4,293 Jews, of whom only 135 were women. In
September 1941, by contrast, the kommando killed 56,459 Jews - 15,104
men, 26,243 women and 15,112 children. By 25 November Jager
reported the following number of deaths: 1,064 Communists, 56
partisans, 653 mentally ill, 44 Poles, 28 Russian prisoners, 5 Gypsies, 1
Armenian, and 136,421 Jews. The situation was the same elsewhere.
Perhaps the most notorious killing took place outside Kiev (the
USSR's third largest city) in September 1941. A few days after the
capture of the town on 19 September 1941 a huge explosion killed
many German soldiers in the Continental Hotel, the German army
headquarters. In reprisal, 33,771 Jews were shot, over a three-day
period, at the Babi Yar ravine on the outskirts of Kiev.
Not only the Einsatzgruppen carried out the killings. Auxiliary
forces, recruited from people of the Baltic States and the Ukraine,
were also willing executioners. So were ordinary German soldiers.
The mass shootings of Jews had the support of the army authorities.
The following order was issued by Field-Marshal von Reichenau on 10
October 1941:
The main aim of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevist system is
the complete destruction of its forces and the extermination of the
asiatic influence on the sphere of European culture. As a result, the
troops have to take on tasks which go beyond the conventional purely
military ones. In the eastern sphere the soldier is not simply a fighter
according to the rules of war, but the supporter of a ruthless racial
ideology and the avenger of all the bestialities which have been inflicted
on the German nation and those ethnic groups related to it. For this
reason soldiers must show full understanding for the necessity for the
severe but just atonement required of the Jewish subhumans. It also has
the further purpose of nipping in the bud uprisings in the rear of the
Wehrmacht which experience shows are invariably instigated by Jews.
On 28 October, after Hitler described Reichenau's order as excellent,
the army high command instructed all its field commanders to issue
orders along the same lines.
After 1945 the Wehrmacht tried to hide the fact that it was involved
in the Holocaust. However, there is now little doubt about its
complicity in the USSR killings - at every level. Army leaders gave the
commands and ordinary soldiers willingly carried them out. Indeed
they sometimes undertook brutal 'cleansing' operations on their own
initiative. The 'primeval' fighting on the eastern front in the Second
World War seems to have had a particularly brutalising effect on
German troops. The nature of the war - the terrible climatic conditions, the horrendous losses (the Germans suffered some six million
casualties in the USSR), the cultural differences between the invaders
and the occupied - resulted in German soldiers becoming indifferent
to death and suffering. The murder of tens of thousands of Jews was
viewed by many as an unavoidable by-product of the battle for
survival: probably few had serious misgivings about it. The German
army was thus a crucial part of the genocidal machinery in the USSR.
The following description of a killing in the Ukraine in 1942 was
given by Hermann Graebe, a German engineer, to a Nuremberg
tribunal in 1945.
The people who had got off the lorries - men, women, and children of
all ages - had to undress on the orders of an SS man who was carrying
a riding or dog whip in his hand. ... Without weeping or crying out
these people undressed and stood together in family groups, embracing
each other and saying good-bye while waiting for a sign from another SS
man who stood on the edge of the ditch and who also had a whip.
During the 15 minutes which I stood near the ditch, I did not hear a
single complaint or a plea for mercy. I watched a family of about eight,
a man and a woman, both about fifty years old with their children of
about one, eight, and ten, as well as two grown-up daughters of about
twenty and twenty-four. An old woman with snow-white hair held a
one-year-old child in her arms singing to it and tickling it. The child
squeaked with delight.The married couple looked on with tears in their
eyes. The father held the ten-year-old boy by the hand speaking softly to
him.The boy was struggling to hold back the tears.The father pointed a
finger to the sky and stroked his head and seemed to be explaining
something to him. At this moment, the SS man near the ditch called out
something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty people,
and ordered them behind the mound. The family of which I have just
spoken was among them. ... I walked round the mound and stood in
front of the huge grave. The bodies were lying so tightly packed together
that only their heads showed, from almost all of which blood ran down
over their shoulders. Some were still moving. Others raised their hands
and turned their heads to show they were still alive. The ditch was
already three quarters full. I estimate that it already held about a thousand bodies. I turned my eyes towards the man doing the shooting. He
was an SS man; he sat, legs swinging, on the edge of the ditch. He had an
automatic rifle resting on his knees and was smoking a cigarette. The
people, completely naked, climbed down steps which had been cut into
the clay wall of the ditch, stumbled over the heads of those lying there
and stopped at the spot indicated by the SS man. They lay down on top
of the dead or wounded; some stroking those still living and spoke
quietly to them. Then I heard a series of rifle shots. I looked into the
ditch and saw the bodies contorting or, the heads already inert, sinking
on the corpses beneath."
The following extract was written in January 1942 by Dr Rudolf
Lange, responsible for Einsatzgruppen operations in Latvia:
The aim of Einsaztkommando 2 from the start was a radical solution of
the Jewish problem through the execution of all Jews. For this purpose
comprehensive purges were carried out in the whole area of our operations by special teams with the help of selected forces from the Latvian auxiliary police (mainly relatives of Latvians who had been abducted or murdered by the Bolsheviks). In early October, the number of Jews
executed in the kommando's sphere of operations was about 30,000. In
addition, a few thousand Jews have been eliminated by Latvian self-defence formations off their own bat after they had been given suitable encouragement....
It was impossible to achieve the complete elimination of Jews from
Latvia in view of the economic factors and, in particular, the demands of
the army.
As the above source makes clear, economic concerns resulted in
some Jews escaping immediate death. This issue produced considerable friction between civilian authorities and the army on the one
hand, and the SS on the other. Orders from Berlin in December
1941 made it clear that 'economic considerations are to be regarded
as fundamentally irrelevant in the settlement of the problem'.
However, in practice, a compromise was struck between the SS and
the army and economic agencies, whereby a few Jews were given a
stay of execution for labour purposes. Nevertheless, over the next
two years the Russian ghettos were progressively liquidated, first
through piecemeal selections of those no longer capable of work,
and then, more comprehensively, during the so-called 'second
sweep' starting in the summer of 1942.
The numbers of Jews killed in the course of the Einsatzgruppen operations in the USSR can only be estimated. During the first sweep from
June 1941 to April 1942 some 750,000 were probably murdered. A
further 1.5 million may have been killed in the second sweep of 1942-3. Most of the victims were shot - sometimes by machine gun. A
number died in special gas vans, used from December 1941. Others
died in labour camps where they were worked to death or succumbed
to disease brought about by malnutrition.
It was not just Jews who suffered. The fate of the non-Jewish peoples
in the occupied zones depended essentially on the Nazis' conception
of where they came on the racial scale. The Estonians, Latvians and
Lithuanians, who were considered partially German, were treated
reasonably well. Other peoples were not so fortunate. The 40 million
Ukrainians, whose hatred for Soviet oppression was so intense that
most welcomed the Germans at first, were soon in the grip of a terror
similar to that in Poland. Disobedience of the most trivial kind
resulted in summary execution. Tens of thousands of able-bodied
Ukrainians were transported to Germany as slave labourers.
The Fate of the German Jews
From August 1941 it became illegal for German Jews to emigrate
voluntarily. On 1 September all Jews were forced to wear the yellow
star of David sewn on their clothing, a move which facilitated the
implementation of further anti-Semitic measures. Later that month
Hitler declared that the Reich should be liberated of Jews 'as rapidly
as possible'. In October Eichmann began transporting German Jews
eastwards. Given the situation in Germany, it was not too difficult to
find volunteers. Those Jews who were to be 'resettled' in the east were
allowed to take with them some money, a case or two of luggage and
food for the journey. (The rest of their property was confiscated by
the state.) Whatever feelings of optimism the 20,000 Jews who were
deported to Lodz in October 1941 had ended as soon as they reached
their destination. Some of those deemed incapable of working were
killed on arrival. The rest were dumped in the over-crowded ghetto,
where many died from starvation and disease. Protests from the
authorities in Warthegau about their inability to absorb more Jews led
to a temporary end of the transportations to Lodz on 4 November. By
then there were other - worse - destinations.
In November and December 1941 some 25,000 Reich Jews were
deported to Riga, Minsk and Kovno, towns in the Ostland - a territory
in which the Einsatzgruppen operated. (See map) Events in
Ostland suggest that, if the ultimate fate of Jews was not in doubt, the
actual timing and form of killing was largely improvised, with members
of each transport having different experiences depending on where
and when they arrived. Some Jews were spared to eke out a survival in
the ghettos or nearby labour camps. But in late November 1941, five
transports of Jews were massacred at Kovno soon after their arrival and
without prior screening to select those fit for labour. The same thing
happened in Riga on 30 November 1941. 14,000 Jews from Riga itself
were massacred, as well as l,000 Jews who had arrived from Berlin the
night before. On 8 December another 13,000 were massacred on the
outskirts of Riga. After the war the Ostland SS police leader claimed
that Himmler had told him (in November) that 'all Jews in the
Ostland must be exterminated right down to the very last one'. Even
so, it seems to have been presumed that there would be a Jewish presence for some time in both Riga and Minsk. Trains of Jewish deportees
continued to arrive in both towns until the spring of 1942.
The Start of Gassing
Until the winter of 1941-2 the main method of eliminating Jews was
mass shootings. While effective in terms of the number killed, this
method had some disadvantages, not least the fact that such
massacres were hard to conceal, as well as occasionally producing
psychological stress among the killers. In August 1941 Himmler
commissioned his SS technical advisers to test different ways of killing
and recommend those which were more efficient and more
'humane'. Tests with explosives proved to be a gruesome failure. Not
surprisingly the SS soon hit upon the idea of gas, which had proved to
be a highly effective method in the euthanasia programme. Added to
this was the fact that Hitler's Chancellery was eager to redeploy the T-4 personnel.
The initial gassing experiment occurred in the Warthegau. By the
autumn of 1941 conditions in the Lodz ghetto were appalling and
thousands more Jews were still expected. In October Wilhelm Koppe,
the area's police chief, aware of the thinking in Berlin, appointed
Herbert Lange to find a suitable place for the killing of Warthegau's
Jews. (Koppe had already used a special unit commanded by Lange
in 1940 to kill some 1,500 mental patients.) In early November Lange
recommended Chelmno, some 40 miles north-west of Lodz. An SS
team set about converting an old mansion into a barracks where Jews
would arrive and undress. A forest clearing, some three miles from
the village, was chosen as the site for a mass grave. The first victims in
December 1941 were killed in gas vans, the exhaust fumes from
which were taken by pipes into the sealed rear. By January 1942 a
permanent gas chamber was in use. Chelmno was a pure killing
centre: it had no labour camp. By the time it was destroyed in March
1943, some 140,000 Jews (and a few thousand Gypsies, Poles and
Russians) are thought to have died there.
Himmler selected Odilo Globocnik, the Lublin police chief, to
oversee the killing of Jews in the General Government. Dozens of SS
and ex-T-4 men were assigned to him in the autumn of 1941. His task
was to construct and run a number of death camps in the Lublin
region. Work at Belzec, the first of three sites, began in November
1941. Meanwhile, at Auschwitz (in Upper Silesia), the first gassing
experiments on Russian prisoners of war took place in September
1941.
...cont.
1 | 2 | 3 | 4
holocaust - complete 6 dvd boxset
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introduction | operation barbarossa |
the final solution: the decision the final solution in the ussr | the fate of the german jews | the start of gassing the wannsee conference | operation reinhard
| economic considerations
auschwitz | end of auschwitz | other deaths | forced labour in germany | the situation in 1945 | conclusion
rudolf hess
adolf hitler | josef goebbels | triumph of the will | leni riefenstahl
| josef mengele | martin bormann
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