Events
December 8, 1941Concentration camp at Chelmno, Poland, begins gassing
Jewish prisoners
January20, 1942Wannsee Conference held
The Beginning of the Holocaust
While the United States was becoming embroiled
in the war in the Pacific, back in Europe the true intent of the
Nazi armies was becoming increasingly clear. As more and more of
eastern Europe fell into German hands, the territory became a sort
of backyard for the Nazis, where the ugliest parts of their plan
could be carried out far away from prying eyes. By late 1941,
the first Jews from Germany and western Europe were gathered and
transported, along with many other minorities, to concentration
camps in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine,
and western Russia, where they were first used as slaves and then
systematically murdered.
At this point, the notorious gas chambers of
the later Nazi concentration camps were not yet common. Most victims
were taken in groups to secluded areas where they were stripped
of clothing, pushed into open pits, machine-gunned, and then quickly
covered over, in many cases even before all were dead. Indeed, one
of the reasons for creating the gas chambers and extermination camps
was that many troops in the German S.S. experienced
severe psychological repercussions carrying out the gruesome tasks
put before them.
The German atrocities were not directed solely at Jews.
Precisely the same fate awaited millions of non-Jewish Russian and
eastern European civilians, as well as many Soviet prisoners of
war. By December 1941,
the number of Nazi murders was already in the hundreds of thousands
and growing rapidly.
The Wannsee Conference
On January 20, 1942,
a group of fifteen Nazi officials met in a villa in the Wannsee
district outside Berlin in order to settle the details for resolving
the so-called “Jewish question.” The meeting
was led by Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Gestapo (the
Nazi secret police), and included several members of the S.S. along
with representatives of several German government ministries. Neither
Hitler nor any heads of government ministries were present.
The topics discussed at the Wannsee Conference included
the logistics of expelling Jews from Germany by emigration, the
possibility of mandatory sterilization, and the best ways to deal
with people of mixed blood. The conference devoted considerable
attention to the matter of who would be legally considered a Jew;
ultimately, it set different conditions for pure Jews and those
of mixed blood, in turn classified by first generation and second
generation. Delegates also discussed how to handle Jews who would
not or could not leave the country; it was decided that these Jews
would be sterilized and sent to live in all-Jewish “retirement ghettos.”
The official record of the Wannsee Conference made no
mention of mass killing of Jews or of extermination camps. However,
the meeting did set a secret goal to remove 11 million
Jews from Europe by whatever means and expressed concern that the
mass emigration process already taking place was becoming expensive
and more difficult to negotiate. The terms “final solution” and
“absolute final solution” were used, although the specifics were
not elaborated.
