The genocide of European Jewry by Nazi Germany — known to its perpetrators as die Endlösung der Judenfrage, the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, and known to its victims, in Hebrew, as the Shoah and in Yiddish as the Khurbn — was carried out between June 1941 and May 1945, in three principal phases, by an apparatus of approximately a quarter of a million direct German participants and a further several hundred thousand collaborators from German-occupied or Axis-allied countries. The number of murdered Jewish men, women and children is in the range 5.7 to 6.2 million, the modal scholarly estimate being approximately 6 million. A further roughly 5 million people from other categories — Soviet prisoners of war (about 3.3 million), Polish civilians (about 1.8 million non-Jewish), Roma and Sinti (about 250,000), disabled Germans and others killed in the T4 "euthanasia" programme (about 230,000), Soviet civilians, German political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and others — were also killed in the camps and the occupied territories. The total of those killed by the regime, outside of conventional combat, is in the range 11–13 million people.
This chapter is not a complete account of the Holocaust. A complete account would require its own volume, and many fine ones have been written. This is the chapter the rest of the volume requires: a summary of the institutional structure that delivered the genocide, the chronology, and the principal sites of operation.
The Einsatzgruppen and the Soviet Jews
The shift from persecution to systematic killing began with the invasion of the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June 1941. Four Einsatzgruppen of approximately 800 men each — A, B, C and D, attached to the four army groups operating in the Baltic states, Belorussia, Ukraine, and the Crimea-Caucasus axis respectively — followed the advancing Wehrmacht into Soviet territory with orders to "secure the rear" by the systematic shooting of Jews, communist functionaries, partisans, and Roma. The orders were transmitted orally; the chronology of the formalisation is contested, but the surviving Einsatzgruppen reports — the "Operational Situation Reports" sent daily to Berlin and preserved in numbered series — show that within four weeks the killing had escalated from selective shootings of Jewish men of military age to indiscriminate shootings of Jewish women, children and the elderly.
The killings in the occupied Soviet territory in the second half of 1941 amounted, on the Einsatzgruppen's own returns, to approximately 700,000 deaths, the great majority Jewish, by the end of December. The largest single operation was Babi Yar, a ravine on the north-western edge of Kiev, where on the 29th-30th of September 1941 Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C shot 33,771 Kiev Jews over two days, under the supervision of Standartenführer Paul Blobel; the count is from the unit's own report. Comparable operations were carried out at Ponary outside Vilnius, at the Rumbula and Bikernieki forests outside Riga, at Drobitsky Yar outside Kharkov, and at hundreds of other sites in Belorussia, Ukraine and the Baltic states. The Einsatzgruppen phase of the killing — face-to-face mass shooting — proved logistically inefficient and was found to be psychologically damaging to many of the executioners. The search for alternatives was already underway by the autumn of 1941.
Wannsee and the death camps
The Wannsee Conference of the 20th of January 1942 was a coordinating meeting of fifteen senior German state and Party officials at a villa on the Wannsee lakeside outside Berlin, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, with Adolf Eichmann taking minutes (the famous "Wannsee Protocol", preserved in a single copy discovered in 1947). The conference did not initiate the genocide; the genocide of Soviet Jewry was already six months old, and the deportation programme from German-occupied Poland was already in pilot. The conference confirmed that the Final Solution would extend to the eleven million Jews of all of Europe — including the British Isles, Sweden, Spain, and other territories the regime did not control — and clarified administrative responsibilities and the legal status of Mischlinge. The principal practical decision was that the European Jews would be deported east and killed in dedicated extermination facilities to be built in occupied Poland.
The "Operation Reinhard" camps — named after Heydrich, who was assassinated by Czech operatives in Prague in May 1942 — were three dedicated death camps in eastern Poland: Bełżec (operational from March 1942), Sobibor (May 1942), and Treblinka (July 1942). They were extermination-only facilities, with no labour function and minimal prisoner populations beyond the small Sonderkommando units of Jewish prisoners forced to operate the gas chambers and crematoria. The killing method was carbon-monoxide gassing from captured Soviet tank engines. The three camps killed approximately 1.65 million Jews between March 1942 and October 1943, predominantly the Jews of the General Government — the part of occupied Poland under direct German civil administration. The camps were dismantled in late 1943, after the killing of Polish Jewry was substantially complete and after the Sobibor prisoner uprising of the 14th of October 1943. The sites were ploughed, planted with crops, and disguised; the surviving witnesses were the small numbers of escaped prisoners, including the leadership of the Sobibor revolt.
The fourth Operation Reinhard site at Majdanek outside Lublin, originally a Soviet-POW camp, was repurposed as a hybrid labour-and-death camp; the fifth, at Chełmno (Kulmhof) in the Warthegau, used gas vans rather than gas chambers and was the killing site for the Łódź ghetto.
Auschwitz-Birkenau
The Auschwitz complex — three principal camps and forty-five sub-camps around the Polish town of Oświęcim in Upper Silesia — was the largest and last of the killing centres, and the only one of the death camps to combine extermination with large-scale slave labour. Auschwitz I, the original camp, opened in May 1940 as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners and was the location of the first experimental gassings with Zyklon B (hydrocyanic acid) on Soviet POWs in September 1941. Auschwitz II — Birkenau, opened in October 1941 about two miles from Auschwitz I, became the dedicated killing facility, with four purpose-built crematoria-and-gas-chamber complexes (Crematoria II, III, IV and V) operational from March-June 1943. Auschwitz III — Monowitz, opened in October 1942 next to the IG Farben Buna synthetic-rubber plant, was the principal slave-labour camp.
Killing operations at Birkenau peaked between May and October 1943, when the four crematoria were running near full capacity, and again between May and July 1944 during the deportation of the Hungarian Jews, when the camp killed approximately 320,000 people in eight weeks — the highest sustained killing rate of any single facility in history. The total Auschwitz death toll, on the contemporary scholarly consensus, is approximately 1.1 million people: approximately 960,000 Jews, 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet POWs, and 10,000-15,000 others. The Allied air photography of Auschwitz from August 1944 onward shows the camp in operation; the Allied governments declined, then and since, on operational and on disputed strategic grounds, to bomb either the gas-chamber facilities or the rail lines.
The death marches
From the summer of 1944 onward, with the Soviet army advancing on the camp territories, the SS began the evacuation of the surviving camp populations westward. The evacuations — generally on foot, over distances of hundreds of miles, in winter, with minimal food, water or shelter — became known as the death marches. The largest of them, the evacuation of approximately 56,000 prisoners from Auschwitz between the 17th and 21st of January 1945 westward into the Reich, killed approximately 15,000 in the first week. Subsequent marches from Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Stutthof, Gross-Rosen and Dachau over the next four months killed approximately 250,000 further prisoners. The marches continued until the last days of the regime; the surviving prisoners were liberated by the Allies at terminal camps from the end of January (Auschwitz, by the Red Army) through April (Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen by the Anglo-American forces) and May 1945 (Mauthausen, Theresienstadt).
The arithmetic
The killing of European Jewry, by country and method, was approximately as follows. Of the approximately 3.3 million Polish Jews of 1939, about 3 million were killed (the great majority in the Operation Reinhard camps and at Chełmno); of the approximately 2.5 million Soviet Jews in the territory the Wehrmacht occupied, about 1 million were killed (overwhelmingly by Einsatzgruppen shootings and at Auschwitz); of the approximately 800,000 Hungarian Jews of 1944, about 565,000 were killed (predominantly at Auschwitz); of the approximately 500,000 German Jews of 1933, about 165,000 of those still in Germany or occupied territory in 1941 were killed (the rest, about 285,000, had emigrated by October 1941, when the borders were closed). Comparable percentages applied to the Jews of the Netherlands, France (partially), Greece, Yugoslavia, Slovakia, the Baltic states, and Italy (north of the Gothic Line, after September 1943). The Jewish population of Europe in 1933 was approximately 9.5 million; in 1950, approximately 3.5 million. The murdered six million were approximately two-thirds of the continent's Jews.
The survivors, the camps and the moral architecture of the German Federal Republic after 1945 — and the long, slow, contested, ongoing work of public reckoning — are the subject of Chapter X. The military catastrophe that ran in parallel with the killings, and that produced the surrender of May 1945, is the subject of Chapter IX.
End of Chapter VIII