g all of Europe’s Jews to the French held island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean or else to Siberia as soon as victory was won. So the large numbers of Polish Jews who had come under Nazi control were concentrated in cities and large towns, and subjected to brutal forced labor, but rarely anything worse. Jews in Hitler’s area of Germany began being sent to ghettos in the part of occupied Poland not taken by Germany and in smaller numbers over to France to be shipped off even to other places. When Hitler turned his armies against the Soviet Union in June 1941, the mass murder of Soviet Jews began.As the German forces swept across the east side of Poland and into the USSR during 1941, they were followed by Hitler’s mobile killing units called Einsatzruppen (meaning “emergency squads”) under the command of the SS, which we have learned to be the main force of terror throughout the Nazi controlled area of Europe. They were assigned the tasks of rounding up all known or potential enemies of the Third Reich, especially political officials, anyone with the Communist party, and of course, Jews. They would usually herd the victims into fields to be shot and buried in mass graves. It is believed that the Einsatzruppen were responsible for about one to two million Jews. The Einsatzruppen group found out that they could not cope with the enormous amount of Jews, roughly eleven million of them. One of the most powerful men of the SS came up with a solution to be able to take care of this large number of Jews. “At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 in Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, the details of the ‘Final Solution’ were worked out. This provided for: deportation of Jews to killing centers; immediate death for those who were unable to work or the very young, the old, and the weak; segregation by gender of the remaining Jews; decimation through forced labor with insufficient nourishmen...
