The 'Final Solution'

Holocaust by bullets
The first massacres were perpetrated through starvation and mass shootings.
Jews imprisoned in ghettos, notably in Warsaw, were starved to death.
And in what is known as the “Holocaust by bullets” Einsatzgruppen firing squads mowed down a million people.
They were mainly Jews and Soviet prisoners of war in Polish, Baltic and Soviet territories seized from the Red Army after the rupture of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact and Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union of June 22, 1941 in Operation Barbarossa.
However, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi paramilitary SS, realised the limitations of this method of extermination, which had an affect on the morale of his troops and was difficult to apply on a large scale in western Europe.
With his deputy Reinhard Heydrich, he therefore established a more discreet method of extermination: genocide through the gas chambers, a technique already experimented with in Germany in the extermination of handicapped people.
In the Soviet Union, Nazi death squads followed in the wake of the Wehrmacht using special gas vans, while in Poland victims were taken to die in death camps.
The death camps
From the summer of 1941, at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp near to the southern Polish city of Krakow, the Nazis experimented on Soviet and ill prisoners with Zyklon B, the trade name of a cyanide-based pesticide invented in Germany in the early 1920s.
A plan to exterminate two million Jews on Polish soil occupied by Germany but not directly annexed by the Reich was drawn up in late 1941. Under “Operation Reinhard” three death camps were set up in Poland at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.
Once the camps were up and running, the SS and Nazi police emptied the ghettos and deported the remaining inhabitants there.
Belzec was in operation from March to December 1942, Sobibor from May 1942 to October 1943 and Treblinka from July 1942 to August 1943.
Another camp at Majdanek was in operation from late 1942 and took over from Belzec when it closed.
According to the Holocaust Memorial in Washington DC, 1.7 million Jews were killed under Operation Reinhard, which was named after Reinhard Heydrich, who was assassinated in Prague in June 1942 by partisans. They were joined by an unknown number of Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war.
The Wannsee Conference
In late 1941, when the “Final Solution” was well under way, it fell to Himmler and Heydrich to coordinate its implementation.
On November 29, 1941, Heydrich convened a planning meeting on the “final solution of the Jewish question”, involving the heads of the main ministries and the SS chiefs.
The Wannsee conference took place on January 20, 1942 in the Berlin suburb it was named after. Heydrich said that the initial plan to force Jews to emigrate from Europe or be deported to Madagascar had been rendered impossible by the war.
It was therefore a question of moving the Jews to the east, and ultimately to the death camps. All the participants agreed on the principle of evacuation under the exclusive authority of the SS.
Adolf Eichmann listed the number of Jews in Europe to be deported country by country, arriving at a figure of 11 million people. These included those in Britain, and other countries not under the control of the Axis powers.
After the Wannsee Conference the industrial process of extermination intensified.