Their murders could hardly be considered 'retaliations'. The Jews in the Occupied Territories were usually ordered to report to a central point, often on the pretext of deportation, or they were rounded up during raids.
Then the Nazis would then take them to a remote place where they were executed. In alone, close to , Soviet Jews were murdered in this way.
Historians disagree about the moment when Hitler decided that all European Jews should be killed. A signed order to do so does not exist. However, based on other sources and events, there is a strong likelihood that the decision was made somewhere in the second half of Mass murder seems an extreme alternative to the previous plans for deportation.
The war made it impossible to deport Jews to Madagascar, and the plan to push the Jews back further to the east could not be carried out because the victory over the Soviet Union was not forthcoming.
During the Wannsee Conference, on 20 January , Nazi officials discussed the execution of the planned murder of the eleven million Jews living in Europe. In late , the Nazis began preparing for the murder of more than two million Jews living in the General Government, the occupied part of Poland. The Nazis also experimented with mass murder in other occupied and annexed areas of Eastern Europe.
In Chelmno, they introduced the use of gas to kill Polish Jews. Here, the victims were murdered in gas chambers with diesel engine exhaust fumes immediately upon arrival. The only purpose of the extermination camps was to kill people. Only a small number of Jews were kept alive to help with the killing process. In November , Aktion Reinhard was terminated. The camps were disassembled and the bodies of the victims were excavated and burned.
The Nazis then planted trees on the grounds to wipe out their crimes. At least 1. In the middle of , the Germans began deporting Jews from the occupied territories in Western Europe. The decision-making process and dynamics differed from one country to the next, as did the numbers of victims.
There are several reasons for this difference. The Jews were crammed in overcrowded cattle wagons and transported to Eastern Europe. Most of them ended up at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but there were other concentration or extermination camps. Out of the , Dutch Jews who were murdered, 34, were killed in Sobibor. Auschwitz-Birkenau was both a labour camp and an extermination camp. And so, upon arrival, the Jews were selected according to their age, health, and ability to work.
Those who were not fit enough were gassed immediately. The others had to do forced labour under barbaric conditions. The work was extremely hard, the little food was of poor quality, hygiene was poor, and Jews were often maltreated. Jews were brought in from other occupied parts of Europe. In and , deportations started from the occupied regions in Italy, Hungary, Greece, and the Balkans. Only when the Allies were drawing near, by end of , did the persecution of the Jews slowly come to a halt.
In the last months of the war, thousands of Jews and other prisoners died during the 'death marches' after the Germans had evacuated the concentration camps to prevent the prisoners from falling into the hands of the Allied troops.
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It included businesses bought at less than fair market or reduced competition because of the liquidation of Jewish-owned businesses.
In Nazi Germany the property taken from the Jews following their deportation was distributed through public auctions, the proceeds of which accrued to state finance offices. In eastern Europe, many Jews entrusted household belongings to neighbors or friends prior to their forced move into Nazi-established ghettos. Goods could then be sold off little by little in exchange for food.
This strategy became a matter of life-and-death for Jews, but the temptations for their helpers were great. The war demoralized people who were decent and honest all their lives, and now without any scruples they appropriated for themselves Jewish property.
In the majority of cases, almost 95 percent, they did not return either possessions or goods, excusing themselves that this was done by the Germans through theft, etc. The Germans also expressly used the lure of gain to win the cooperation of locals in the persecution and murder of Jews.
In Lithuania, locals who participated in mass shootings got the first cut of property, usually housing, then auctioned off household belongings to the wider population, in this way spreading complicity. However, it is not in order to assure us that we can count on her in time of need. Since we are made to feel that for her we are as living corpses, who is worthy of inheriting our things, especially bedding?
Probably only she, who has known us for so many years and is fond of us. She leaves very surprised and angry because in order not to be bothered by her anymore, we gave her a black skirt.
Some, taking them, promise that in the worst of situations they will receive and hide the owners. Examples of this abound not only in communities in Germany where police became distressed at the number of denunciations, often false, provided by those with ulterior motives revenge as well as the desire to reduce business competition , but elsewhere in Europe.
Members of police, paramilitary, or military unit are trained to follow established chains of command. The shocks were not real but the subjects did not know that. In their opinion, this provides stronger motivation than coercion. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau near Munich in March , and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists.
Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler , head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel SS , and later chief of the German police.
In , Jews in Germany numbered around ,, or only 1 percent of the total German population. Under the Nuremberg Laws of , anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge half-breeds. Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution.
From to , hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did, while those who remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.
In September , the German army occupied the western half of Poland. German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans non-Jews outside Germany who identified as German , Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles. Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, the Jewish ghettoes in Poland functioned like captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils.
In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation made the ghettoes breeding grounds for disease such as typhus. Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of , Nazi officials selected around 70, Germans institutionalized for mental illness or disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program. After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to the program in August , though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by some , people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed.
In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust. Beginning in , Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Romani people, were transported to the Polish ghettoes. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June marked a new level of brutality in warfare.
Mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppenwould murder more than , Soviet Jews and others usually by shooting over the course of the German occupation. Since June , experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz , near Krakow. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust. Beginning in late , the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young.
The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17,
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