Index IntroductionThe Holocaust Killing Camps During the WarAftermath and Lasting Consequences of the HolocaustIntroductionThroughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded the empire of Hitler in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Starting in 1941, Jews from across the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European gypsies, were deported to Polish ghettos. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in the war. Mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen reportedly killed more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler's top commander, Hermann Goering, to Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD (the SS security service), referred to the need for an Endlösung (final solution) to the “ Jewish question". Starting in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-controlled territory was marked with a yellow star, making them an open target. Tens of thousands were soon deported to Polish ghettos and German-occupied cities in the USSR. Since June 1941, experiments with methods of mass killing had been underway in the Auschwitz concentration camp near Krakow. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet prisoners of war to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a large order for gas from a German pest control firm, an ominous indicator of the impending Holocaust. Holocaust extermination camps during the war Starting from the end of 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the Polish ghettos to the concentration camps, starting with those people considered least useful: the sick, the elderly, the weak and the very young . The first mass gassings began in the Belzec camp, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass extermination centers were built in camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all , Auschwitz-Birkenau. . From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territories and those allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and autumn of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto alone. Although the Nazis tried to keep the operation of the camps secret, the scale of the killings made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to Allied governments, which were sharply criticized after the war for their failure to respond to or publicize news of the mass massacre. This lack of action was probably due primarily to the Allies' focus on winning the ongoing war, but was also the result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was received and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could occur at such a time. stairs. At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were killed in a process that resembled a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp; although only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease. During the summer of 1944, just as the events of D-Day (6 June 1944) and the Soviet offensive that same month marked the beginning of the end of the war for Germany, much of Hungary's Jewish population was deported to.