TOPIC: THE HOLOCAUST.

PAPER 3 MODULE
Definition of Terms
Holocaust - the systematic attempt by Hitler and the Nazi to eliminate all European Jews. It is
also known as the final solution.So it was a final solution to a problem-what to do with the Jews
after the outbreak of the second world war.

 The Holocaust has been defined by Farmer (2016: 1) as the systematic attempt to eliminate
all European Jews. It is often referred to as the Final Solution.
 It should be noted that the Holocaust came as a result of anti-Semitism which means hatred
of Jews. Throughout Europe, Jews experienced discrimination for hundreds of years. They
were often treated unjustly in courts or forced to live in GHETTOS.
 One reason for this persecution was religious in that the Jews were blamed for the death of
Jesus Christ.
 Another reason was that they tended to be well educated and therefore held well-paid
professional jobs or ran successful stores and businesses.
 Hitler hated Jews insanely. In his years of poverty in Vienna, he became obsessed by the
fact that Jews ran most of the successful businesses like large stores. This offended his
idea of the superiority of Aryans. He also blamed the Jewish businessmen for the defeat of
Germany in the First World War. He thought they had forced the surrender of the Germany
army.
 As soon as Hitler came in to power he began to mobilise the full powers of the state against
the Jews. During the Nazi rule, Jews were banned from the civil service and a variety of
public services like broadcasting and teaching. At the same time, the Nazi SS and SA
troopers organized boycotts of Jewish shops and businesses which were marked with a Star
of David.
 In 1935 Nuremberg laws were also passed, which took away German citizenship from Jews
and also forbade them to neither marry nor have sex with pure-German blooded.
 On the other hand Goebelss’ propaganda bombarded German children and families with
anti-Jewish messages. Jews were often refused jobs and people in shops refused to serve
them. In schools, Jewish children were humiliated and discriminated.
 The night of broken glass is another example of Jewish persecution. In 1938 after a young
Jew had killed a German diplomat in Paris, the Nazi responded by launching a violent
revenge on Jews. Jewish shops were smashed and about 91 Jews were murdered,
hundreds of their synagogues were also burnt, 20 thousand Jews were sent to
concentration camps

Origin and Meaning of the Term Anti-Semitism

The word antisemitism means prejudice against or hatred of Jews. The Holocaust, the state-
sponsored persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators
between 1933 and 1945, is history’s most extreme example of antisemitism.
In 1879, German journalist Wilhelm Marr originated the term antisemitism, denoting the hatred
of Jews, and also hatred of various liberal, cosmopolitan, and international political trends of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often associated with Jews. The trends under attack
included equal civil rights, constitutional democracy, free trade, socialism, finance capitalism,
and pacifism.

Antisemitism in European History

It should be noted that during this period the Jews were hated throughout Europe for certain
reasons that include the following. The specific hatred of Jews, however, preceded the modern
era and the coining of the term antisemitism. Among the most common manifestations of
antisemitism throughout history were pogroms, violent riots launched against Jews and
frequently encouraged by government authorities. Pogroms were often incited by blood libels—
false rumors that Jews used the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes.

The other reason why the Jews were hated in Europe was based on religious dimension.

Hatred of Jews was based on two crucial events that are the crucifixion of Christ and the failure
of the Jewish uprising against the Roman empire. On the first event, the Jews were accused of
having murdered Christ and the second event is when the Romans destroyed Israel resulting in
the Jews scattering all over the world without their own country until 1948 when the modern
state of Israel was founded. Following the diaspora, the Jews became targets for persecution
throughout Christian Europe. There was persecution in every European country. In England for
example, there were massacres of Jews in London and York as well as in Germany, France and
Russia.

Jews were also hated for being unscrupulous money lenders at an interest which was seen as a
sin. This got worse during the reformation period of Martin Luther who was strongly anti-semitic,
so his followers like protestants also became anti-semitic.

There are also political reasons to explain anti-semitism, one of them was state sponsored. In
Russian for example, the Tsarist government encouraged attacks on the Jews. This was
because the Tsar, Nicholas ii just like his father was anti Semite.

Anti-Semitism in Germany.

It should be noted that although anti-semitism was common in Europe, in Germany it became
more intolerant and brutal. The reasons are the following:
 a) Anti-semitism had been strong in Germany since reformation era of Martin Luther.
Luther who was anti-semitic formed a protestant church in Germany, so he became the
father of aniti-semitism. In Germany, philosophers like Johann Fichte strongly protested
against the French law of equality of all men including Jews. They argued that the Jews
were alien and likely to undermine the German nation. They argued that the German
culture was superior and the principles of equality and fraternity would threaten it.
b) More concern with race. The Germans were more obsessed with race than Christianity.
c) The impact of the First world war. The world war resulted in the outburst of extreme
patriotism. This resulted in the hatred of Jews as they began to be regarded as sellouts.
They began to blame the jews for profiting financially from the war.
d) The jews were also blamed for the defeat of the German in the war
e) They were also hated for their economic prosperity were they were accused of
manipulating of the state’s resources and for occupying important posts in the
government.

Anti-semitism was worsened by the coming of the Nazi into power.The Nazi Party, founded in
1919 and led by Adolf Hitler, gave political expression to theories of racism. In part, the Nazi
Party gained popularity by disseminating anti-Jewish propaganda. Millions bought Hitler's
book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which called for the removal of Jews from Germany. It is not
clear why Hitler hated Jews but most historians have blamed his Austrian background.

In the modern era, antisemites added a political dimension to their ideology of hatred. In the
last third of the nineteenth century, antisemitic political parties were formed in Germany,
France, and Austria. Publications such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion generated or
provided support for fraudulent theories of an international Jewish conspiracy. A potent
component of political antisemitism was nationalism, whose adherents often falsely denounced
Jews as disloyal citizens.

The nineteenth century xenophobic "voelkisch movement" (folk or people’s movement)—made

up of German philosophers, scholars, and artists who viewed the Jewish spirit as alien to
Germandom—shaped a notion of the Jew as "non-German." Theorists of racial anthropology
provided pseudoscientific backing for this idea.

Historians who attempt to explain how the Holocaust, one of history's most profound events,
occurred divide into two major schools: the intentionalist and the functionalist. Intentionalists
may be defined as those who “essentially construct a case around the decisive impact of
particular individuals or events.” (Claydon, John) Functionalists may be defined as those who
“react specifically against the intentionalist approach and build up a picture of what happened
through meticulous research, often at a very local level, without any preconceived ideas”.
(Claydon, John) This Historical debate involves Hitler as a dictator, and the role he played in
the administration of Nazi Germany. It is impossible to determine which school is more
valid than the other, as these differing interpretations of history can be drawn from the
same body of facts and information. (Laurita, Paula) This can be seen through the
following quote by Adolf Hitler; “If at the beginning of the War and during the War,
twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held
under the poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German
workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions would not have been in vain.” (Wasiak,
Kjersti) This statement can be interpreted from both the perspective of the
intentionalist, as well as the functionalist. An intentionalist would determine this as
proof that Hitler had a plan for the Holocaust from the time he came into power, while a
functionalist would argue that this was not a decision for future actions of annihiliation,
but rather that the idea for the genocide of the Jews evolved when other solutions
proved to be unsuccessful. (Wasiak, Kjersti)

NAZI ANTI-SEMITISM BETWEEN THE TWO WORLD

WARS
In the aftermath of Germany’s defeat in World War I, anti-Semitic political parties in Weimar Germany,
including the Nazis, blamed the Jews for the nation’s loss in the war. This charge was reinforced by the
canard that the loyalty of the Jews transcended geographic boundary lines. The allegiance of the Jews,
the Nazis argued, was to one another across international boundaries rather than to the nation of their
birth, and the Nazis accused “international Jewry” of profiting from Germany’s defeat in the war.
Similarly, the Nazis believed that the Jews had weakened the moral fabric of Germany through their
“bolshevization” of the social and cultural life of the nation. The avant-garde in art, music, and film, and
modernism in general, were viewed as Jewish weapons in the fight to permeate German life with a
“Jewish sensibility.” The achievements of Albert Einstein (the theories of relativity), Sigmund Freud
(psychoanalysis), and other Jewish scientists, for example, were attacked as promoting what Josef
Goebbels called a “Jew science” that sought to destroy the moral and spiritual vitality of the nation.

Nazi racial ideologists claimed that the Germans originally descended from the Aryan race, an Indo-
European language group, and that the reassertion of national greatness necessitated the removal of
the Jewish Semites from Germany, if not from all of Europe. This ideology held that the struggle
between the Aryans and the Semites was the preeminent theme of world history. Although in antiquity
the Aryan races generally prevailed over the Semites in warfare—as, for example, Greece’s defeat of
Persia and Rome’s defeat of Carthage—the Semitic spiritual system, in the form of Christianity, with all
of its implications for protecting the weak from the strong, had triumphed throughout Europe. In an age
in which the ideas of Social Darwinism and “survival of the fittest” had become a mantra in right-wing
circles, Christianity and its derivative moral system were seen as giving succor to the weak and the least
fit in society.

Having identified Christianity as a Semitic and, therefore, an alien religion, the Nazis attacked both Jews
and Judaism as the progenitor of an unacceptable value system. Mixing both religious and racial
categories, the Nazis wasted little time in purging their German churches of Jewish or Semitic
influences. But the Nazi critics of the Jews were not content to attack the doctrines of St. Paul, derisively
referred to as “Rabbi” Paul, or ritual practices. They also insisted that baptized Jews who served in the
churches of Germany be eliminated from their ecclesiastical positions. This demand, however, ran
counter to the beliefs of the churches, which taught the redemptive nature of baptism. The reaction in
both the Catholic and Protestant churches to the purging of converted Jews was to confront the regime
over this matter. The response of the Evangelical German Confessional Church and Pope Pius XI’s
encyclical, “With Burning Concern” (Mit Brennender Sorge), issued in 1937, condemned the racist
practices of the Nazis as being incompatible with Christian teaching. The attitude toward the Nazi
persecution of the Jews, how-
INTRODUCTION

ever, was one of silence, which may have indicated approval. The Nazis were not the first to legislate
anti-Jewish laws; rather, discrimination against Jews was as old as Christianity itself. For example, the
Nuremberg Laws (1935), which denationalized the Jews of Germany, had their counterpart in the
Middle Ages when Jews were subjected to all sorts of restrictions, including their contacts with the
Christian majority.

What was new about the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews was their rejection of the efficacy of baptism,
which precluded discrimination on the basis of ethnic origin or racial categories. The Catholic Church, in
particular, viewed itself as a universal church with a mission to convert nonbelievers to accept Jesus as
the Christ. The Catholic Church taught that Jews would one day accept Jesus but, while they remained a
“stiff-necked” people because of their unwillingness to accept Christ, their persecution was God’s way
of punishing the Jews for their stubbornness. Catholic doctrine, therefore, taught the unity of all
mankind in Christ, and this applied to Jews once they accepted the Savior. Nazi racial doctrine, on the
other hand, stressed the primacy of race as an inherent characteristic that can never be altered. For this
reason, Jews could never be Aryans or true Germans regardless of the redemptive nature of baptism.
Thus, in the years prior to the outbreak of World War II in September of 1939, two anti-Jewish attitudes
came into conflict with one another: the traditional or Christian anti-Judentum, and the more modern
and “scientific” racial anti-Semitism.

The components of Nazi anti-Semitism, however, were not limited to racial bigotry. Added to the mix of
ideas that eventually justified the Nazi genocide of the Jews was the belief in conspiracy theory,
whereby the Jews were accused of playing a prominent behind-the-scenes role in shaping the course of
modern history in general and Germany’s loss in World War I in particular. Specifically, Hitler and his
inner coterie of radical anti-Semites were believers in the forgery known as the Protocols of the Elders
of Zion, which purported to describe the efforts of a cabal of Jews to rule the world. As the Nazis
analyzed the post–World War I events in Europe, the message of the Protocols reinforced their belief in
a Jewish conspiracy. Adolf Hitler, in many of his public speeches during the 1920s, accused the Jews of
instigating the communist revolution in Russia and spreading Marxist ideology throughout Germany. For
 Hitler, “Bolshevism” and world Jewry became synonymous. His reading of the Protocols led him to
conclude that in the struggle between capitalism and communism, there would be great suffering, but
the Jews would emerge triumphant because they were strategically placed in both camps. Thus, the
Nazis actively sought to prevent the Jewish cabal from achieving its objectives, as outlined in the
Protocols, by expelling the Jews from Germany, and when the opportunity subsequently presented
itself, to exterminate them.

Nazi ideology also held that the Jews not only were an inferior race but also that the approximately
600,000 Jews, or 1 percent of the German population, were a diseased people who must be separated
from the rest of the German nation. Nazi propaganda reinforced this view in all aspects of German
public life, including the entertainment industry. Nowhere was the caricature of the diseased Jew more
pronounced than in the film The Eternal Jew (1940), wherein Jews were equated with rats and the
spread of disease. The description of Jews as “parasites” or “bacilli” was commonly used by Nazi
propaganda to secure support for anti-Semitic measures, and ultimately for the extermination of the
Jews.

that in the struggle between capitalism and communism, there would be great suffering, but the Jews
would emerge triumphant because they were strategically placed in both camps. Thus, the Nazis
actively sought to prevent the Jewish cabal from achieving its objectives, as outlined in the Protocols, by
expelling the Jews from Germany, and when the opportunity subsequently presented itself, to
exterminate them.

Nazi ideology also held that the Jews not only were an inferior race but also that the approximately
600,000 Jews, or 1 percent of the German population, were a diseased people who must be separated
from the rest of the German nation. Nazi propaganda reinforced this view in all aspects of German
public life, including the entertainment industry. Nowhere was the caricature of the diseased Jew more
pronounced than in the film The Eternal Jew (1940), wherein Jews were equated with rats and the
spread of disease. The description of Jews as “parasites” or “bacilli” was commonly used by Nazi
propaganda to secure support for anti-Semitic measures, and ultimately for the extermination of the
Jews.

Steps taken in the persecution of Jews

The following are steps taken by the Nazis in the treatment of the Jewish people during the
1930s.

1933

 Jewish people were removed from public office and professions – civil servants, lawyers and
teachers were sacked.
 School lessons were to reflect the view that Jewish people were ‘Untermensch’.
April Boycott
 Boycott outside a Jewish store

 On 1 April 1933, a boycott of Jewish shops and other businesses took place.
 SA officers actively encouraged Germans to avoid entering Jewish places of work.
 Many Jewish shops were vandalised.
1935

 The Nuremberg Laws were introduced at the Nuremberg Rally on 15 September and removed
many Jewish rights.
 Jewish people were denied the right to be German citizens.
 Marriage and relationships between Jewish people and Germans became illegal.
1938

 Jewish people were banned from becoming doctors.

 Jewish people had to carry identity cards which showed a ‘J’ stamp.
 Jewish children were denied education and banned from schools.
 Jewish men had to add ‘Israel to their name, women had to add ‘Sarah’.
Kristallnacht

A shop damaged during Kristallnacht

 On the night of the 9 November 1938 Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were attacked
throughout Germany and Austria.
 Around 7,500 Jewish shops were damaged or destroyed. 400 synagogues were burned to the
ground.
 Almost 100 Jewish people were killed and 30,000 were sent to concentration camps.
1939

 Jewish people were banned from owning businesses.

 The first ghettos (segregated housing within towns, with a controlled entrance and exit) were
opened in Eastern Europe to separate Jewish people from ‘ordinary’ citizens.
Star of David Emblem

A group of Jews display the Star of David emblem

 On 23 November, 1939, Jewish people were ordered to wear the Star of David emblem on
their clothes. This helped identify them more easily.
The Nazis persecution of the Jewish people meant that many other Germans lived in fear of the
Nazis turning on them.

This severely reduced the number of people who were willing to openly oppose the Nazis.

Why the outbreak of the war influenced a radical Nazi anti-Semitism

 The year 1939 was a particularly painful one for the Jews of Europe. Because of the imminence of war,
Great Britain dramatically reduced the number of refugees allowed to enter Britain, and in order to placate
the Arabs, the government issued a white paper that limited the number of immigrant entry to Palestine to
75,000 over a five-year period.
 Once the war began in September 1939, the rapid defeat of Poland placed millions of Jews under German
control, thus necessitating a much broader solution in regard to the future of the Jews. The Nazis quickly
realized that the policies that were implemented in the Greater Reich were not applicable for dealing with
the millions of captive Polish Jews.
 At first, Germany’s Jewish policy in Poland took the form of the Lublin Plan and then the Madagascar
Plan. Both schemes sought to remove the Jews under its control and move them beyond German-occupied
territory. The implementation of either plan, however, would have removed Jews to areas whose economic
 infrastructure was incapable of absorbing such large numbers. The Nazis were aware of the severity of their
solution, but the expectation was that once resettled, the Jews would slowly die of hunger and illness.
 The failure of both of these schemes to materialize led to the second phase of Nazi policy toward the Jews,
which was characterized by the wholesale murder of millions of civilians.
 The invasion of the German army into Poland was accompanied by special killing squads or
Einsatzgruppen units. Their duties included shooting those civilians deemed a threat to Nazi rule. The
introduction of these killing squads in Poland marked the beginning of Germany’s willingness to commit
acts of genocide under the cover of war.
 This resulted in the wholesale murder of civilians by the Einsatzgruppen in Poland and subsequently in the
Soviet Union.

THE EUTHANASIA PROGRAM

 In the aftermath of the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, measures were taken to eliminate the racially unfit.
 Nazi propaganda sought to stigmatize the chronically ill, the handicapped, the mentally retarded, and other
categories deemed as “life unworthy of living.”
 The Nazis established racial hygiene courts, as well as programs of sterilization, which had as their
objective the removal of nonproductive elements from the nation and to ensure that they did not reproduce.
 With the outbreak of war, Adolf Hitler secretly authorized the Euthanasia Program for the purpose of
killing those identified as “social undesirables.”
 Despite the efforts at secrecy, however, public knowledge of the euthanasia killings became widely known.
Relatives of those who were murdered engaged in protests, and they were quickly joined by members of
the German clergy.
 In August 1941, Hitler, bowing to public outrage, suspended the Euthanasia Program because he realized
that widespread knowledge of the killings was creating unrest among the population.
 The Euthanasia Program, however, continued to operate sub rosa, and by the end of the war more than
200,000 “patients” were legally murdered under the supervision of physicians.
 The killing process was not only attended by those in the medical profession but also by technicians who
became skilled in subterfuge, whereby they disguised the gas chambers as shower stalls, in order to lull the
unsuspecting victims to their death.
 Those involved in the gassing of the “unfit,” as well as the machinery and the technical experts who made
it operational, were later transferred to the death camps, for the purpose of implementing the Final Solution.
 Having engaged in the killing of innocent people, the Germans had fewer scruples about the murder of
European Jewry. Given the apparent indifference of the free world to absorbing Jewish refugees, as
evidenced by the failure of the Evian Conference in 1938, the German leadership concluded that the
democratic world was indifferent to the fate of the Jews. They calculated that a policy of mass murder
against the Jews would bring a pro forma reaction, but it would not elicit more than the normal response
generated by wartime atrocity stories. Hitler is credited with asking the question, in regard to an earlier
historical instance of genocide, “Who remembers the Armenians?” Hitler’s belief that the Allies would not
expend energy on saving Jewish lives proved correct.
 Once the war began, Allied policy focused on winning the war rather than on saving Jewish lives in the
belief that the former would result in the latter.
 Having embarked on a policy of genocide, the Germans were determined to keep it a secret. Consequently,
they cloaked their plan to exterminate European Jewry in the language of euphemisms. This form of
language served two purposes: to disguise from the victims their ultimate fate and to prevent a repetition of
the protests that followed the disclosure of the euthanasia killings in Germany

Aktion T4
This is a secrete authorization signed by Hitler in the autumn of 1939 in order to protect participating physicians,
medical staff, and administrators from prosecution. This authorization was backdated to September 1, 1939, to
suggest that the effort was related to wartime measures.

The Führer Chancellery was compact and separate from state, government, or Nazi Party apparatuses. For these
reasons, Hitler chose it to serve as the engine for the "euthanasia" campaign. The program's functionaries called their
secret enterprise "T4." This code-name came from the street address of the program's coordinating office in Berlin:
Tiergartenstrasse 4.

According to Hitler's directive, Führer Chancellery director Phillip Bouhler and physician Karl Brandt led the killing
operation. Under their leadership, T4 operatives established six gassing installations for adults as part of the
"euthanasia" action. These were:

 Brandenburg, on the Havel River near Berlin

 Grafeneck, in southwestern Germany
 Bernburg, in Saxony
 Sonnenstein, also in Saxony
 Hartheim, near Linz on the Danube in Austria
 Hadamar, in Hessen

Using a practice developed for the child "euthanasia" program, in the autumn of 1939, T4 planners began to
distribute carefully formulated questionnaires to all public health officials, public and private hospitals, mental
institutions, and nursing homes for the chronically ill and aged. The limited space and wording on the forms, as well
as the instructions in the accompanying cover letter, combined to give the impression that the survey was intended
simply to gather statistical data.

The form's sinister purpose was suggested only by the emphasis placed upon the patient's capacity to work and by
the categories of patients which the inquiry required health authorities to identify. The categories of patients were:

 those suffering from schizophrenia, epilepsy, dementia, encephalitis, and other chronic psychiatric or
neurological disorders
 those not of German or "related" blood
 the criminally insane or those committed on criminal grounds
 those who had been confined to the institution in question for more than five years

Secretly recruited "medical experts," physicians—many of them of significant reputation—worked in teams of three
to evaluate the forms. On the basis of their decisions beginning in January 1940, T4 functionaries began to remove
patients selected for the "euthanasia" program from their home institutions. The patients were transported by bus or
by rail to one of the central gassing installations for killing.
Within hours of their arrival at such centers, the victims perished in gas chambers. The gas chambers, disguised as
shower facilities, used pure, bottled carbon monoxide gas. T4 functionaries burned the bodies in crematoria attached
to the gassing facilities. Other workers took the ashes of cremated victims from a common pile and placed them in
urns to send to the relatives of the victims. The families or guardians of the victims received such an urn, along with
a death certificate and other documentation, listing a fictive cause and date of death.

Because the program was secret, T-4 planners and functionaries took elaborate measures to conceal its deadly
designs. Even though physicians and institutional administrators falsified official records in every case to indicate
that the victims died of natural causes, the "euthanasia" program quickly become an open secret. There was
widespread public knowledge of the measure. Private and public protests concerning the killings took place,
especially from members of the German clergy. Among these clergy was the bishop of Münster, Clemens August
Count von Galen. He protested the T-4 killings in a sermon August 3, 1941. In light of the widespread public
knowledge and the public and private protests, Hitler ordered a halt to the Euthanasia Program in late August 1941.

According to T4's own internal calculations, the "euthanasia" effort claimed the lives of 70,273 institutionalized
mentally and physically disabled persons at the six gassing facilities between January 1940 and August 1941.
Hadamar death register

(Invasion of Soviet Union and the Holocaust)

Definition of Terms
Blitzkrieg - an intense military campaign intended to bring about a swift victory.

Euthanasia -the act or practice of killing or permitting the death of hopelessly sick or injured individuals (such
as persons or domestic animals) in a relatively painless way.

Under the code name Operation “Barbarossa,” Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22,
1941. This was the largest German military operation of World War II.
Reasons for the Invasion

Since the 1920s, core policies of the Nazi movement included:

 the destruction of the Soviet Union by military force;

 the permanent elimination of the perceived Communist threat to Germany;
 and the seizure of prime land within Soviet borders as Lebensraum (“Living space”) for long-
term German settlement.

As such, Adolf Hitler had always regarded the August 23, 1939 German-Soviet nonaggression
pact (commonly referred to as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) as a temporary tactical maneuver. In July
1940, just weeks after the German conquest of France and the Low Countries (Belgium, Luxembourg,
and the Netherlands), Hitler decided to attack the Soviet Union within the following year. On December
18, 1940, he signed Directive 21 (code-named Operation “Barbarossa”). This was the first operational
order for the invasion of the Soviet Union.

From the beginning of operational planning, German military and police authorities intended to wage
a war of annihilation against both the Soviet Union’s “Judeo-Bolshevik” Communist government and its
citizens, particularly the Jews. During the winter and spring months of 1941, officials of the Army High
Command and the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt-RSHA) negotiated
arrangements for the deployment of Einsatzgruppen behind the front lines. The
Einsatzgruppen would conduct mass shootings of Jews, Communists, and other persons deemed to be
dangerous to establishing long-term German rule on Soviet territory. Often referred to as mobile killing
units, they were special units of the Security Police and the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst-SD). In
addition, the German military planned that tens of millions of Soviet citizens would starve to death as the
intentional result of German occupation policies.

The Invasion

When the invasion of Soviet Union was declared, Germany quickly employed its war plan, the Blitzkrieg
With 134 divisions at full fighting strength and 73 more divisions for deployment behind the front,
German forces invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The invasion began less than two years after
the German-Soviet Pact was signed. Three army groups attacked the Soviet Union across a broad front.
These groups included more than three million German soldiers. The soldiers were supported by 650,000
troops from Germany’s allies (Finland and Romania). These troops were later augmented by units from
Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, and Hungary. The front stretched from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black
Sea in the south.

For months, the Soviet leadership had refused to heed warnings from the Western powers of the German
troop buildup along its western border. Thus, Germany and its Axis partners achieved almost complete
tactical surprise. Much of the existing Soviet air force was destroyed on the ground. The Soviet armies
were initially overwhelmed. German units encircled millions of Soviet soldiers. Cut off from supplies and
reinforcements, the Soviet soldiers had few options other than to surrender.

As the German army advanced deep into Soviet territory, SS and police units followed the troops. The
first to arrive were the Einsatzgruppen. View This Term in the Glossary The RSHA tasked these
units with:

 identifying and eliminating people who might organize and carry out resistance to the German
occupation forces;
 identifying and concentrating groups of people who were considered potential threats to German
rule in the East;
 establishing intelligence networks;
 and securing key documentation and facilities.

Mass Murder

These mass shootings primarily targeted Jewish males, officials of the Communist Party and Soviet state,
and Roma. They established ghettos and other holding facilities to concentrate large numbers of Soviet
Jews, often with assistance from German Army personnel.
In late July, Heinrich Himmler's representatives (the Higher SS and Police Leaders) arrived in the Soviet
Union. The SS and police, supported by locally recruited auxiliaries, began to shoot entire Jewish
communities there. Hitler decided to deport German Jews to the occupied Soviet Union beginning on
October 15, 1941. Contributing to this decision were the rapid advances both on the military front and in
the murder of the Soviet Jews. The decision initiated the policy that would become known as the “Final
Solution.” The “Final Solution” was the physical annihilation not only of Jews in the German-occupied
East, but of Jews throughout Europe.

Impact of the invasion of Soviet Union to the Holocaust

For Hitler, the war in the Soviet Union was to be a war of total destruction against the enemy, which
included the Jews. Once deployed in Russia, the Einsatzgruppen proceeded to murder Jews through mass
shootings as well as the use of mobile vans as gas chambers, whereby carbon monoxide was piped into
the back of the crowded trucks, thus causing the death of the victims. It is estimated that more than a
million Jews were killed in Einsatzgruppen operations. Once Nazi Germany made the decision in mid-to-
late 1941 to exterminate the Jews of Europe, it sought methods that were both inexpensive and efficient.
Given the large number of Jews targeted for annihilation, the methods employed by the Einsatzgruppen in
the Soviet Union proved to be too costly and inefficient for a successful resolution of the “Jewish
problem.” It became apparent that the murder of millions of Jews required the use of techniques not
unlike the methods used in industry. Extermination camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, and
Sobibor became factories of death, whereby the methods of industrial engineering were applied to the
implementation of the Final Solution. Every aspect of the extermination process—from the loading of the
victims into the cattle cars, to disguising the real purpose of the extermination camp, to lulling the
unsuspecting victims into the gas chambers—was calculated to make the process function as efficiently as
possible. The murder of such a large number of Jews also required the cooperation of all segments of the
German bureaucracy, and toward that end a conference was held in January 1942 at Wannsee, a suburb of
Berlin. The Wannsee Conference was organized by Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Security
Main Office (RSHA) and Himmler’s closest aide. Those who were invited to attend the conference
represented important jurisdictions within the Nazi bureaucratic system. Heydrich’s objective in
convening the meeting was to impress upon the assembled government functionaries the high priority that
the Nazi leadership, including Hitler, placed on the annihilation of the Jews. Subsequently, he asked for
and received the promise of their cooperation in all facets of the implementation of the Final Solution.