he would be expanding German territory right back over them, decided it was nearly time escalate his “solution”. “Immediately after conquering Poland, Nazi leaders put into action the ‘final solution’...” (Resnick p. 36)Hitler’s “final solution” called for the total annihilation of the Jewish population in Europe. Following the German army were the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units that would round up any Jews found in overrun territory and machine-gun them to death in pits they were forced to dig themselves. Nevertheless, for Hitler and his top Nazi commanders, this was both time-consuming, and wasteful of bullets that would be needed to use against the Allies. Hitler believed that a more efficient plan would be needed.The Nazis then began to transport large numbers of Jews to many captured Polish cities, which they transformed into ghettos. A ghetto was like one huge prison cell, where crowded conditions, starvation, disease, and the elements were the Nazi’s tools of death. (Resnick p. 43) The Nazis constructed concentration camps, called death camps, to work the Jews to death, then they constructed gas chambers to kill masses of people, and crematories to dispose of their bodies. “Killing centers using gas chambers were built in early 1942 after the Nazis learned that large numbers of people could be killed quickly and with the help of few personnel.” (Resnick p. 55) The most infamous of these extermination camps was Auschwitz-Birkenau.The legacy of the Holocaust is best summarized by this, “No words, no book, can fully describe the humiliation, the pain, the horror, of that time. The lives lost cannot be reclaimed. And still the lesson the Holocaust has to teach us has not been learned. Prejudice, bigotry, and hatred have not disappeared. On the contrary, in the past few years violent acts motivated by prejudice have increased.” (Adler...
