Final Solution

File:Adolf Hitler's speech in the Reichstag, 30 January 1939.jpg in the Reichstag, 30 January 1939]]

The term "Final Solution" was a euphemism used by the Nazis to refer to their plan for the annihilation of the Jewish people. Some historians argue that the usual tendency of the German leadership was to be extremely guarded when discussing the Final Solution. For example, Mark Roseman wrote that euphemisms were "their normal mode of communicating about murder".{{sfnp|Roseman|2002|p=87}} However, Jeffrey Herf has argued that the role of euphemisms in Nazi propaganda has been exaggerated, and in fact Nazi leaders often made direct threats against Jews.{{sfn|Herf|2005|p=54}} For example, during his speech of 30 January 1939, Hitler threatened "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe".{{sfn|Herf|2005|p=56}}

From gaining power in January 1933 until the outbreak of war in September 1939, the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany was focused on intimidation, expropriating their money and property, and encouraging them to emigrate. According to the Nazi Party policy statement, Jews and the Romani people{{r|Browning181}} were the only "alien people in Europe".{{cite book |title=The Routledge History of the Holocaust |author=Ian Hancock |editor=Jonathan C. Friedman |publisher=Taylor & Francis |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=vsrJLASVC3QC&q=Menace+Bureau |page=378 |year=2010 |isbn=978-1136870606|author-link=Ian Hancock }} Also in: {{cite book |title=The Gypsies of Eastern Europe |author1=David M. Crowe |author2=John Kolsti |author3=Ian Hancock |publisher=Routledge |year=2016 |isbn=978-1315490243 |page=16 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jyC3DAAAQBAJ&q=Nuremberg+anti-Gypsyism|author1-link=David M. Crowe }} In 1936, the Bureau of Romani Affairs in Munich was renamed to the Center for Combating the Gypsy Menace. Introduced at the end of 1937,{{harvp|Browning|2004|loc=(2007 ed.: pp. 179, 181–12}}). [https://books.google.com/books?id=d9Wg4gjtP3cC&q=Gypsy+question+final "The Gypsy question"]. the "final solution of the Gypsy Question" entailed round-ups, expulsions, and incarceration of Romani in concentration camps built at, until this point, Dachau, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, Natzweiler, Ravensbruck, Taucha and Westerbork. After the Anschluss with Austria in 1938, Central Offices for Jewish Emigration were established in Vienna and Berlin to increase Jewish emigration, without covert plans for their forthcoming annihilation.{{harvp|Roseman|2002|pp=11–12}}.

The outbreak of war and the invasion of Poland brought a population of 3.5 million Polish Jews under the control of the Nazi and Soviet security forces,{{cite book |last1=Lukas |first1=Richard |author-link1=Richard C. Lukas |url=https://archive.org/details/outofinferno00rela |url-access=registration |quote=Nazi terror. |title=Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust |publisher=University Press of Kentucky |year=1989 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/outofinferno00rela/page/5 5], 13, 111, 201|isbn=0813116929 }}; also in {{cite book |orig-year=1986 |year=2012 |last1=Lukas |first1= Richard |author-link1=Richard C. Lukas |publisher=University of Kentucky Press/Hippocrene Books |isbn=978-0-7818-0901-6 |title=The Forgotten Holocaust: Poles Under Nazi Occupation 1939–1944 |location=New York |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Lv1mAAAAMAAJ&q=editions:lC7HhINUjXIC}} and marked the start of the Holocaust in Poland.{{r|Browning213}} In the German-occupied zone of Poland, Jews were forced into hundreds of makeshift ghettos, pending other arrangements.{{cite web |title=German Invasion of Poland: Jewish Refugees, 1939 |author=Holocaust Encyclopedia |publisher=United States Holocaust Memorial Museum |location= Washington, DC |url=http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005593}}

In April 1941, the German agriculture and interior ministries designated the SS as an authorized applier of Zyklon B, which meant they were able to use it without any further training or governmental oversight.{{cite book | last = Hayes | first = Peter | author-link=Peter Hayes (historian) |title = From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich | year = 2004 | publisher = Cambridge University Press | location = Cambridge; New York; Melbourne | isbn = 0-521-78227-9 }} The launch of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 coincided with the German top echelon's newfound intent to pursue Hitler's new anti-Semitic plan to eradicate, rather than expel, Jews.{{cite book |title=God, Greed, and Genocide: The Holocaust Through the Centuries |first=Arthur |last=Grenke |publisher=New Academia Publishing |year=2005 |isbn=097670420X |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=iBaGO8Ue2NMC&q=eradication+rather+than+expulsion |page=92}} Hitler's earlier ideas about forcible removal of Jews from the German-controlled territories to achieve Lebensraum were abandoned after the failure of the air campaign against Britain, initiating a naval blockade of Germany.{{cite book |last=Browning |first=Christopher R. |author-link=Christopher Browning |title=The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution |year=1995 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=L1O2ZvS29DYC |via=Google Books |isbn=978-0-521-55878-5 |pages=18–19, 127–28}} Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler became the chief architect of a new plan, which came to be called The Final Solution to the Jewish question.{{sfnp|Browning|2004|loc=[https://books.google.com/books?id=d9Wg4gjtP3cC&q=Lebensraum+1941 pp. 35–36]}} On 31 July 1941, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring wrote to Reinhard Heydrich (Himmler's deputy and chief of the RSHA),{{sfnp|Roseman|2002|pp=14–15}}{{sfnp|Hilberg|1985|p= 278}} authorising him to make the "necessary preparations" for a "total solution of the Jewish question" and coordinate with all affected organizations. Göring also instructed Heydrich to submit concrete proposals for the implementation of the new projected goal.{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=d9Wg4gjtP3cC&pg=PA315|title=The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942|last=Browning|first=Christopher R.|year=2007|publisher=University of Nebraska Press|isbn=978-0803203921|page=315|language=en}}{{cite web |url=http://www.ghwk.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf-wannsee/engl/goering.pdf |title=Authorization letter of Hermann Göring to Heydrich, 31 July 1941 |last=Göring |first=Hermann |date=31 July 1941 |access-date=3 June 2014 |publisher=House of the Wannsee Conference |archive-date=19 February 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180219024305/http://www.ghwk.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf-wannsee/engl/goering.pdf |url-status=dead }}

Broadly speaking, the extermination of Jews was carried out in two major operations. With the onset of Operation Barbarossa, mobile killing units of the SS, the Einsatzgruppen, and Order Police battalions were dispatched to the occupied Soviet Union for the express purpose of murdering all Jews. During the early stages of the invasion, Himmler himself visited Białystok at the beginning of July 1941, and requested that, "as a matter of principle, any Jew" behind the German-Soviet frontier was to be "regarded as a partisan". His new orders gave the SS and police leaders full authority for the mass-murder behind the front lines. By August 1941, all Jewish men, women, and children were shot.{{sfnp|Longerich|2012|pp=[https://books.google.com/books?id=GBQchepZ-7EC&q=Bialystok%2Bprinciple&pg=PA525 525–33]}} In the second phase of annihilation, the Jewish inhabitants of central, western, and south-eastern Europe were transported by Holocaust trains to camps with newly built gassing facilities. Raul Hilberg wrote: "In essence, the killers of the occupied USSR moved to the victims, whereas outside this arena, the victims were brought to the killers. The two operations constitute an evolution not only chronologically, but also in complexity."{{harvp|Hilberg|1985|p=273}}. Massacres of about one million Jews occurred before plans for the Final Solution were fully implemented in 1942, but it was only with the decision to annihilate the entire Jewish population that extermination camps such as Auschwitz II Birkenau and Treblinka were fitted with permanent gas chambers to murder large numbers of Jews in a relatively short period of time.{{sfnp|Browning|2004|loc=[https://books.google.com/books?id=d9Wg4gjtP3cC&q=gas+chambers pp. 352–56]}}

File:Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz 02-2014.jpg was held, is now a memorial and museum.]]

The plans to exterminate all the Jews of Europe were formalized at the Wannsee Conference, held at an SS guesthouse near Berlin,{{sfnp|Longerich|2012|p=555}} on 20 January 1942. The conference was chaired by Heydrich and attended by 15 senior officials of the Nazi Party and the German government. Most of those attending were representatives of the Interior Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, and the Justice Ministry, including Ministers for the Eastern Territories.{{sfnp|Roseman|2002|pp=65–67}} At the conference, Heydrich indicated that approximately 11,000,000 Jews in Europe would fall under the provisions of the "Final Solution". This figure included not only Jews residing in Axis-controlled Europe, but also the Jewish populations of the United Kingdom and of neutral nations (Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and European Turkey). Eichmann's biographer David Cesarani wrote that Heydrich's main purpose in convening the conference was to assert his authority over the various agencies dealing with Jewish issues. "The simplest, most decisive way that Heydrich could ensure the smooth flow of deportations" to death camps, according to Cesarani, "was by asserting his total control over the fate of the Jews in the Reich and the east" under the single authority of the RSHA.{{sfnp|Cesarani|2005|pp=110–11}} A copy of the minutes of this meeting (later called the Wannsee Conference Protocol) was found by the Allies in March 1947;{{cite web |title=Protocol of Conference on the final solution (Endlösung) of the Jewish question |url=https://www.ghwk.de/fileadmin/Redaktion/PDF/Konferenz/texte/English_translation_wannsee_protocol_2020.pdf |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230409112828/https://www.ghwk.de/fileadmin/Redaktion/PDF/Konferenz/texte/English_translation_wannsee_protocol_2020.pdf |archive-date=9 April 2023 |access-date=7 August 2023 |publisher=House of the Wannsee Conference}} it was too late to serve as evidence during the first Nuremberg Trial, but was used by prosecutor General Telford Taylor in the subsequent Nuremberg Trials.{{sfnp|Roseman|2002|pp=1–2}}

After the end of World War{{nbsp}}II, surviving archival documents provided a clear record of the Final Solution policies and actions of Nazi Germany. They included the Wannsee Conference Protocol, which documented the co-operation of various German state agencies in the SS-led Holocaust, as well as some 3,000 tons of original German records captured by Allied armies,{{cite book |first=Konnilyn G. |last=Feig |title=Hitler's death camps: the sanity of madness |year=1981 |publisher=Holmes & Meier |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CNqEAAAAIAAJ&q=soldiers%2C+railroad+and+factory+workers%2C+chemists%2C+pharmacists%2C+foremen |pages=12–13 |isbn=0841906769 |quote=Hitler exterminated the Jews of Europe. But he did not do so alone. The task was so enormous, complex, time-consuming, and mentally and economically demanding that it took the best efforts of millions of Germans.}} including the Einsatzgruppen reports, which documented the progress of the mobile killing units assigned, among other tasks, to murder Jewish civilians during the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. The evidential proof which documented the mechanism of the Holocaust was submitted at Nuremberg.{{cite web |title=Combating Holocaust Denial: Evidence of the Holocaust Presented at Nuremberg |url=http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007271 |publisher=United States Holocaust Memorial Museum |access-date=8 November 2013}}

{{main|Einsatzgruppen|Einsatzgruppen reports|Order Police battalions}}{{See also|War crimes of the Wehrmacht|Clean Wehrmacht}}

The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union codenamed Operation Barbarossa, which commenced on 22 June 1941, set in motion a "war of annihilation" which quickly opened the door to the systematic mass murder of European Jews.{{sfnp|Browning|2004|p=216}} For Hitler, Bolshevism was merely "the most recent and most nefarious manifestation of the eternal Jewish threat".{{sfnp|Browning|2004|p=224}} On 3 March 1941, Wehrmacht Joint Operations Staff Chief Alfred Jodl repeated Hitler's declaration that the "Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia would have to be eliminated" and that the forthcoming war would be a confrontation between two completely opposing cultures.{{sfnp|Hilberg|1985|p= 281}} In May 1941, Gestapo leader Heinrich Müller wrote a preamble to the new law limiting the jurisdiction of military courts in prosecuting troops for criminal actions because: "This time, the troops will encounter an especially dangerous element from the civilian population, and therefore, have the right and obligation to secure themselves."{{sfnp|Browning|2004|p=[https://books.google.com/books?id=d9Wg4gjtP3cC&q=worldview 219]}}

File:Himmler note 18 december 1941.jpg

Himmler and Heydrich assembled a force of about 3,000 men from Security Police, Gestapo, Kripo, SD, and the Waffen-SS, as the so-called "special commandos of the security forces" known as the Einsatzgruppen, to eliminate both communists and Jews in occupied territories.{{sfnp|Browning|2004|p=217}} These forces were supported by 21 battalions of Orpo Reserve Police under Kurt Daluege, adding up to 11,000 men.{{sfnp|Browning|2004|p=229}} The explicit orders given to the Order Police varied between locations, but for Police Battalion 309 participating in the first mass murder of 5,500 Polish Jews in the Soviet-controlled Białystok (a Polish provincial capital), Major Weiss explained to his officers that Barbarossa is a war of annihilation against Bolshevism,{{sfnp|Browning|1998|p=11|ps=: On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, Major Weiss disclosed to his men the directives of Hitler's [http://www.mrclancy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Barbarossa-Decree.pdf 'Barbarossa Decree'.]}} and that his battalions would proceed ruthlessly against all Jews, regardless of age or sex.{{sfnp|Browning|2004|p=232}}

After crossing the Soviet demarcation line in 1941, what had been regarded as exceptional in the Greater Germanic Reich became a normal way of operating in the east. The crucial taboo against the murder of women and children was breached not only in Białystok but also in Gargždai in late June.{{sfnp|Browning|2004|p=260}} By July, significant numbers of women and children were being murdered behind all front-lines not only by the Germans but also by the local Ukrainian and Lithuanian auxiliary forces.{{sfnp|Browning|2004|p=261}} On 29 July 1941, at a meeting of SS officers in Vileyka (Polish Wilejka, now Belarus), the Einsatzgruppen had been given a dressing-down for their low execution figures. Heydrich himself issued an order to include the Jewish women and children in all subsequent shooting operations.{{cite book |title=The Making of an SS Killer |first=Alex J. |last=Kay |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2016 |pages=57–62, 72 |isbn=978-1107146341 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=r0jGCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA57 |quote=The Vileyka massacres by Einsatzkommando 9 at the end of July marked the transition to genocide.^{[p. 60]} Entire Jewish population of town, at least 450 Jewish men, women and children, were killed.^[p.72]}} Accordingly, by the end of July the entire Jewish population of Vileyka, men, women and children, were murdered. Around 12 August, no less than two-thirds of the Jews shot in Surazh were women and children of all ages. In late August 1941 the Einsatzgruppen murdered 23,600 Jews in the Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre. A month later, the largest mass shooting of Soviet Jews took place on 29–30 September in the ravine of Babi Yar, near Kyiv, where more than 33,000 Jewish people of all ages were systematically machine-gunned.{{sfnp|Laqueur|Baumel|2001|p=51}} In mid-October 1941, HSSPF South, under the command of Friedrich Jeckeln, had reported the indiscriminate murder of more than 100,000 people.{{sfnp|Browning|2004|pp=291–92}}

{{multiple image

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|image1=Map Stahlecker's Report 1941-1943.jpg

|caption1=Original annotated map from Stahlecker's Report, summarizing murders committed by Einsatzgruppen in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Russia until January 1942

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|caption2=Notably, the Stahlecker's map (top) had shown the Soviet Byelorussia according to bilateral terms of the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland, not the Byelorussian SSR (marked in pink), from before the Soviet annexation of Kresy. In this map, territory of prewar Poland inhabited by Polish Jews is marked in yellow.

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By the end of December 1941, before the Wannsee Conference, over 439,800 Jewish people had been murdered, and the Final Solution policy in the east became common knowledge within the SS.{{cite book |last=Yahil |first=Leni |author-link=Leni Yahil |title=The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=e_aRvKpLUf0C&pg=PA270 |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=1991 |page=270 |isbn=0195045238 }} Entire regions were reported "free of Jews" by the Einsatzgruppen. Addressing his district governors in the General Government on 16 December 1941, Governor-General Hans Frank said: "But what will happen to the Jews? Do you believe they will be lodged in settlements in Ostland? In Berlin, we were told: why all this trouble; we cannot use them in the Ostland or the Reichskommissariat either; liquidate them yourselves!"{{sfnp|Browning|2004|pp=408–09}} Two days later, Himmler recorded the outcome of his discussion with Hitler. The result was: "als Partisanen auszurotten" ("exterminate them as partisans").{{cite book |last=Bauer |first=Yehuda |title=Rethinking the Holocaust |publisher=Yale University Press |year=2000 |page=5 |isbn=0300093004 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=WhvShlTeqesC&q=zurotten&pg=PA5}} Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer wrote that the remark is probably as close as historians will ever get to a definitive order from Hitler for the genocide carried out during the Holocaust. Within two years, the total number of shooting victims in the east had risen to between 618,000 and 800,000 Jews.{{r|LY1991}}{{sfnp|Browning|2004|p=244}}

{{see also|Reichskommissariat Ostland}}

Several scholars have suggested that the Final Solution began in the newly formed district of Bezirk Bialystok.{{cite journal |first=Marcin |last=Markiewicz |journal=Biuletyn Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej |department=Komentarze Historyczne |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110611232035/http://www.ipn.gov.pl/download.php?s=1&id=3922 |archive-date=11 June 2011 |access-date=9 February 2016 |url=http://www.ipn.gov.pl/download.php?s=1&id=3922 |at=68/96 in PDF |publisher=Biuro Edukacji Publicznej IPN |title=Bezirk Białystok (in) Represje hitlerowskie wobec wsi białostockiej |trans-title=Bezirk Białystok (in) Nazi repressions against the Białystok countryside |via=direct download 873 KB from the Internet Archive |volume=35-36 (12/2003–1/2004) |issn=1641-9561 }} Also in: {{harvp|Roseman|2002|p=111}}: "During the Wannsee meeting, the number of Jews in Białystok (i. e., in Bezirk Bialystok)—subject to Final Solution—was estimated by Heydrich at 400,000. In Lithuania: 34,000. In Latvia: 3,500. In White Russia (excluding Bialystok): 446,484, and in USSR: 5,000,000. Estonia was listed in the minutes as being already Judenfrei (see [http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/wannsee.asp Wannsee Protocol], Nuremberg)." The German army took over Białystok within days. On Friday, 27 June 1941, the Reserve Police Battalion 309 arrived in the city and set the Great Synagogue on fire with hundreds of Jewish men locked inside.{{sfnp|Browning|1998|p=12}} The burning of the synagogue was followed by a frenzy of murders both inside the homes around the Jewish neighbourhood of Chanajki, and in the city park, lasting until night time.{{cite web |url=http://www.sztetl.org.pl/en/article/bialystok/5,history/?action=view&page=6 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131017013243/http://www.sztetl.org.pl/en/article/bialystok/5,history/?action=view&page=6 |url-status=dead |archive-date=2013-10-17 |title=Białystok – History |publisher=Virtual Shtetl Museum of the History of Polish Jews |via=Internet Archive |page=6, paragraph #3 |id=According to records, about 5,000 Jews died at that time.^[7.2] See: {{harvp|Browning|1998|page=12}} – Weis and his officers subsequently submitted a false report of the events to [General] Pfugbeil ... 2,000 to 2,200 Jews had been killed.^[8]}} The next day, some 30 wagons of dead bodies were taken to mass graves. As noted by Browning, the murders were led by a commander "who correctly intuited and anticipated the wishes of his Führer" without direct orders.{{sfnp|Browning|1998|p=12}} For reasons unknown, the number of victims in the official report by Major Weis was cut in half. The next mass-shooting of Polish Jews within the newly formed Reichskommissariat Ostland took place in two days of 5–7 August in occupied Pińsk, where over 12,000 Jews were murdered by the Waffen SS,{{cite web |title=The Holocaust and the Destruction of the Jews of Pinsk (4 July 1941 – 23 December 1942) |publisher=The Jewish Community of Pinsk |url=http://www.pinskjews.org.il/eng/history03.asp |first=Nachum |last=Boneh |work=The Book of Pinsk. Chapter 3: The Oppressors in Action |access-date=20 September 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170912192040/http://www.pinskjews.org.il/eng/history03.asp |archive-date=12 September 2017 |url-status=dead }} not the Einsatzgruppen. An additional 17,000 Jews perished there in a ghetto uprising crushed a year later with the aid of Belarusian Auxiliary Police.{{cite web |url=http://www.sztetl.org.pl/he/article/pinsk/5,-/?print=1 |title=Pińsk |publisher=Virtual Shtetl |work=Elektroniczna Encyklopedia Żydowska |id=English version |at=Translation: המאמר לא זמין בשפה זו, נכון לעכשיו |access-date=20 September 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170912191757/http://www.sztetl.org.pl/he/article/pinsk/5,-/?print=1 |archive-date=12 September 2017 |url-status=dead }}

An Israeli historian Dina Porat claimed that the Final Solution, i.e.: "the systematic overall physical extermination of Jewish communities one after the other—began in Lithuania" during the massive German chase after the Red Army across the Reichskommissariat Ostland.{{Cite book |author-link=Dina Porat |first=Dina |last=Porat |chapter=The Holocaust in Lithuania: Some Unique Aspects |editor-first=David |editor-last=Cesarani |title=The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation |publisher=Routledge |year=2002 |isbn=0-415-15232-1 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1LeGAgAAQBAJ&q=80%2C000 |via=Google Books |page=[https://archive.org/details/finalsolutionori0000unse/page/161 161] |url=https://archive.org/details/finalsolutionori0000unse/page/161 }} The subject of the Holocaust in Lithuania has been analysed by Konrad Kweit from USHMM who wrote: "Lithuanian Jews were among the first victims of the Holocaust [beyond the eastern borders of occupied Poland]. The Germans carried out the mass executions [...] signaling the beginning of the 'Final Solution'."{{Cite journal |first=Konrad |last=Kwiet |title=Rehearsing for Murder: The Beginning of the Final Solution in Lithuania in June 1941 |journal=Holocaust and Genocide Studies|volume=12 |issue=1 |pages=3–26 |year=1998 |doi=10.1093/hgs/12.1.3}} and {{cite conference |first=Konrad |last=Kwiet |title=The Onset of the Holocaust: The Massacres of Jews in Lithuania in June 1941 |type=Annual lecture |conference=J. B. and Maurice Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum |date=4 December 1995}} Published under the same title, but expanded in {{cite book |title=Power, Conscience and Opposition: Essays in German History in Honour of John A Moses |editor1-first=Andrew |editor1-last=Bonnell |location=New York |publisher=Peter Lang |year=1996 |pages=107–21}} About 80,000 Jews were murdered in Lithuania by October (including in formerly Polish Wilno) and about 175,000 by the end of 1941 according to official reports.

{{see also|Reichskommissariat Ukraine}}

Within one week from the start of Operation Barbarossa, Heydrich issued an order to his Einsatzgruppen for the on-the-spot execution of all Bolsheviks, interpreted by the SS to mean all Jews. One of the first indiscriminate massacres of men, women, and children in Reichskommissariat Ukraine took the lives of over 4,000 Polish Jews in occupied Łuck on 2–4 July 1941, murdered by Einsatzkommando 4a assisted by the Ukrainian People's Militia.{{cite book |first=Joshua D. |last=Zimmerman |author-link=Joshua D. Zimmerman |year=2015 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=w4dsCQAAQBAJ&q=%22%C5%81uck+ghetto%22 |title=The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939–1945 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |via=Google Books |page=193|isbn=978-1107014268 }} Formed officially on 20 August 1941, the Reichskommissariat Ukraine—stretching from prewar east-central Poland to Crimea—had become operational theatre of the Einsatzgruppe C. Within the Soviet Union proper, between 9 July 1941 and 19 September 1941 the city of Zhytomyr was made Judenfrei in three murder operations conducted by German and Ukrainian police in which 10,000 Jews perished. In the Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre of 26–28 August 1941 some 23,600 Jews were shot in front of open pits (including 14,000–18,000 people expelled from Hungary).{{cite book |title=The Politics of Genocide |first=Randolph L. |last=Braham |author-link=Randolph L. Braham |publisher=Wayne State University Press |year=2000 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ATpHs6fgr_YC&q=Kamenets+Report |isbn=0814326919 |page=34}} After an incident in Bila Tserkva in which 90 small children left behind had to be shot separately, Blobel requested that Jewish mothers hold them in their arms during mass shootings.{{cite book |title=Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine |first=Wendy |last=Lower | author-link=Wendy Lower | publisher=Univ of North Carolina Press |year=2006 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=UwDmUJWdcJkC&q=Radomyshl%27+Bila+Tserkva+Ukrainians |isbn=0807876917 |page=253}}{{cite book |title=Life In The Ghettos During The Holocaust |first=Eric |last=Sterling |publisher=Syracuse University Press |year=2005 |isbn=0815608039 |page=127 |via=Google Books |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ywZG1TwqHwoC&q=Bila+Tserkva+4a%2C+Ukrainian}} Long before the conference at Wannsee, 28,000 Jews were shot by SS and Ukrainian military in Vinnytsia on 22 September 1941, followed by the 29 September massacre of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar.{{cite web |title=Goering orders Heydrich to prepare the plan for the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem |work=The Holocaust Timeline 1940–1945 |author=Yad Vashem |year=2016 |publisher=The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority |url=http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/timeline/timeline_40.asp |access-date=26 January 2016 |archive-date=15 July 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180715001155/http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/timeline/timeline_40.asp |url-status=dead }}{{cite web |title=Places of Massacres by German Task Forces between 1941–1943 |year=2009 |publisher=TOS Gemeinde Tübingen |location=Germany |first=Patrick |last=Desbois |author-link=Patrick Desbois |url=http://www.marchoflife.org/fileadmin/data/_TOS-info/2010/downloads/map_ukraine_english.pdf |access-date=26 January 2016 |archive-date=9 October 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161009213903/http://www.marchoflife.org/fileadmin/data/_TOS-info/2010/downloads/map_ukraine_english.pdf |url-status=dead }} In Dnipropetrovsk, on 13 October 1941 some 10,000–15,000 Jews were shot. In Chernihiv, 10,000 Jews were murdered and only 260 Jews were spared. In mid-October, during the Krivoy-Rog massacre of 4,000–5,000 Soviet Jews the entire Ukrainian auxiliary police force actively participated.{{cite book |title=The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined |author-link=Michael Berenbaum |first=Michael |last=Berenbaum |publisher=Indiana University Press |year=2002 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=zkZC6bp3upsC&q=Krivoy-Rog |isbn=0253215293 |page=257}} Also in: {{cite book |title=The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust: K-Se |author1=Shmuel Spector |author2=Geoffrey Wigoder |publisher=NYU Press |year=2001 |isbn=0814793770 |page=679 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MZzY8sG8yNsC&q=KRIVOY+ROG}} In the first days of January 1942 in Kharkiv, 12,000 Jews were murdered, but smaller massacres continued in this period on daily basis in countless other locations.{{cite book |title=The trial of Adolf Eichmann: record of proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem |isbn=0317058401 |id=Volume 1 |author1=Adolf Eichmann |author2=Bet ha-mishpaṭ ha-meḥozi |author3=Miśrad ha-mishpaṭim |publisher=Trust for the Publication of the Proceedings of the Eichmann Trial, in co-operation with the Israel State Archives, and Yad Vashem |year=1992 |pages=522, 93 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=i-7zAAAAMAAJ&q=Dnepropetrovsk}} Also in: {{cite book |title=Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928–1953 |author1=Timothy Snyder |author2=Ray Brandon |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2014 |isbn=978-0199945573 |page=194 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=fZBtAwAAQBAJ&q=Dnipropetrovsk+15%2C000 |quote=Quoted 15,000 dead at Dnipropetrovsk and 12,000 Jews murdered in Kharkiv.}} In August 1942 in the presence of only a few German SS men over 5,000 Jews were massacred in Polish Zofjówka by the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police leading to the town's complete sweep from existence.{{cite web |author=Beit Tal |year=2010 |title=Zofiówka |publisher=POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews |url=http://www.sztetl.org.pl/pl/article/zofiowka/5,historia/ |access-date=27 November 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141230081456/http://www.sztetl.org.pl/pl/article/zofiowka/5,historia/ |archive-date=30 December 2014 |url-status=dead }} Also in: {{cite web |author=Beit Tal |year=2014 |title=Truchenbrod – Lozisht |publisher=The Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora |url=http://www.bet-tal.com/index.aspx?id=2421 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140810091732/http://www.bet-tal.com/index.aspx?id=2421 |archive-date=10 August 2014 }}

Historians find it difficult to determine precisely when the first concerted effort at annihilation of all Jews began in the last weeks of June 1941 during Operation Barbarossa. Dr. Samuel Drix (Witness to Annihilation), Jochaim Schoenfeld (Holocaust Memoirs), and several survivors of the Janowska concentration camp, who were interviewed in the film Janovska Camp at Lvov, among other witnesses, have argued that the Final Solution began in Lwów (Lemberg) in Distrikt Galizien of the General Government during the German advance across Soviet-occupied Poland. Statements and memoirs of survivors emphasize that, when Ukrainian nationalists and ad hoc Ukrainian People's Militia (soon reorganized as the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police) began to murder women and children, rather than only male Jews, the "Final Solution" had begun. Witnesses have said that such murders happened both prior to and during the pogroms reportedly triggered by the NKVD prisoner massacre. The question of whether there was some coordination between the Lithuanian and Ukrainian militias remains open (i.e. collaborating for a joint assault in Kovno, Wilno, and Lwów).{{cite book |first=Jakob |last=Weiss |title= The Lemberg Mosaic |contribution=Introduction |location= New York |publisher= Alderbrook Press |year= 2011 |page=397|title-link=The Lemberg Mosaic |isbn=978-0983109105 }}

The murders continued uninterrupted. On 12 October 1941, in Stanisławów, some 10,000–12,000 Jewish men, women, and children were shot at the Jewish cemetery by the German uniformed SS-men and Ukrainian Auxiliary Police during the so-called "{{ill|Bloody Sunday of Stanislau|lt=Bloody Sunday|de|Blutsonntag von Stanislau|uk|Кривава неділя у Станіславі}}" (de).{{cite web |first=Andrea |last= Löw |date=10 June 2013 |url=http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007236 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140520064011/http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007236 |archive-date= 20 May 2014 |title=Stanislawów (now Ivano-Frankivsk) |publisher=United States Holocaust Memorial Museum |access-date=29 January 2016 |quote=From The USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945.}} The shooters began firing at 12 noon and continued without stopping by taking turns. There were picnic tables set up on the side with bottles of vodka and sandwiches for those who needed to rest from the deafening noise of gunfire.{{cite book |first=Dieter |last=Pohl |title=Hans Krueger and the Murder of the Jews in the Stanislawow Region (Galicia) |url=http://yad-vashem.org.il/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%202292.pdf |via=Yad Vashem.org |pages=12–13, 17–18, 21 |quote=It is impossible to determine what Krueger's exact responsibility was in connection with 'Bloody Sunday' [massacre of 12 October 1941]. It is clear that a massacre of such proportions under German civil administration was virtually unprecedented. |access-date=29 January 2016 |archive-date=14 March 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150314220019/http://yad-vashem.org.il/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%202292.pdf |url-status=dead }} It was the single largest massacre of Polish Jews in Generalgouvernement prior to mass gassings of Aktion Reinhard, which commenced at Bełżec in March 1942. Notably, the extermination operations in Chełmno had begun on 8 December 1941, one-and-a-half months before Wannsee, but Chełmno—located in Reichsgau Wartheland—was not a part of Reinhard, and neither was Auschwitz-Birkenau functioning as an extermination center until November 1944 in Polish lands annexed by Hitler and added to Germany proper.{{cite web |url=https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005195 |title=Operation Reinhard (Einsatz Reinhard) |access-date=15 August 2016 |publisher=United States Holocaust Memorial Museum}}

The conference at Wannsee gave impetus to the so-called second sweep of the Holocaust by the bullet in the east. Between April and July 1942 in Volhynia, 30,000 Jews were murdered in death pits with the help of dozens of newly formed Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft.{{cite book |title=The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization |first=Dieter |last=Pohl|editor1=Ray Brandon |editor2=Wendy Lower |editor-link2=Wendy Lower | publisher=Indiana University Press |year=2008 |isbn=978-0253001597 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hyYGOyX1IQUC&q=Final+Solution+Volhynia |page=97}} Owing to good relations with the Ukrainian Hilfsverwaltung,{{cite book |first=Markus |last=Eikel |chapter=The local administration under German occupation in central and eastern Ukraine, 1941–1944 |at=pp. 110–22 in PDF |title=The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives |quote=Ukraine differs from other parts of the Nazi-occupied Soviet Union, whereas the local administrators have formed the Hilfsverwaltung in support of extermination policies in 1941 and 1942, and in providing assistance for the deportations to camps in Germany mainly in 1942 and 1943. |publisher=Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum |year=2013 |chapter-url=http://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20130500-holocaust-in-ukraine.pdf}} these auxiliary battalions were deployed by the SS also in Russia Center, Russia South, and in Byelorussia; each with about 500 soldiers divided into three companies.{{cite web |title=Schutzmannschaft Bataillone |url=http://www.axishistory.com/books/137-germany-military-other/foreign-volunteers/9065-schutzmannschaft-bataillone |publisher=Axis History Books |date=9 June 2013 |first=Marcus |last=Wendel |at=Internet Archive, 6 January 1914 capture |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140106075125/http://www.axishistory.com/books/137-germany-military-other/foreign-volunteers/9065-schutzmannschaft-bataillone |url-status=live |archive-date=6 January 2014}} They participated in the extermination of 150,000 Volhynian Jews alone, or 98 percent of the Jewish inhabitants of the entire region.{{cite book |title=The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands |first=Alexander |last=Statiev |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2010 |isbn=978-0521768337 |page=69 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YIRSwRDVqu4C&q=auxiliary+150%2C000+Jews}} In July 1942 the Completion of the Final Solution in the General Government territory which included Distrikt Galizien, was ordered personally by Himmler. He set the initial deadline for 31 December 1942.{{cite book |title=The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia |first=Wendy |last=Lower |publisher=Rowman Altamira |year=2011 |isbn=978-0759120785 |pages=17, 154 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=RmdnnIlS-6cC&q=Final+Solution+1942}}

{{see also|General Government|Extermination camp}}

File:WW2-Holocaust-Poland.PNG territory: centre, Distrikt Galizien: lower–right. Death camp at Auschwitz: lower–left (in Provinz Oberschlesien), Nazi-Soviet line in red]]

When the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the area of the General Government was enlarged by the inclusion of regions that had been annexed by the Soviet Union since the 1939 invasion.{{cite book |author1=Piotr Eberhardt |author2=Jan Owsinski |title=Ethnic Groups and Population Changes in Twentieth-century Central-Eastern Europe: History, Data, Analysis |publisher=M.E. Sharpe |year=2003 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jLfX1q3kJzgC&q=%22first+part+of+World+War+II%22 |pages=216– |isbn=978-0765606655}} The murders of Jews from the Łódź Ghetto in the Warthegau district began in early December 1941 with the use of gas vans (approved by Heydrich) at the Kulmhof extermination camp. Victims were misled under the deceptive guise of "Resettlement in the East", organised by SS Commissioners,{{cite book |author-link=Israel Gutman |first=Israel |last=Gutman |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=4P_kP4yKqy8C&q=Himmler+resettlement |title=Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |page=119 |isbn=0395901308|year=1994 }} which was also tried and tested at Chełmno. By the time the European-wide Final Solution was formulated two months later, Heydrich's RSHA had already confirmed the effectiveness of industrial murder by exhaust fumes, and the strength of deception.{{cite web |url=https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/vans.html |title=The Development of the Gas-Van in the Murdering of the Jews |publisher=Jewish Virtual Library |work=The Final Solution |date=2015 |access-date=28 January 2016 |first=Mathias |last=Beer |id=Translated from the German |at="Die Entwicklung der Gaswagen beim Mord an den Juden", Miszelle. Vierteljahrshefte fuer Zeitgeschichte, 37 (3), pp. 403–17.}}

Construction work on the first killing centre at Bełżec in occupied Poland began in October 1941, three months before the Wannsee Conference. The new facility was operational by March the following year.{{cite web |title=Historia Niemieckiego Obozu Zagłady w Bełżcu |trans-title=History of the Belzec extermination camp |publisher=Muzeum-Miejsce Pamięci w Bełżcu |author=National Bełżec Museum |url=http://www.belzec.eu/articles.php?acid=77 |language=pl |access-date=24 January 2016 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151029003413/http://www.belzec.eu/articles.php?acid=77 |archive-date=29 October 2015}} By mid-1942, two more death camps had been built on Polish lands: Sobibór operational by May 1942, and Treblinka operational in July.{{cite web |url=https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/reinhard.html#5 |title=The Construction of the Treblinka Extermination Camp |publisher=Jewish Virtual Library.org |work=Yad Vashem Studies, XVI |year=1984 |access-date=3 November 2013 |author=McVay, Kenneth}} From July 1942, the mass murder of Polish and foreign Jews took place at Treblinka as part of Operation Reinhard, the deadliest phase of the Final Solution. More Jews were murdered at Treblinka than at any other Nazi extermination camp apart from Auschwitz.{{cite encyclopedia |last=Berenbaum |first=Michael |title=Treblinka |encyclopedia=Encyclopædia Britannica |year=2016 |publisher=Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. |location=Chicago }} By the time the mass killings of Operation Reinhard ended in 1943, roughly two million Jews in German-occupied Poland had been murdered. The total number of people murdered in 1942 in Lublin/Majdanek, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka was 1,274,166 by Germany's own estimation, not counting Auschwitz II Birkenau nor Kulmhof.{{cite book |title=The Holocaust Encyclopedia |author1=Walter Laqueur |author2=Judith Tydor Baumel |publisher=Yale University Press |year=2001 |isbn=0300138113 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=nPbr0XzlTzcC&q=Chelmno+graveyard |page=178 |author1-link=Walter Laqueur }} Their bodies were buried in mass graves initially.{{sfnp|Arad|1987|p=640}} Both Treblinka and Bełżec were equipped with powerful crawler excavators from Polish construction sites in the vicinity, capable of most digging tasks without disrupting surfaces.{{cite encyclopedia |url=http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005191 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120107184303/http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005191 |archive-date=7 January 2012 |encyclopedia=The Holocaust Encyclopedia |title=Belzec |publisher=United States Holocaust Memorial Museum |access-date=24 January 2016}} Although other methods of extermination, such as the cyanic poison Zyklon B, were already being used at other Nazi killing centres such as Auschwitz, the Aktion Reinhard camps used lethal exhaust gases from captured tank engines.{{cite book |first=K. |last=Carol Rittner, Roth |title=Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=t2AjlkSlMa8C&q=captured-soviet+tank+engines+holocaust&pg=PA2 |publisher=Continuum International Publishing Group |year=2004 |page=2 |isbn=978-0-8264-7566-4}}

The Holocaust by bullets (as opposed to the Holocaust by gas){{cite AV media |url=http://natgeotv.com/ca/world-war-ii-the-apocalypse/videos/the-holocaust-by-bullets |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100309133810/http://www.natgeotv.com/ca/world-war-ii-the-apocalypse/videos/the-holocaust-by-bullets |url-status=dead |archive-date=9 March 2010 |author=National Geographic Channel |title=The Holocaust by bullets |publisher=NGC Europe Limited |year=2013 |work=Excerpt from episode "Apocalypse: The Second World War"}} went on in the territory of occupied Poland in conjunction with the ghetto uprisings, irrespective of death camps' quota. In two weeks of July 1942, the Słonim Ghetto revolt, crushed with the help of Latvian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft, cost the lives of 8,000–13,000 Jews.{{harvp|Longerich|2010|pp=198, 238, 347}}. See also {{cite web |author=Lawrence Bush |date=28 June 2010 |title=June 29: The Slonim Massacres |website=Jewish Currents |url=http://jewishcurrents.org/june-29-the-slonim-massacres/ |access-date=1 May 2017 }} The second largest mass shooting (to that particular date) took place in late October 1942 when the insurgency was suppressed in the Pińsk Ghetto; over 26,000 men, women and children were shot with the aid of Belarusian Auxiliary Police before the ghetto's closure.{{cite book |editor1=Ray Brandon |editor2=Wendy Lower |editor-link=Wendy Lower |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hyYGOyX1IQUC&dq=Pinsk+massacre+in+the+RKU&pg=PA290|first=Karel C. |last=Berkhoff |title=The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization |date=28 May 2008 |publisher=Indiana University Press |page=290 |isbn=978-0-253-00159-7 }} Also in: {{cite web |author1=Barbara N. Łopieńska |author2-link=Ryszard Kapuściński |author2=Ryszard Kapuściński |work=Interview |date=2003 |url=http://kapuscinski.info/czlowiek-z-bagna.html |title=Człowiek z bagna |trans-title=A man from the marshes |publisher=Przekrój nr 28/3029. Reprint: Ryszard Kapuściński.info }} Further info: {{cite web |url=http://www.sztetl.org.pl/en/selectcity/ |title=Glossary of 2,077 Jewish towns in Poland |author=Virtual Shtetl |publisher=POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160208215116/http://www.sztetl.org.pl/en/selectcity/ |archive-date=8 February 2016 |author-link=Virtual Shtetl }} {{cite web |url=http://www.izrael.badacz.org/historia/szoa_getto.html |title=Getta Żydowskie |author=Gedeon }} {{cite web |url=http://www.deathcamps.org/occupation/ghettolist.htm |title=Ghetto List |author=Michael Peters |publisher=Deathcamps.org }} During the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II), 13,000 Jews were killed in action before May 1943.{{cite encyclopedia |url=https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/nowarsaw.html |title=Stroop Report |author=SS Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop |encyclopedia=Jewish Virtual Library |date=May 1943}} Numerous other uprisings were quelled without impacting the pre-planned Nazi deportations actions.{{cite web |url=http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005407 |title=Resistance in Ghettos |author=The Holocaust Encyclopedia |work=Jewish Uprisings in Ghettos and Camps, 1941–1944 |date=2013 |publisher=United States Holocaust Memorial Museum}} Notable examples include the Łuck Ghetto uprising quelled on 12 December 1942 with the help of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, see: Yad Vashem, {{YouTube |id=1k7v0VPOKnw |title=Łuck, December 1942}}; testimony of {{cite web |url=http://www.berdichev.org/the_forgotten_december.html |archive-date=22 July 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150722232607/http://www.berdichev.org/the_forgotten_december.html |url-status=dead |title=The forgotten December |author=Shmuel Shilo|author-link=Shmuel Shilo }} The Łachwa Ghetto uprising was suppressed on 3 September 1942, the Częstochowa Ghetto uprising on 30 June 1943, the Sosnowiec Ghetto uprising on 3 August 1943, and the Białystok Ghetto uprising on 17 August 1943.

About two-thirds of the overall number of victims of the Final Solution were murdered before February 1943,{{cite journal |publisher=German History in Documents and Images, GHDI |volume= 7. Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 |title=Statistical Report on the "Final Solution", known as the Korherr Report of 23 March 1943 |author=Paula Lerner |year=2007 |journal=Die Endlösung by Gerald Reitlinger |url=http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/English42.pdf}} which included the main phase of the extermination programme in the West launched by Eichmann on 11 June 1942 from Berlin.{{cite book |title=The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945 |author=Leni Yahil |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=1991 |isbn=0195045238 |page=389 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=e_aRvKpLUf0C&q=West+European&pg=PA389}} The Holocaust trains run by the Deutsche Reichsbahn and several other national railway systems delivered condemned Jewish captives from as far as Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Moravia, Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, and even Scandinavia.{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=WRFG-HKoBgEC&q=Reichsbahn+Railways&pg=PA57 |author=Ronald J. Berger |year=2002 |title=Fathoming the Holocaust: A Social Problems Approach |publisher=Transaction Publishers |isbn=0202366111 |pages=57–58 |quote=Bureaucrats in the Reichsbahn performed important functions that facilitated the movement of trains. They constructed and published timetables, collected fares, and allocated cars and locomotives. In sending Jews to their death, they did not deviate much from the routine procedures they used to process ordinary train traffic.}}{{cite web |first1=Ben|last1=Hecht|first2=Julian|last2=Messner|date=31 December 1969 |url=http://www.aish.com/ho/o/48970811.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140222020235/http://www.aish.com/ho/o/48970811.html |archive-date=22 February 2014 |title=Holocaust: The Trains |publisher=Aish.com Holocaust Studies}} The cremation of exhumed corpses to destroy any evidence left behind began in early spring and continued throughout summer.{{sfnp|Arad|1987|pp=300–01}} The nearly completed clandestine programme of murdering all deportees was explicitly addressed by Heinrich Himmler in his Posen speeches made to the leadership of the Nazi Party on 4 October and during a conference in Posen (Poznań) of 6 October 1943 in occupied Poland. Himmler explained why the Nazi leadership found it necessary to murder Jewish women and children along with the Jewish men. The assembled functionaries were told that the Nazi state policy was "the extermination of the Jewish people" as such.Letter written by Albert Speer who attended Posen Conference.{{cite news |url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/mar/13/secondworldwar.kateconnolly |title=Letter proves Speer knew of Holocaust plan |last=Connolly |first=Kate |date=13 March 2007 |access-date=29 May 2014 |newspaper=The Guardian |location=London}}

{{blockquote|We were faced with the question: what about the women and children?–I have decided on a solution to this problem. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men only—in other words, to kill them or have them killed while allowing the avengers, in the form of their children, to grow up in the midst of our sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth.|Heinrich Himmler, 6 October 1943Bradley F. Smith & Agnes Peterson (1974), Heinrich Himmler. Speeches Frankfurt/M., pp. 169 f. {{OCLC|1241890}}; {{cite web |url= http://holocaustcontroversies.yuku.com/topic/1825/Himmlers-Speech-in-Posen-on-6-October-1943 |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20160127090051/http://holocaustcontroversies.yuku.com/topic/1825/Himmlers-Speech-in-Posen-on-6-October-1943 |archive-date=27 January 2016 |title=Himmler's Speech in Posen on 6 October 1944 |date= 12 March 2012 |access-date=28 February 2015 |publisher=Holocaust Controversies Reference Section }}; also (with differing translation) in {{cite web |url=http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007407 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131214192421/http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007407 |archive-date=14 December 2013 |title=Heinrich Himmler |access-date=28 February 2015 |publisher=United States Holocaust Memorial Museum }}}}

On 19 October 1943, five days after the prisoner revolt in Sobibór, Operation Reinhard was terminated by Odilo Globocnik on behalf of Himmler. The camps responsible for the murder of nearly 2,700,000 Jews were soon closed. Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka were dismantled and ploughed over before spring.{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7p2rngKmZuUC&q=%22Oct.+19%2C+1943%22 |title=Hitler's death camps: the sanity of madness |first=Konnilyn G. |last=Feig |publisher=Holmes & Meier Publishers |page=30 |year=1981 |isbn=0841906750 |via=Remember.org |quote=On November 4, 1943, Globocnik wrote to Himmler from Trieste: "I have, on Oct. 19, 1943, completed Action Reinhard, and closed all the camps." He asked for special medals for his men in recognition of their "specially difficult task". Himmler responded warmly to 'Globos' on November 30, 1943, thanking him for carrying out Operation Reinhard.}} [http://remember.org/fact-fin-lazartr.html book excerpt in full screen]. Also in: {{cite web |title="Final Solution": Overview |author=Holocaust Encyclopedia |publisher=United States Holocaust Memorial Museum |location=Washington, DC |url=http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005151 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130302130042/http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005151 |archive-date=2 March 2013}} The operation was followed by the single largest German massacre of Jews in the entire war carried out on 3 November 1943; with approximately 43,000 prisoners shot one-by-one simultaneously in three nearby locations by the Reserve Police Battalion 101 hand-in-hand with the Trawniki men from Ukraine.{{sfnp|Browning|1998|pp=135–42}} Auschwitz alone had enough capacity to fulfill the Nazis' remaining extermination needs.{{sfnp|Arad|1987|p=640}}

Unlike Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Lublin-Majdanek,{{cite journal |author1=Peter Witte |author2=Stephen Tyas |title=A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during "Einsatz Reinhardt" 1942 |journal=Holocaust and Genocide Studies |volume=15 |issue=3 |year=2001 |pages=468–86 |doi=10.1093/hgs/15.3.468 |doi-access=free }} See also: {{cite web |author=Oxford Journals |publisher=Oxford University Press |title=Abstract of article |url=http://www3.oup.co.uk/holgen/current/150468.sgm.abs.html |year=2002 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20020212003049/http://www3.oup.co.uk/holgen/current/150468.sgm.abs.html |archive-date=12 February 2002}} which were built in the occupied General Government territory inhabited by the largest concentrations of Jews,{{cite book |chapter=Poland's Ghettos at War |publisher=Ardent Media |page=35 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=m-q2qdBzfowC&q=largest+concentrations |title=The Establishment of Ghettos in [occupied] Poland |first=Alfred |last=Katz |location=Twayne Publishers, New York |year=1970 |oclc=141597}} the killing centre at Auschwitz subcamp of Birkenau operated directly in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany. The new gas chambers at Bunker I were finished around March 1942 when the Final Solution was officially launched at Belzec. Until mid June, around 20,000 Silesian Jews were murdered there using Zyklon B. In July 1942, Bunker II became operational. In August, another 10,000–13,000 Polish Jews from Silesia were murdered,{{r|Browning544}} along with 16,000 French Jews declared 'stateless',{{harvp|Longerich|2010|pp=[https://books.google.com/books?id=cxYqYIn73SgC&q=Auschwitz+Stammlager+1942 344, 360, 380, 391]}}. and 7,700 Jews from Slovakia.{{harvp|Browning|2004|loc=(2007 ed.: [https://books.google.com/books?id=d9Wg4gjtP3cC&pg=PA544 p. 544]}}).

The infamous 'Gate of Death' at Auschwitz II for the incoming freight trains was built of brick and cement mortar in 1943, and the three-track rail spur was added. Until mid-August, 45,000 Thessaloniki Jews were murdered in a mere six months,{{r|PLong10}} including over 30,000 Jews from Sosnowiec (Sosnowitz) and Bendzin Ghettos.{{sfnp|Longerich|2010|loc=[https://books.google.com/books?id=cxYqYIn73SgC&q=Sosnowitz p. 380: Extermination].}} The spring of 1944 marked the beginning of the last phase of the Final Solution at Birkenau. The new big ramps and sidings were constructed, and two freight elevators were installed inside Crematoria II and III for moving the bodies faster. The size of the Sonderkommando was nearly quadrupled in preparation for the Special Operation Hungary (Sonderaktion Ungarn).{{cite book |last1=Greif |first1=Gideon |title=Im Zentrum der Endlösung – Alltag in der Todesfabrik Auschwitz |date=2022 |publisher=Tuebingen, TOS Verlag |pages=528 |url=https://www.kulturkaufhaus.de/de/detail/ISBN 9783965890022/Greif-Gideon/Im-Zentrum-der-Endl%C3%B6sung |access-date=22 May 2022|isbn=978-3-96589-002-2}} In May 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau became the site of one of the two largest mass murder operations in modern history, after the Großaktion Warschau deportations of the Warsaw Ghetto inmates to Treblinka in 1942. It is estimated that until July 1944 approximately 320,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed at Birkenau in less than eight weeks.{{cite book |title=Auschwitz: The Nazi Solution |author=Andrew Rawson |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=izigBwAAQBAJ&q=%22Gate%20of%20Death%22 |publisher=Pen and Sword |year=2015 |isbn=978-1473855410 |pages=69, 87, 123}} While the numbers considerably reduced through June and July [1944], nearly 440,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to Auschwitz in less than eight weeks; 320,000 were murdered. — [https://books.google.com/books?id=9zegBwAAQBAJ&q=Sonderaktion+Hungary+1944&pg=PT144 Rawson, 144.] Also in: {{cite web |title=The Destruction of the Jews of Hungary |year=2007 |author1=S.J. |author2=Carmelo Lisciotto |url=http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/othercamps/DestructionofHungarianJews.html |publisher=H.E.A.R.T |quote=Of the 381,600 Jews who left Hungary between 15 May 1944 and 30 June 1944 it is probable that 200,000 – 240,000 were gassed or shot on 46 working days.}} The entire operation was photographed by the SS.{{cite book |last1=Hellman |first1=Peter |last2=Meier |first2=Lili |last3=Klarsfeld |first3=Serge |author-link3=Serge and Beate Klarsfeld |title=The Auschwitz Album |year=1981 |publisher=Random House |location=New York; Toronto |isbn=0-394-51932-9 |url=http://www.abebooks.com/book-search/isbn/0394519329/}} In total, between April and November 1944, Auschwitz II received over 585,000 Jews from over a dozen regions as far as Greece, Italy, and France, including 426,000 Jews from Hungary, 67,000 from Łódź, 25,000 from Theresienstadt, and the last 23,000 Jews from the General Government.{{cite book |title=Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp |first1=Israel |last1=Gutman |first2=Michael |last2=Berenbaum |author3=United States Holocaust Memorial Museum |publisher=Indiana University Press |year=1998 |page=89 |isbn=025320884X |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=mub823JQrdUC&q=Arrival+Specific+Regions+November+1944 }} Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945, when the gassing had already stopped.{{sfnp|Yahil|1991|p=637}}

{{see also|Responsibility for the Holocaust}}

{{The Holocaust sidebar}}

Historians disagree as to when and how the Nazi leadership decided that the European Jews should be exterminated. The controversy is commonly described as the functionalism versus intentionalism debate which began in the 1960s, and subsided thirty years later. In the 1990s, the attention of mainstream historians moved away from the question of top executive orders triggering the Holocaust and focused on factors that were overlooked earlier, such as personal initiative and ingenuity of countless functionaries in charge of the killing fields. No written evidence of Hitler ordering the Final Solution has ever been found to serve as a "smoking gun", and therefore, this one particular question remains unanswered.{{cite book |title=Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements |first1=David |last1= Bankier |first2= Dan |last2= Mikhman |publisher=Berghahn Books |year=2008 |isbn=978-9653083264 |page=330 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=aNzjTUT6jdYC&q=smoking%2Bgun}}

Hitler made numerous predictions regarding the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe prior to the beginning of World War{{nbsp}}II. During a speech given on 30 January 1939, on the sixth anniversary of his accession to power, Hitler said:

{{Blockquote|Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!|Adolf Hitler, 1939{{cite web |url=http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocaust/documents/part1/doc59.html |title=Extract from the Speech by Hitler, 30 January 1939 |first=Adolf |last=Hitler |date=30 January 1939 |publisher=YadVashem.org }} [Also in:] {{cite web |url=http://www.holocaust-history.org/der-ewige-jude/hitler-19390130.shtml |title=Adolf Hitler on the Jewish Question |date=30 January 1939 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080314131150/http://holocaust-history.org/der-ewige-jude/hitler-19390130.shtml |archive-date=14 March 2008}} [And:] {{cite web |url=http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_fi.php?ModuleId=10005175&MediaId=3108 |title=Hitler Speaks before the Reichstag (German Parliament) |publisher=United States Holocaust Museum }}}}

Raul Hilberg, in his book The Destruction of the European Jews, was the first historian to systematically document and analyse the Nazi project to murder every Jew in Europe. The book was initially published in 1961, and issued in an enlarged version in 1985.{{cite web |url= http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=395051 |title= The Revised Hilberg |last= Browning |first= Christopher |date= 10 May 1987 |access-date= 2 June 2014 |work= Museumoftolerance |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20140602195555/http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=395051 |archive-date= 2 June 2014 |url-status= dead }}

Hilberg's analysis of the steps that led to the destruction of European Jews revealed that it was "an administrative process carried out by bureaucrats in a network of offices spanning a continent".{{sfnp|Hilberg|1985|p=ix}} Hilberg divides this bureaucracy into four components or hierarchies: the Nazi Party, the civil service, industry, and the Wehrmacht armed forces—but their cooperation is viewed as "so complete that we may truly speak of their fusion into a machinery of destruction".{{sfnp|Hilberg|1985|p= 56}} For Hilberg, the key stages in the destruction process were: definition and registration of the Jews; expropriation of property; concentration into ghettoes and camps; and, finally, annihilation.{{sfnp|Hilberg|1985|p=354}} Hilberg gives an estimate of 5.1 million as the total number of Jews murdered. He breaks this figure down into three categories: Ghettoization and general privation: over 800,000; open-air shootings: over 1,300,000; extermination camps: up to 3,000,000.{{sfnp|Hilberg|1985|p=1219}}

With respect to the "functionalism versus intentionalism" debate about a master plan for the Final Solution, or the lack thereof, Hilberg posits what has been described as "a kind of structural determinism". Hilberg argues that "a destruction process has an inherent pattern" and the "sequence of steps in a destruction process is thus determined". If a bureaucracy is motivated "to inflict maximum damage upon a group of people", it is "inevitable that a bureaucracy—no matter how decentralized its apparatus or how unplanned its activities—should push its victims through these stages", culminating in their annihilation.{{sfnp|Hilberg|1985|pp= 998–99}}

In his monograph, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942, Christopher Browning argues that Nazi policy toward the Jews was radicalized twice: in September 1939, when the invasion of Poland implied policies of mass expulsion and massive loss of Jewish lives; and in spring 1941, when preparation for Operation Barbarossa involved the planning of mass execution, mass expulsion, and starvation—to dwarf what had happened in Jewish Poland.{{sfnp|Browning|2004|loc=(2007 ed.: p. [https://books.google.com/books?id=d9Wg4gjtP3cC&q=scale%2Bdwarf 213]).}}

Browning believes that the "Final Solution as it is now understood—the systematic attempt to murder every last Jew within the German grasp"{{harvp|Browning|2004|p=[https://books.google.com/books?id=d9Wg4gjtP3cC&q=%22murdering%20every%20last%20Jew%20in%20the%20German%20grasp%22&pg=PA424 424]}}. took shape during a five-week period, from 18 September to 25 October 1941. During this time, the sites of the first extermination camps were selected, different methods of murder were tested, Jewish emigration was forbidden, and 11 transports departed for Łódź as a temporary holding station. Of this period, Browning writes, "The vision of the Final Solution had crystallised in the minds of the Nazi leadership, and was being turned into reality."{{r|Browning424}} This was the peak of Nazi victories against the Soviet Army on the Eastern Front, and, according to Browning, the stunning series of German victories led to both an expectation that the war would soon be won, and the planning of the final destruction of the "Jewish-Bolshevik enemy".{{sfnp|Browning|2004|pp= 426–27}}

Browning describes the creation of the extermination camps, which were responsible for the largest number of murders in the Final Solution, as bringing together three separate developments within Nazi Germany: the concentration camps which had been established in Germany since 1933; an expansion of the gassing technology of the Nazi euthanasia programme to provide a murder technique of greater efficiency and psychological detachment; and the creation of "factories of death" to be fed endless streams of victims by mass uprooting and deportation that utilized the experience and personnel from earlier population resettlement programmes—especially the HSSPF and Adolf Eichmann's RSHA for "Jewish affairs and evacuations".{{sfnp|Browning|2004|p= 354}}

Peter Longerich argues that the search for a finite date on which the Nazis embarked upon the extermination of the Jews is futile, in his book Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (2011). Longerich writes: "We should abandon the notion that it is historically meaningful to try to filter the wealth of available historical material and pick out a single decision" that led to the Holocaust.{{sfnp|Longerich|2010|p=[https://books.google.com/books?id=cxYqYIn73SgC&q=abandon%2Bnotion&pg=PA6 6]}}{{cite journal |author-link=Timothy Snyder |last=Snyder |first=Timothy |title=A New Approach to the Holocaust |url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/new-approach-holocaust/ |access-date=30 March 2015 |journal=The New York Review of Books |date=23 June 2011 |volume=58 |issue=11 }}

Timothy Snyder writes that Longerich "grants the significance of Greiser's murder of Jews by gas at Chełmno in December 1941", but also detects a significant moment of escalation in spring 1942, which includes "the construction of the large death factory at Treblinka for the destruction of the Warsaw Jews, and the addition of a gas chamber to the concentration camp at Auschwitz for the murder of the Jews of Silesia".{{r|NYRB}} Longerich suggests that it "was only in the summer of 1942, that mass killing was finally understood as the realization of the Final Solution, rather than as an extensively violent preliminary to some later program of slave labor and deportation to the lands of a conquered USSR". For Longerich, to see mass-murder as the Final Solution was an acknowledgement by the Nazi leadership that there would not be a German military victory over the USSR in the near future.

David Cesarani emphasises the improvised, haphazard nature of Nazi policies in response to changing war time conditions in his overview, Final Solution: The Fate of the European Jews 1933–49 (2016). "Cesarani provides telling examples", wrote Mark Roseman, "of a lack of coherence and planning for the future in Jewish policy, even when we would most expect it. The classic instance is the invasion of Poland in 1939, when not even the most elementary consideration had been given to what should happen to Poland's Jews either in the shorter or longer term. Given that Poland was home to the largest Jewish population in the world, and that, in a couple of years, it would house the extermination camps, this is remarkable."{{cite magazine |url=http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/the-last-word/ |title=The last word |last1=Roseman |first1=Mark |date=10 August 2016 |access-date=13 February 2017 |magazine=The Times Literary Supplement}}

Whereas Browning places the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews in the context of the Wehrmacht victories on the Eastern front, Cesarani argues that the German subsequent realisation that there would be no swift victory over the Soviet Union "scuppered the last territorial 'solution' still on the table: expulsion to Siberia".{{cite news |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/16/final-solution-the-fate-of-the-jews-1933-1949-david-cesarani-review |title=Final Solution by David Cesarani review – the Holocaust on the hoof |author-link=Nikolaus Wachsmann |last1=Wachsmann |first1=Nikolaus |date=16 June 2016 |access-date=13 February 2017 |newspaper=The Guardian}} Germany's declaration of war on the United States on 11 December 1941, "meant that holding European Jews hostage to deter the US from entering the conflict was now pointless".Adolf Hitler's Declaration of War against the United States in Wikisource. Cesarani concludes, the Holocaust "was rooted in anti-Semitism, but it was shaped by war". The fact that the Nazis were, ultimately, so successful in murdering between five and six million Jews was not due to the efficiency of Nazi Germany or the clarity of their policies. "Rather, the catastrophic rate of killing was due to German persistence ... and the duration of the murderous campaigns. This last factor was largely a consequence of allied military failure."{{sfnp|Cesarani|2016|pp=796}}

File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-B06275A, Berlin, Reichstagssitzung, Rede Adolf Hitler.jpg session of 11 December 1941: Adolf Hitler declares war on the United States of America.]]

The entry of the U.S. into the War is also crucial to the time-frame proposed by Christian Gerlach, who argued in his 1997 thesis{{cite book |author-link=Christian Gerlach |last=Gerlach |first=Christian |orig-year=1997 |title=Kalkulierte Morde: die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944 |location=Hamburg |publisher=Hamburger Edition |year=1999 |pages=1018–36|oclc=764039257}} Originally presented as the author's doctoral thesis at {{nowrap|TU Berlin}}. that the Final Solution decision was announced on 12 December 1941, when Hitler addressed a meeting of the Nazi Party (the Reichsleiter) and of regional party leaders (the Gauleiter).{{cite web |url= http://www.holocaust-history.org/december-12-1941 |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20130802104948/http://www.holocaust-history.org/december-12-1941 |archive-date= 2 August 2013 |title=December 12, 1941 |first=Götz |last= Aly |translator-first= Gord |translator-last= McFee |access-date=3 February 2016 |author-link=Götz Aly |publisher=Holocaust-history.org |quote=The original appeared in the German edition of Berliner Zeitung on December 13, 1997.}}{{Efn|Commenting on Gerlach, Christopher Browning writes: "What he interprets as Hitler's basic decision, I see as an official initiation of party leaders to

a decision taken several months earlier."{{sfnp|Browning|2004|pp=540f}} }} The day after Hitler's speech, on 13 December 1941, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary:{{cite book |title=The Holocaust |first=Frank |last=McDonough |publisher=Palgrave Macmillan |year=2008 |isbn=978-1137020482 |page=57 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=G4kdBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA57}}

{{blockquote|With respect of the Jewish Question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they again brought about a world war, they would see their annihilation in it. That wasn't just a catch-word. The world war is here and the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.{{cite web |url= http://www.holocaust-history.org/hitler-final-solution/ |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20150602232947/http://www.holocaust-history.org/hitler-final-solution/ |archive-date=2 June 2015 |title=When did Hitler decide on the Final Solution? |author=Gord McFee |publisher=Holocaust-history.org |quote=Research in this area is hampered by the fact that no written Hitler-Order launching the Final Solution has ever been found, and that if there ever was one, it most likely was destroyed.}}}}

Cesarani notes that by 1943, as the military position of the German forces deteriorated, the Nazi leadership became more openly explicit about the Final Solution. In March, Goebbels confided to his diary: "On the Jewish question especially, we are in it so deeply that there is no getting out any longer. And that is a good thing. Experience teaches that a movement and a people who have burned their bridges fight with much greater determination and fewer constraints than those that have a chance of retreat."{{harvp|Cesarani|2016|p=665}}.

When Himmler addressed senior SS personnel and leading members of the regime in the Posen speeches on 4 October 1943, he used "the fate of the Jews as a sort of blood bond to tie the civil and military leadership to the Nazi cause".{{r|Cesarani665}}

{{blockquote|Today, I am going to refer quite frankly to a very grave chapter. We can mention it now among ourselves quite openly and yet we shall never talk about it in public. I'm referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. Most of you will know what it's like to see 100 corpses side by side or 500 corpses or 1,000 of them. To have coped with this and—except for cases of human weakness—to have remained decent, that has made us tough. This is an unwritten—never to be written—and yet glorious page in our history.{{r|Cesarani665}}}}

• Höfle Telegram with arrivals for the camps of Einsatz Reinhardt
• History of the Jews during World War II
• Korherr Report written in 1943 on the progress of the Final Solution
• Never again
• Porajmos, Romani genocide during World War II
• Timeline of the Holocaust – The genocide of Jewish people by Nazi Germany, under the rule of Adolf Hitler

{{Notelist}}

{{Reflist}}

{{refbegin}}

• {{Cite book |last=Arad |first=Yitzhak |author-link=Yitzhak Arad |year=1987 |title=Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana University Press |isbn=0-253-21305-3 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QpAgHYTPRz0C }}
• {{cite book |last= Baumslag |first= Naomi |title= Murderous Medicine: Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation, and Typhus |url= https://archive.org/details/murderousmedicin0000baum |url-access= registration |publisher= Praeger Publishers |year= 2005 |isbn= 0-275-98312-9 }}
• {{cite book |author-link= Richard Breitman |last= Breitman |first= Richard |title= The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and The Final Solution |publisher= Alfred A. Knopf |location= New York |year= 1991 |isbn= 0-394-56841-9 |url= https://archive.org/details/architectofgenoc00rich }}
• {{cite book |last=Browning |first=Christopher R. |author-link=Christopher Browning |year=1998 |orig-year=1992 |title=Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland |publisher=Penguin Books |url=http://hampshirehigh.com/exchange2012/docs/BROWNING-Ordinary%20Men.%20Reserve%20Police%20Battalion%20101%20and%20the%20Final%20Solution%20in%20Poland%20(1992).pdf |access-date=7 May 2013 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131019043400/http://hampshirehigh.com/exchange2012/docs/BROWNING-Ordinary%20Men.%20Reserve%20Police%20Battalion%20101%20and%20the%20Final%20Solution%20in%20Poland%20%281992%29.pdf |archive-date=19 October 2013 }}
• {{cite book |last=Browning |first=Christopher R. |author-mask=3 |others=With contributions by Jürgen Matthäus |year=2004 |title=The Origins of the Final Solution : The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942 |series=Comprehensive History of the Holocaust |location=London |publisher=Random House / William Heinemann |isbn=0803203926 }} Newer edition by Univ. of Nebraska Press / Yad Vashem [https://books.google.com/books?id=d9Wg4gjtP3cC 2007].
• {{cite book |last=Cesarani |first=David |author-link=David Cesarani |year=2005 |orig-year=2004 |title=Eichmann: His Life and Crimes |location=London |publisher=Vintage |isbn=978-0-099-44844-0 }}
• {{cite book |last=Cesarani |first=David |author-mask=3 |year=2016 |title=Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949 |location=London |publisher=Macmillan |isbn=978-0-330-53537-3 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=mimNBwAAQBAJ }}
• {{cite book |author-link= Lucy Dawidowicz |last= Dawidowicz |first= Lucy |title= The War Against the Jews |year= 1975 |publisher= Holt, Rinehart and Winston |isbn=0-03-013661-X |title-link= The War Against the Jews }}
• {{cite book |first= Gerald |last= Fleming |title= Hitler and the Final Solution |url= https://archive.org/details/hitlerfinalsolut0000flem |url-access= registration |publisher= University of California Press |location= Berkeley |year= 1984 |isbn=978-0-520-05103-4 }}
• {{Cite journal |author-link=Christian Gerlach |last=Gerlach |first=Christian |title=The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler's decision in principle to exterminate all European Jews |journal=The Journal of Modern History |location=Chicago |date=December 1998 |volume=70 |issue=4 |pages=759–812 |doi=10.1086/235167 |s2cid=143904500 |url=http://boris.unibe.ch/74383/1/235167.pdf}}
• {{cite book |editor-first1= Anetta |editor-last1= Głowacka-Penczyńska |editor-first2= Tomasz |editor-last2= Kawski |editor-first3= Witold |editor-last3= Mędykowski |editor-first4= Tuvia |editor-last4= Horev |title= The First to be Destroyed: The Jewish Community of Kleczew and the Beginning of the Final Solution |publisher= Academic Studies Press |location= Boston |year= 2015 |isbn=978-1-61811-284-2 }}
• {{cite journal | last=Grossmann | first=Kurt R. | title=Reitlinger, Gerald. 'The Final Solution' (Book Review) | journal=Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science | date=1954 | page=211| doi=10.1177/000271625429200190 | s2cid=143630900 }}
• {{cite journal |last1=Herf |first1=Jeffrey |author-link1=Jeffrey Herf |title=The "Jewish War": Goebbels and the Antisemitic Campaigns of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry |journal=Holocaust and Genocide Studies |date=2005 |volume=19 |issue=1 |pages=51–80 |doi=10.1093/hgs/dci003}}
• {{cite book |last= Hilberg |first= Raul |author-link= Raul Hilberg |year= 1985 |title= The Destruction of the European Jews: The Revised and Definitive Edition |location= New York |publisher= Holmes and Meier |isbn=0-8419-0832-X |url=https://archive.org/details/DestructionOfTheEuropeanJewsRaulHilberg |via=Archive.org search inside |quote=The deportations ... were the work of a much larger apparatus that had to deal with a host of constraints and requirements. The effort, as we shall see, was deemed necessary to accomplish the Final Solution on a European-wide scale.^{[p. 273]} }}
• {{cite book | last1= Laqueur | first1=Walter | last2=Baumel | first2 = Judith Tydor | year=2001 | title= The Holocaust Encyclopedia | location= New Haven and London | publisher= Yale University Press | isbn=978-0-30008-432-0 }}
• {{cite book |last=Longerich |first=Peter |author-link=Peter Longerich |year=2003 |title=The Unwritten Order: Hitler's Role in The Final Solution |location=Stroud |publisher=Tempus Publishing |isbn=978-075242564-1 }}
• {{cite book |last=Longerich |first=Peter |author-mask=3 |year=2010 |title=Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0192804365 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=cxYqYIn73SgC }}
• {{cite book |last=Longerich |first=Peter |author-mask=3 |year=2012 |others=Translation by Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe |title=Heinrich Himmler |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-019959232-6 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=GBQchepZ-7EC }}
• {{cite book | last1 = Mędykowski | first1 = Witold Wojciech | title = Macht Arbeit Frei?: German Economic Policy and Forced Labor of Jews in the General Government, 1939–1943 | place=Brighton | publisher = Academic Studies Press | year = 2018 | isbn=978-1-61811-956-8 }}
• {{cite book | last1 = Niewyk | first1 = Donald | last2 = Nicosia | first2 = Francis | title = The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust | url = https://archive.org/details/columbiaguidetot00niew | url-access = registration | place=New York | publisher = Columbia University Press | year = 2000 | isbn=978-0-23111-201-7 }}
• Reitlinger, Gerald Roberts. 1953. The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939–1945. London: Valentine Mitchell.
• {{cite book |last= Roseman |first= Mark |author-link= Mark Roseman |year= 2002 |title= The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution |publisher= Allen Lane |isbn=0-713-99570-X |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NLgWAQAAIAAJ }}
• {{cite book |last1= Schultheis |first1= Herbert |last2= Wahler |first2= Isaac E. |title= Bilder und Akten der Gestapo Wuerzburg ueber die Judendeportationen 1941–1943 |publisher= Bad Neustadt a. d. Saale |year= 1988 |isbn=978-3-9800482-7-9 |edition= German-English }}

{{refend}}

• [https://www.ghwk.de/en/ Website of the House of the Wannsee Conference]
• [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPXPjZurupc The Development of the "Final Solution"] – lecture from Dr. David Silberklang, Yad Vashem
• [https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20081001211524/http://yad-vashem.org.il/about_holocaust/studies/vol35/Mallmann-Cuppers2.pdf Elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine: The Einsatzkommando of the Panzer army Africa, 1942] by Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers
• [https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/death-decree/ Death Decree: Göring directive officially launches the Final Solution]

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