Why did the Nazis(TM) treatment of the Jews change from 1939-1945?

In September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and started the Second World War. The war could have been a reason why the treatment of the Jews changed for many reasons. War involves extreme situations and so more extreme solutions could be reached, but the main reason why treatment changed for the Jews was because the eastward invasion, into Poland in 1939 and the Soviet Union in 1941, unearthed millions more Jews, meaning new solutions had to be found, as the policies of the moment of putting all the Jews in ghettos was reaching breaking point. The war also ruled out options of moving Jews out of the country.

As the invasion pushed eastward, Himmler, head of the SS, began to rid themselves of the Jews they discovered by setting up Einsatzgruppen who followed the German army, shooting any Jews and encouraging local populations to attack them. However, Himmler thought the was likely to psychologically damaging for his troops, so he made the first steps towards the industrial mass murder of the Jews by setting up gas-vans, which would poison the Jews with carbon monoxide. Soon some death camps would follow.

The Wannsee Conference of January 1942 would seal the fate of Europe’s Jews as Heydrich and Himmler took control of the situation and came up with the ‘Final Solution’. They ordered that Jews were to be sent to concentration or extermination camps.

Although it is not clear whether it was Hitler’s intention or the war that caused the ‘Final Solution’, the war certainly acted as a catalyst by removing options of resettling the Jews. It added to the Jewish problem by unearthing millions more Jews and so causing a new solution to be contemplated – the shooting of the Jews by German soldiers. However, this proved slow and wasteful of ammunition and so death camps or the ‘Final Solution’ was thought up; the war enabled this mass extermination to be kept secret due to the security arrangements in place.