Towards Genocide
One of the central questions in any Holocaust study is 'When did the Nazis actually take the decision to kill all the Jews?' Many historians argue that the plan for murder was central to Nazi ideology from the beginning. As early as 1919 Hitler stated: "Rational antisemitism must lead to systematic legal opposition. Its final objective must be the removal of the Jews altogether."


l) A family being deported from Slovakia
r) Women in cattle cars en route to the death camps

Others maintain that genocide as a policy evolved gradually, as the Nazis gained popular support and encountered little or no resistance to the idea of killing Jews. Indeed, it has been noted that over 12 years of Nazi rule in Germany only 52 formal complaints were made by non-Jewish Germans about treatment of the Jews. (Goldhagen, 1996)

Until 1938 official Nazi policy had been to first encourage, then force, the Jews in the Reich to emigrate. However, Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland brought an additional two million Jews into the Reich and emigration was no longer a suitable solution to what they called their "Jewish problem".

The Euthanasia Program
The "final solution" to the Jewish problem actually began with the murder of physically and intellectually disabled Germans, both Jewish and non-Jewish. In September 1939 Hitler authorised a "euthanasia" program to rid Germany of all those people the Nazis classified as "unworthy to live". Wartime, said Hitler, "was the best time for the elimination of the incurably ill."

The T-4 euthanasia/extermination program (named for the address in Berlin, Tiergarten 4, where it was administered) was basically a trial run for the murder of the Jews. Its first victims were killed by starvation, or by lethal injections. Later they were transported to specially-built killing centres where they were gassed in chambers and their bodies burned in crematoria. Their murderers were doctors: physicians and psychiatrists, many of whom went on to run the killing centres for Jews at the concentration camps. 80 to 100 000 people were killed in the T-4 program, which was finally brought to a halt in the early 1940s due to pressure exerted in large part by the German Church. (For further details, see Non-Jewish Victims.)

Mobile Killing Units
At first the mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen in German) were made up primarily of 'ordinary' Germans, not necessarily even members of the Nazi Party. Often they were reservists or men too old or otherwise unfit for regular military service. The Einsatzgruppen followed directly behind the advance units of the Germany military forces as they marched through Europe and their task was to hunt down and eliminate real or possible opponents of the Nazi regime. Once Army units had occupied an area, then identified and isolated its Jewish population, the Einsatzgruppen were brought in. The methods they used were simple and brutal. They took delight in humiliating Jews by, for example, shaving off the beards of religious men, or making them clean latrines with their bare hands on the holiest days of the Jewish year.

They either transported Jews to the various ghettos that the Nazis had set up, or more often, simply killed them on the spot in what was called an Aktion. Most usually they marched the Jewish men, women and children to the outskirts of their city or town, forced them to dig their own mass graves, lined them up and either shot them individually in the head or mowed them down with machine gunfire.

On June 26 1941 the German Army swept into Russia. In its wake came the Einsatzgruppen, which now also included many local collaborators, including Latvians, Ukrainians, Estonians and others. Their orders were to execute all male Jews, communist functionaries, "second-class Asiatics" and Gypsies. In total, more than a million Russian Jews were liquidated. Overall, the Einsatzgruppen which operated in Eastern Europe are estimated to have killed more than one million of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

Genocide as State Policy
In July 1941 Reich Security Service Head Reinhard Heydrich was instructed to prepare a comprehensive scheme for the total elimination of all European Jews. He received an order from Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering which read in part:

"... I herewith give you the responsibility of making all necessary preparations with regard to the organisational, practical and financial aspects of an overall solution (Gesamtlosung) of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe... I further give you the responsibility of submitting to me promptly an overall plan of the preliminary organisational, practical and financial measures for the execution of the intended final solution of the Jewish question."

By late 1941 a large number of transit and concentration camps already existed in Germany and its conquered territories. The construction of special extermination camps in Poland had begun and Chelmno, the first to be completed, began functioning in December of that year. At first, the Jews were killed in mobile gas vans whose engine exhaust was fed back into a sealed compartment. Everyone inside died of carbon monoxide poisoning. After Chelmno, extermination facilities were installed at the existing camps of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz. These six Polish camps became industrialised killing centres, where the Germans murdered close to 4 million people. (For details of the death camps, see The Camps.)

The Wannsee Conference
Heydrich convened a conference in January 1942 in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. The purpose of the Wannsee Conference was to draw up a practical plan to round up, transport and eliminate all the Jews of Europe. Heydrich explained that the continent was "to be combed through from west to east" for Jews, who would be "evacuated group by group into so-called transit-ghettos, and transported from there to the East."

At Wannsee plans were actually drawn up for the murder of all the Jews of Europe. Not only for the Jews of occupied Eastern Europe, but also for those of as-yet-undefeated nations like Britain, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain and Turkey. It was determined, however, to begin with the Jews then in Poland, in what became known as "Operation Reinhard".

Deportations to Death
In the spring of 1942 the deportations began. Throughout Europe, Jews were rounded up for "resettlement in the East". This meant either deportation from towns or cities to ghettos or transit camps, deportation from small ghettos to larger ones or deportation from anywhere to the death camps. Railroads were essential to the killing process and all the death camps were situated along the Polish rail lines.

Between 1942 and 1945 the Reichsbahn (German railways) transported people from all over Europe to their deaths. As well as all the Jews of Eastern Europe who had not been killed by the Einsatzgruppen, 110 000 Jews from The Netherlands were transported to the camps, 77 000 French Jews directly to Auschwitz, 26 500 Belgian Jews, about 1000 from Luxembourg and 800 from Norway. As historian Raul Hilberg has said, "no Jew was left alive for lack of transport."

In stifling heat and freezing cold, Jewish men, women and children were herded into open wagons or sealed into cattle cars with no food or water for sometimes days on end. The most that was ever provided was a bucket for bodily functions, but often even this was not. People had to stand or sit for the length of the journey in their own and others' filth and stench, and among those who had died en route.

At the end of their 'journeys from Hell' the Jews were worked, starved, shot or beaten to death, tortured or killed in pseudo-medical experiments. The total number of six million victims is only approximate, since many people were taken straight from the trains to the gas chambers and their deaths were never statistically registered.

The Jewish Death Toll
As Goldhagen (1996) states, "The geographic scope of the Germans' exterminationist drive against the Jews has no parallel, certainly not in the twentieth century. The Germans sought to uncover and kill Jews everywhere they could, outside their country and the territories that they controlled, ultimately throughout the world…Every last Jew, every Jewish child, had to die." (See Map: The Jewish Death Toll)

By 1945 the percentage of the Jewish population of each country killed was: