A group of Jews, including a small boy, is escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers in this April 19, 1943 photo

A group of Jews, including a small boy, is escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers in this April 19, 1943 photo. The picture formed part of a report from SS Gen. Stroop to his Commanding Officer, and was introduced as evidence to the War Crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1945.

After the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Ghetto was completely destroyed. Of the more than 56,000 Jews captured, about 7,000 were shot, and the remainder were deported to killing centers or concentration camps. This is a view of the remains of the ghetto, which the German SS dynamited to the ground. The Warsaw Ghetto only existed for a few years, and in that time, some 300,000 Polish Jews lost their lives there.




The Nazis then began carefully tallying up the actual figures and also required Jews to register all of their assets.


But the overall question remained as to what to do with the millions of Jews now under Nazi control – referred to by the Nazis themselves as the Judenfrage (Jewish question).


The following year, 1941, would be the turning point. In June, Hitler took a tremendous military gamble by invading the Soviet Union


Before the invasion, he had summoned his top generals and told them the attack on Russia would be a ruthless “war of annihilation” targeting Communists and Jews and that normal rules of military conflict were to be utterly ignored.


Inside the Soviet Union were an estimated three million Jews, many of whom still lived in tiny isolated villages known as Shtetls.


Following behind the invading German armies, four SS special action units known as Einsatzgruppen systematically rounded up and shot all of the inhabitants of these Shtetls. Sometimes the Einsatz execution squads were aided by local anti-Semitic volunteers.

During the summer of 1941, SS leader Heinrich Himmler summoned Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss to Berlin and told him: “The Führer has ordered the Final Solution of the Jewish question. We, the SS, have to carry out this order…I have therefore chosen Auschwitz for this purpose”.

At Auschwitz, a large new camp was already under construction to be known as Auschwitz II (Birkenau). This would become the future site of four large gas chambers to be used for mass extermination.

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