A Look at the Nazi Final Solution in Europe

On January of 1942 the Final Solution was discussed and agreed upon by Reinhard Heydrich who was a member of the SS secret police army under Hitler. Heydrich opened up a special Jewish office for Security and Police and put it under the leadership of Adolf Eichmann. The two men discussed the Final Solution for the Jews in depth. In the Final Solution, Jews would be put to work on labor camps, separated by gender, put to work on building roads and other government projects. In their opinion, this would decrease the Jewish population. There was still no clear answer for dealing with the remaining Jewish people or of a mass killing of Jewish people.

In June of 1941 when Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, he ordered all Bolshevik Jews to be killed. By August of 1941, all Jews were being killed. The SS officers were put in charge of rounding up the Jews and executing them. In the Soviet Union, as the German army advanced, they obtained lists of all of the Jewish people in the town and starting searching for them to kill them. In Kiev, 33,000 Jewish people were executed within a two day period. Jews were routinely and systematically shot and buried in mass grave sites. Jews were told to dig ditches and then they were shot by machine guns. As the German army moved deeper into Soviet territory, the killings of Jews became quicker.

On December 14, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich issued an order that all Polish Jews be rounded up and brought into the main cities. By 1940, large ghettos were set up to contain the mass populations of Jewish people. These ghettos were in Warsaw, Lublin, Cracow and Kovno. In Warsaw, 450,000 Jews were massed together into a small area. Food rations for Jews were limited and many people starved before they were transported into the concentration camps. Disease and starvation killed 30 percent of the ghetto communities. The Nazis set up a Jewish council in each ghetto to organize the people and carry out the Nazi decrees. Some Jewish councils thought that be appeasing to the Nazi demands, they would survive. In the end, it didn't matter whether the Jews cooperated or not: they were all systematically killed and executed.

In 1942, concentration death camps were set up, the most famous of which is Aushwitz which killed the most Jews out of any concentration camp with slightly more than a million deaths. Gassings of mass Jewish people became the ritual for killing instead of using bullets because the Nazis though that the gas chambers would speed up the process and make it more effective. In May of 1942, the gas called Zyklon B was designed by Lieutenant-General Heinz Kammler. Gas chambers were disguised as shower rooms.

When Jewish people were transported by train to the concentration camps, they were told to hand over all of their belongings. Jews were separated by male and female and then they were prompted marched into the shower rooms where they were gassed. Large cars were then designed to carry the bodies away and bury them into a mass grave site. Each day between 6-10,000 Jewish men and women were rounded up and brought to their deaths.
Jews that were not yet rounded up to the death camps had to wear a yellow Star of David.

As Germany conquered more and more territory, more and more Jewish people lost their lives.

In Belgium, Jews were able to seek refuge through an underground system of hiding Jewish people. Clergy members in Belgium helped hide Jews from the Nazis. In Denmark, Jews were also protected to some extent. Denmark resisted fiercely to the Nazis and was unwilling to surrender their Jewish citizens to the Nazis. The Danish people greatly helped their Jewish neighbors and hid them when the Nazis came. The reason from the great help that Jews received in Denmark was because the small Jewish communities were highly integrated into society and many Jews had mixed marriages. Only a few hundred Jews were rounded up and killed from Denmark. Sweden also helped out the Jews by providing his country as a safe haven for Jewish people.

German influence extended to France where France adopted anti-Jewish policies. Jews were required to wear the yellow star and prohibited from practicing businesses and other professional areas like medicine and law. From France, Jews were shipped to the concentration camps.

In Hungary, the greatest amount of Jews died. Out of a population of 800,000 Jewish people, 575,000 people were killed by the Nazis. In total when the war was over, over 6 million Jewish people were executed by the Nazis.