Essay Database

In the spring of 1941, as preparations were under way for the invasion of the USSR, Hitler proclaimed that a war of destruction was about to start. He called for the annihilation of the Bolshevik leadership, thus laying the foundation for the extermination of what Hitler considered to be the biological source of Bolshevism: the Jews of the USSR. The killings were to be conducted by four mobile SS units called Einsatzgruppen (action squads), each consisting …

…Eichmann, who worked under Heydrich and was entrusted with responsibility for carrying out and coordinating the "final solution." Their task was done in stages: First the poorer members of a Jewish community were rounded up, then foreign Jews and Jewish refugees, and finally the rest of the Jewish community. Some western European Jews were initially transported to ghettos in the east and later to the concentration camps. Others were sent directly to the extermination centers