The Nazi conquest of Poland at the end of the 1939 marked the next turn-
ing point in its Jewish policy. This invasion brought an additional 2 million
Jews under Nazi occupation (the remaining 1 million had fled eastward into
the Soviet Union). This was far more than the combined Jewish populations
of Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and Austria, signifi-
cantly altering the scope of the Nazi policies regarding Jews.
Other than the western provinces of Poland, which were incorporated
directly into the German Reich, Nazi-occupied Poland was renamed the
General Government. Jews there were forcibly concentrated in the newly cre-
ated ghettos that were set up in every major Polish city. The largest ghettos
were in Warsaw, ód ́z, Lublin, and Kraców. The initial purpose of ghettoiza-
tion was to concentrate Jews and separate them from the general population.
The ghettos were horribly overcrowded, and rife with starvation and disease.
A Jewish council (Judenrat) was appointed – usually from the existing Jewish
leadership – to administer each ghetto and implement Nazi policies. There is
no evidence at this point that a mass genocide was intended. On the contrary,
the abortive Madagascar Plan, in which the Nazi regime planned to relocate
Polish Jews to the island of Madagascar, indicates that the main strategy was
separation and enslavement, not annihilation.
The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked the next shift
in Nazi policy. The rapid conquest of the western part of the Soviet Union
brought millions more Jews under Nazi occupation, including the 1 million
who had fled Poland in 1939. It was at this point that mass killing became
the main Nazi strategy for dealing with Jews. Special units known as
Einsatzgruppentrailed the advancing German army and executed the Jews
from each newly conquered town and village. From June 1941 through July
1942, the Einsatzgruppenkilled more than 1 million Jews, including more
than 300,000 Ukrainian Jews in a few weeks at Babi Yar, a stream near Kiev.
This mass execution raised the possibility of removing the Jews through
genocide. In January 1942, Hitler, his closest advisers, and a team of scien-
tists and engineers met at Wannsee to discuss “the Final Solution of the
Jewish problem.”
Following the Wannsee Conference, construction began on a series of
death camps. In contrast to concentration camps and labor camps, death
camps were built primarily for the mass killing of Jews. All of the death
camps were located in Poland, and most were built adjacent to an existing
concentration camp; Birkenau, for example, was built next to Auschwitz. The
death camps were set up near one of the ghettos. Majdanek was located on the
outskirts of Lublin. Treblinka was less than an hour’s drive from Warsaw.
Between 1941 and 1944, all Jewish ghettos were “liquidated” and the Jews
deported to one of the death camps. Jews from all over Nazi-occupied Europe,
from the Netherlands to Greece, were deported to the death camps.
The death-camp experience was one of indescribable horror. Although
there is some variation among the slew of death-camp memoirs, the basic
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