Death camps were also used to kill the Jews if they already survived the Concentration Camps. They used Zyklon B pellets, which would produce a poisonous gas which, when it reacts with the oxygen in the air, becomes very harmful. But if there were too many Jews in the camp they were shot. However, if there weren’t enough bullets to kill them, they would be torched using a flame thrower.
Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) were groups of German SS and police. They were under the command of security police and security service officers. The Einsatzgruppen were sent to the Soviet Union to murder anyone behind enemy lines that they felt were, politically or racially, a threat. These people were mainly made up of Jews, Gypsies and officials of the Soviet State and Communist Party.
The Einsatzgruppen also murdered people who were mentally or physically handicapped, by going to special homes where these people were kept and murdering them in mass numbers.
During the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen followed the German army as it made its way into Soviet Territory. The Einsatzgruppen, often requiring local support, carried out mass-murder tasks. Instead of putting Jews and the like into concentration camps, The Einsatzgruppen went straight to their homes and slaughtered them.
The German army helped out the Einsatzgruppen by providing them with supplies, transportation and housing. At first the Einsatzgruppen shot mainly Jewish men. Soon, wherever the Einsatzgruppen went, they shot all Jewish men, women and children without thought for their age or sex. The bodies were then buried in mass graves, which were sometimes actually dug by the Jews themselves.
The Final Solution was the plan to annihilate all the Jews out of Europe. This was also known as the mass murder of the Jews (Genocide). After the Nazi party achieved power, state enforced racism resulted in boycotts, “Aryanisation,” Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) programme, all of which was aimed towards the Jewish population, to try and drive the Jews out of Germany for good. After the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) began killing operations aimed entirely at the Jewish communities.
The SS soon regarded the mobile killing methods, mainly shooting and/or gas vans, as inefficient as it caused the murderers psychological damage.
In the autumn of 1941, Heinrich Himmler assigned SS General Odilo Globocnik to take out the operation of murdering the Jews of the general government. This operation was then given the codename Aktion Reinhard after Heydrich. Three death camps were established in Poland as a part of Aktion Reinhard, these were called Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. On arrival at the camps, Jews were sent directly to gas chambers. Globocnik’s assistant, SS Major Hermann Hoeffel, was in charge of organizing the deportation of Jews to the Aktion Reinhard camps.
The Nazis also gassed Jews in other extermination camps in Poland: Auschwitz Berkenau (the largest of all camps), Majdanek and Chelmno. At Majdanek, groups of Jews who were considered incapable of doing the work required were gassed. In Chelmno all of the Jews were gassed in mobile gas vans. The Nazis murdered over three million Jews in extermination camps.
In its whole, the “Final Solution” called for the murder of the Jews of Europe by gassing, shooting and other ways. Up to six million Jews lost their lives, and that’s the same amount of Jews that were living in Europe in 1939.