With the launch of Operation Barbarossa, on 22nd June 1941, Einsatzgruppen moved into Russia behind the advancing German armies to round up and kill Jews. Their orders made no distinction between Jews and Communists. Those picked out were marched to the outskirts of their villages, forced to dig their own graves and then shot. As the process continued, Jewish women and children were included in the executions. The numbers killed can only be estimated but by 1943 it is thought the Einsatzgruppen had murdered 2.2 million Russians and Jews. It is difficult to determine who was responsible for the decision of the ‘Final Solution’, Goering signed the order but the initiative seems to have come from Himmler and the SS with Hitler’s approval.
The war itself was precipitated by Germany's invasion of Poland, which brought under the Third Reich's control a population of nearly 3 million Jews, who were immediately ghettoised and/or sent to concentration camps. The subsequent invasion of the Soviet Union by the Nazis in June 1941 brought even more Jews under Nazi control, and knowing this eventuality beforehand, Hitler sent in four units called Einsatzgruppen, who were deployed specifically to kill civilian Jewish populations, as well as Soviet commissars and partisans. This marks the beginning of an open genocide program. The decision in early 1942 on a ‘Final Solution’ for European Jewry, i.e., complete extermination, led to the installation of gassing facilities at the already existing Auschwitz concentration camp and the building of other extermination camps in Poland. The "Final Solution" having been decided upon, the majority of Jews under Nazi control ended up in these camps. The chaos of the war on the Eastern Front provided the Nazis with the ability to carry out their extermination program in a relatively secret manner, though reports of mass genocide did escape from Eastern Europe as early as 1942.
Published reports about the Nazi persecution of the Jews before World War II were freely available. With the beginning of the War in 1939, information was more difficult to obtain. Nevertheless, news about the mass murder of Jews and other victims received publicity through the printed media. Though the information was usually not in the headlines, there were enough newspaper reports to demonstrate that information was not completely lacking.
Eastern Europe was the major arena for the murder of targeted victims. Specifically, the places designed to implement the Nazi's policy of genocide-included ghettos, concentration camps and death camps. Concentration camps were built for the imprisonment of all kinds of enemies of the state, real or imagined.
Between 1939-1945, on Hitler's order, eleven million people were killed during the Holocaust (6 million Jews of which 1.5 million were children). The young died first because as the Nazis said "Nits breed lice." Only a few hundred survived the persecution, ghettos, and camps of Nazi-dominated Europe. Survival in this period of moral darkness was a matter of luck or the ability to do hard labour. Neither factor of which the victims had any control. The victims of the Holocaust were men, women, children, and babies, living in urban or rural areas and from all walks of life. The victims were rounded up by the thousands and packed into trains going to concentration camps such as Dachau, or extermination camps such as Auschwitz. Many died on the crowded trains because they could not breathe. Others died of starvation or disease in these camps. Millions were shot or gassed in huge buildings where canisters of poisonous gas (carbon monoxide or Zyklon B) were released from showerheads and their bodies were burned in gigantic crematoriums as part of Hitler's "Final Solution."
Jews were not the only target of Nazi persecution despite their status as the main "problem." Nazi hatred extended to include groups into categories of hatred; those deemed racially or genetically inferior, asocial (sex offenders or habitual criminals), religious groups and political enemies of the state. Therefore, there was a mosaic of victims who experienced state-sanctioned discrimination and extermination, the Romani (Gypsies) the mentally and physically handicapped, homosexuals, the infirmed, the elderly, the terminally ill, the academically challenged, Professionals, Intelligentsia, Poles, Slavs, Blacks, Nuns, Catholic priests, oppositional clergies, Jehovah Witnesses, Soviet P.O.W.'s, Social Democrats, Communists, purged Nazis, those who aided targeted victims and all others that did not fit the Aryan myth. At the end of WWI those victims who managed to survive were portraits of their inhumane treatment and represented parodies of human beings.
The Holocaust was Hitler's and Nazi Germany's war against the Jews, so they were singled out for genocide, their lives were shattered, and it ultimately affected all Jews living, dead, and not yet born. The Holocaust was a uniquely man-made catastrophe, unprecedented in human history, because never had anti-Semitic acts been endorsed by the state. Speaking to the Reichstag, on the eve of WWII, Hitler declared, "the Jew is to be eliminated and the state has no regard for the manner of his elimination." The Holocaust was a tragedy of great proportions because it was done with the aide of a vast Nazi bureaucracy, an indifferent world, and the utilization of science and technology for the sole purpose of completely murdering a people. The deadly design of the Holocaust took place on the backdrop of a Germany labouring under the burden of WWI, reparations, intense nationalism and hyperinflation. Most importantly, it was a Germany in which anti-Semitism was installed and racism scattered every part of society. Thus explaining how ordinary Germany citizens came to regard the Jews as domestic enemies of the state whose extermination was not only necessary but just so, German citizens readily became perpetrators, collaborators, and accomplishes to death. The Holocaust left an imprint of death, suffering, cruel memories and the after shocks are still being felt today. The reality of the Holocaust is the knowledge that all forms of discrimination can lead to genocide.
