In 1939, Hitler had already frightened half of Germany’s Jews into leaving the country. However, when he started to invade other countries, including Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Norway, Denmark and Czechoslovakia, he found that the number of Jews at his control had risen, almost 10x the number he had had in 1933. Therefore, he realised that new, more effective tactics were needed to fully destroy the Jewish ‘threat’. These new tactics were the Einsatzgruppen.

The Einsatzgruppen were specially trained members of the SS, trained to kill Jews. Jews were rounded up from registers, made to dig their own graves, and then shot. If the Einsatzgruppen ran out of bullets, they were told to use flamethrowers. However, very soon, Hitler realised that these trained soldiers were not a viable option. Therefore, in 1942, Heinrich Himmler called a conference at Wannsee, at which the ‘Final Solution’ was decided upon.  

The Jewish would be rounded up into Ghettos, which would be houses, surrounded by fences, and in these the conditions would be so bad that all of the Jews would want to move out, and many would die. These Jews would be used as a cheap source of labour. After this, Jews were sent to ‘re-settlement areas’ in the east. These sounded promising, as pretty much anything would be better than the Ghettos, but really, these were death camps in Poland, designed to kill the Jews. They went through ‘selection’, women, children, the old and the sick were sent off for ‘special treatment’, which started and ended with the infamous ‘showers’, a room looking like showers where barrels of poisonous gas were dropped through the ceiling.

The remainder of the people went through ‘Destruction through Work’, a ploy to use a person’s every last ounce of strength literally, to produce goods for his country. A person needs 2400 calories to maintain their weight each day, but in some camps, prisoners were fed as little as 200 calories a day. Specially selected Jews were known as the Sonderkommando, and they processed the bodies of the gassed Jews, collecting hair and gold fillings from each Jew, before being forced to burn the bodies.

Another of the bad things about the camps was that, from the air, Auschwitz and many others looked merely like factory complexes, so if the Allies did fly over head, they would not have any idea of the mass genocide happening.