3) In what ways did the Nazis attempt to eliminate all Jews in Europe from 1941 onwards?
From the time the decision was made to eliminate all the Jews in Europe, or from late 1941, many different methods would be tried before an efficient way was found.
Before 1941, Jews were being killed in Germany and invaded Poland, but not due to an actual decision to kill them; the Jews were rounded up and forced into ghettos which resulted in many Jewish deaths. The ghettos were often a tiny portion of the cities and towns in which they were situated and this resulted in overcrowding; in Warsaw, 400,000 Jews were forced to live in an area just two percent the size of the cities. Many Jews died from the conditions of the ghettos as disease and starvation were rampant due to inadequate supplies. Jews were also killed, by the armed guards that patrolled the ghetto boundaries, if they were caught trying to escape from the ghettos.
However, the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 unearthed millions more Jews and it became obvious to the Nazis that they would not be able to house them all in ghettos. In July 1941, Himmler, leader of the SS, gave the order that any enemies of Germans found by the invading forces should be executed without trial, though it was clear that his intentions were to kill the Soviet Jews. Four main groups of Einsatzgruppen followed behind the regular army, executing Jews and persuading local populations to turn on the Jews and kill them themselves. It is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen killed almost 1.5 million men, women and children throughout their time; in a span of just five months in 1941 they killed 130,000 Jews in Lithuania alone.