As such, it is a key component of the Holocaust — They murdered Jews by implementing policies that led to starvation; disease; random acts of terror; and mass shootings and gassings. When the Nazis came to power in Germany in , they did not have a plan to murder the Jews of Europe. However, the Nazis were antisemitic. They saw Jews in Germany as a problem. One of the major questions for the Nazis was: How do we get rid of the Jewish population in Germany?
For example, throughout the s, they tried to force Jews to emigrate. As a result of Nazi territorial expansion and alliances, millions of European Jews came under German control between and Nazi anti-Jewish policies became more and more extreme.
They affected thousands of Jewish communities. At the beginning of the war, the Nazis considered relocating entire Jewish communities. They explored plans to send Jews to a reservation in German-occupied Poland, to Siberia, or even to Madagascar, an island off the African coast. Ultimately, these plans were too hard to carry out. In German-occupied Poland, the Germans began to create ghettos in — They established these ghettos to isolate Jews from the local non-Jewish population. Ghettos were separate areas of cities where German occupiers forced Jews to live in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions.
These areas were often enclosed by a wall or other barriers. Many ghetto residents died as a result of disease, starvation, and brutal maltreatment. The Nazis began to systematically commit mass killings of Jews in As part of Operation Tannenberg, special units of police and SS Einsatzgruppen murdered more than 60, people in September and October , including Jews.
They were killed not so much as Jews as for being part of the Polish elites intellectuals, artists, members of the liberal professions, senior civil servants and officials that the Nazis wanted to eradicate to destroy Polish culture. The plan was to use this as an area in which to hold Jews and Poles driven out of the north. It was hoped that conquered Poland would also take in German Jews. Eichmann, who in the meantime had opened a new Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague annexed in March , was ordered to oversee six transports to deport 5, Jews of the Reich mainly from Vienna, Kattowitz and Moravia to a Judenreservat a Jewish reservation or a Reichsghetto near Cracow or Lublin, but eventually created at Nisko, in the Little Carpathians the Nisko Plan.
These deportations, carried out between 18 and 26 October , were openly designed as feasibility studies: how easy would it be to deport Jews and hold them in camps that they had to build and maintain themselves, while awaiting their deportation further east to regions that had not yet been defined?
Protests against what the SS was doing by the German occupying authorities, and the growing frustration of Governor-General Hans Frank, who wanted to turn the General Government into a model, productive state, led to the abandonment of the plan. In the spring of , the Madagascar plan, seriously considered since , took on clearer shape, before being abandoned at the end of What should be done with the Jews of Europe?
If the sea route to Madagascar was closed, if emigration was not an answer because no country wanted to receive the Jews of the Reich Evian Conference, July , and British opposition to any Jewish immigration in Palestine , the East seemed full of possibilities.
The Nazis had closely followed the forced movements of populations in Europe since the end of the First World War: the transfers between Turkey and Greece in the s, the mass deportations carried out by Stalin in the s — all these proved that good logistics and an efficient rail network could accomplish enormous tasks and shift millions of people in record time.
Operation Barbarossa the invasion of the USSR opened up a potential new way to remove the Jews — by using the railway system for mass deportations far to the east, preferably to the Arctic Circle, where they could be left to their fate. The problem was that there were already Jews in the East, and in the eyes of the Nazis they represented a danger to military security and a demographic liability.
Since German armies were supposed to support themselves using the resources of the countries they occupied rather than being funded by the Reich, it seemed imperative to reduce the number of mouths considered useless the Generalplan Ost made provisions for the death in the medium term of 30 million Slavs considered surplus to requirements. The Jewish populations of the East were thus main enemies: every Jew, whether a soldier in the Red Army, a political commissar or a poor peasant in a Ukrainian shtetl , was an ontological, implacable enemy of the Reich, a great threat.
These massacres turned into genocide from August , when women and children were also murdered alongside men of military age who could bear arms. This was the first centrally planned mass murder, preceding that in Babi Yar a few weeks later. If the competency of other central organisations is touched in this connection, these organisations are to participate.
I furthermore commission you to submit to me as soon as possible a draft showing the … measures already taken for the execution of the intended final solution of the Jewish question. To achieve this, the Jews of the East were condemned to death, and the Jews of the West to deportation to the furthest regions of the East. Since the hoped-for swift victory had not been forthcoming, it seemed questionable whether the evacuation of Western Jews to the East could be achieved.
After months of retreats and defeats, the first Soviet counter-attacks in October and November put an end to any prospect of a victorious Blitzkrieg. The road to the East seemed blocked, and the German military now faced a long war in the USSR with a mixture of fear and resignation. At the same time, the situation in the Polish ghettos had deteriorated: some of these had now existed for two years, with a growing population living in appalling sanitary and nutritional conditions.
In the particularly hot summer of , typhus was rife, an epidemic that did not only hit the Jewish inhabitants but also threatened German administrators, police and soldiers. This health problem had become more acute for the Germans now that the evacuation of the ghettos to the East seemed postponed sine die.
Finally, worldwide geopolitical developments had led to a war on two fronts: the resistance of the USSR, and then the entry into the war of the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on 7 December For the Nazis this looked as if the nightmare of was about to be repeated: a real world war, on two vast fronts.
It is important to note here that the date of this decision is still debated by historians, but the one which Christian Gerlach proposed at the end of the s seems the most plausible to the present author.
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