With the extra Jews in Poland, and the Jews in Russia who had been handed over, Hitler was running out of space to keep them. He came up with the idea of moving every Jew to the island of Madagascar, off the south east coast of Africa. However in July 1940, the time of the plan, Germany was at war with Great Britain who controlled the seas and made it impossible for the Nazis to ship them all the way to South Africa. On 22nd June 1941, Germany broke the treaty, it had signed with the Soviet Union in August 1939, and invaded Russia, 3 million soviet soldiers were taken prisoner in the 1st eight months. Jews, gypsies, and those suspected of being communist, were shot straight away. Hitler saw the Soviet Union as the heartland of his most hated racial and ideological enemies; Jews, Slavs, and communists. This was to be a racial war of extermination that would destroy entire communities. Nazi terror became systematic mass murder. To carry out the murders, Hitler designed the Einsatzgruppen, murder squads, which followed the Nazi army into occupied territory and into Jewish communities. They swept across the continent shooting, gassing, beating or torturing to death any Jews they found. Those that were not murdered by the Death Squads were put into newly formed ghettos like the one in Warsaw. Some were sent to already overcrowded ghettos making things worse. The Nazis were clearing Europe of all Jews, making living space for his Aryan Race, the task he had set out to do in the first place.
In January 1942, Hitler and a group of Nazi officials met in a town, just outside of Berlin, called Wansee, to discuss the future of the Jewish “problem”. This conference came shortly after America joined in the war. Hitler knew he faced the most powerful country in the world and was not prepared for a long conflict. His hate towards the Jews turned into frustration. Another reason for this was that the German advance had ground to a halt in Soviet Russia so Hitler’s plan to deport the Jews East was impossible. During the Nazi advance in Russia, they had suffered heavy losses and Hitler believed that the Jews were responsible. Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, noted this in his diary: “If the German people have sacrificed 160 000 dead in the eastern campaign, so the authors of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives”. The Nazis had decided that no Jewish man, woman or child would remain alive in Europe. Tens of thousands of Jews could be killed in a few days by the SS murder squads but the Nazis realised that shooting people into mass graves was too slow to be used for the murder of every Jew in Europe. They also wanted a method of killing that would cause less distress to the killers. Scientists and engineers competed to find the fastest and cheapest way to kill people. The solution was found by building factories whose only purpose was the murder of human beings. In December 1941, in a town called Chelmno the first of these factories was opened. 150 000 Jews were killed there with gas vans. The Nazis, seeing the success of the Chelmno camp, opened a further three camps the following the following spring with the aim of killing every Jew in Poland. 1 600 000 Jews were killed in the camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. The Nazis told the Jews they were to be “resettled” and sent to work for the Nazis in the east. Millions of people arrived at these camps expecting to enjoy a new life but they did not know that resettlement actually meant death. Auschwitz, a death camp in Poland was opened in 1942. it was the biggest of it’s kind ever so that it could kill every Jew in Europe, not just in Poland. Hundreds of people were packed into small cattle trains for days, many people died along the way. The deception continued when everyone arrived at the death camps, music was played at the stations to make them more welcoming. It tricked people into thinking that the death camps would not be a bad thing. Working men were separated from children, the elderly, the sick, and women and taken in one direction whilst the others were taken towards the showers. As people were made to undress the Nazis continued to lie to them, saying they should remember their clothes’ peg number and that the showers would delouse them. Then they were led into the gas chambers and locked in. Only once it was too late did everyone figure out that the showers were pumping out a poisonous gas called Zyklon B, and not water, which is more commonly associated with showers. Hundreds of people were killed at once, in the biggest gas chamber of Auschwitz, 2000 people could be killed. The bodies were taken to the incinerators and burnt by other prisoners, this destroyed the evidence. Once inside, the men had no escape. They were forced to work in Auschwitz, in a building called Canada. This deceptive name was actually where the dead Jews’ belongings were sorted such as clothes, shoes, combs and even hair.
Many companies moved into death camps like Auschwitz, this made money for Germany with the use of forced labour. Siemens, the Telecommunications Company, and I.G Farben had factories at Auschwitz. They made a lot of money whilst working the Jews to death. The Nazis killed the prisoners as soon as they were not fit enough to work anymore as it was the only reason they were being kept alive in the first place. Towards the end of the war, the Nazis tried their best to destroy all knowledge of the Holocaust and the brutal treatment of the Jews. However resistance groups such as the Jewish Sonderkommando were able to smuggle or hide letters and photos about what was really going on. Thanks to these letters we know what happened and by doing this, the Jews defied the Nazis and Adolf Hitler.
In 1945, the Nazis surrended signalling the end of the Second World War. Allied troops liberated camps from the east whilst Soviet troops did the same from the west. They found thousands of dead and dying Jews, the only survivors of the Holocaust that had started many years back in 1933, with Hitler’s rise to power. Firstly the Jews were discriminated with the Nuremberg and other anti-Semitic laws with the view of making life so hard in Germany that the Jews would leave for other countries. However somewhere along the line, the Nazis changed their ideas and separated Jews into ghettos and work camps. This separated them from the Aryan Germans and made it easier to target them. Then, as the war drew to an end, the Germans did their best to eliminate every Jew in Europe. At the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of Jews left Europe for Palestine and rebuilt a Jewish homeland so that they would never again be the persecuted minority.
