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Unlock This CourseBefore 1939 the Nazis tried to force Jews to leave Germany. The Second World War changed this in two ways. First, emigration became almost impossible, and in October 1941 the Nazis banned it altogether. Second, each conquest brought many more Jews under Nazi rule. The part of Poland that Germany took in September 1939 was home to about two million Jews, and the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 added millions more.
So Nazi policy grew more extreme in three stages: shutting Jews into ghettos, shooting by death squads, and finally the death camps. Together, the murder of about six million Jewish men, women and children is known as the Holocaust.
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From late 1939 the Nazis forced the Jews of occupied Poland out of their homes and into ghettos in the poorest parts of towns and cities. The Łódź ghetto was sealed in the spring of 1940. The largest was in Warsaw, sealed in November 1940 behind a wall about three metres high.
More than 400,000 Jews were packed into a small part of Warsaw, with an average of over seven people to a room. Official food rations were far too small to live on, so people depended on food smuggled in, often by children. Disease spread quickly. About 83,000 people died in the Warsaw ghetto from hunger and disease between 1940 and mid-1942.
Leaving a ghetto without permission could be punished by death. The Nazis made a Jewish Council in each ghetto carry out their orders, such as handing out rations and housing. In Łódź, Jews were used as forced labour in workshops that made uniforms and other goods for the German army. Jews in Germany itself were made to wear a yellow star from September 1941, and deportations from Germany to the east began the next month.
People in the ghettos tried to keep life going. They ran secret schools and soup kitchens. But the ghettos killed hundreds of thousands and gathered Jews in places from which they could easily be deported later.
On 22 June 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Behind the army came four Einsatzgruppen, about 3,000 men in all, under the command of Himmler and Heydrich. Helped by other SS and police units, by local helpers and at times by the army, they rounded up Jews, marched them to the edge of a town and shot them into pits. At first the victims were mainly men. Within weeks whole communities, including women and children, were being killed.
One of the largest massacres was at Babi Yar, a ravine outside Kyiv (Kiev). On 29 and 30 September 1941, 33,771 Jews were shot there in two days. In all, well over a million Jews were murdered in these mass shootings.
This was a turning point. The Nazis had moved from persecuting Jews to killing them in huge numbers. But Nazi leaders found shooting slow, hard to keep secret and a strain on the killers. They began to look for another method. In December 1941 the first death camp opened at Chełmno in occupied Poland. There Jews were killed with poison gas, in sealed vans.
On 20 January 1942, 15 senior officials from the SS, the Nazi Party and government ministries, led by Heydrich, met at a villa at Wannsee, on the edge of Berlin. Adolf Eichmann wrote the record of the meeting.
The meeting did not decide to murder the Jews. That was already happening. Its purpose was to organise the Final Solution across the whole of Europe and to make sure every part of the government worked together under the SS. The record listed 11 million Jews, including those in countries Germany had not conquered, such as Britain. Jews were to be taken east. Those fit to work would be worked to death and the rest would be killed. The record never used the word 'killing'. It spoke of 'evacuation to the east'.
Remember, concentration camps such as Dachau were prisons. The six death camps were different. All were in occupied Poland, away from German eyes: Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In the summer of 1942 about 265,000 Jews were deported from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka. About 1.1 million people died at Auschwitz, around one million of them Jews.
Jews did resist. In April 1943 fighters in the Warsaw ghetto held off German troops for almost a month. There were also revolts in some of the camps. Soviet troops reached Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. By then about six million Jews, around two thirds of the Jews of Europe, had been murdered. The Nazis also murdered hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti.
Do not write that the Wannsee Conference decided to start killing Jews. The death squads had been shooting Jews for seven months by then. Wannsee organised the Final Solution. Do not mix up concentration camps and death camps: Dachau was a prison camp in Germany, while Treblinka was built for killing and was in Poland. And keep the order clear: ghettos from 1939, death squads from 1941, death camps mainly from 1942.
Extract A (a practice extract written for this lesson, in the style of a modern history textbook)
The men who met at Wannsee in January 1942 were not street thugs. They were senior officials, and more than half of them held university doctorates. In a comfortable lakeside villa they dealt with the fate of eleven million people as calmly as if it were a railway timetable. Nobody objected. The record spoke of numbers, categories and 'evacuation to the east', never of killing in plain words. In about ninety minutes the business was done.
(a) What impression does the author give about the Wannsee Conference? You must use Extract A to explain your answer. [6 marks]
The author gives the impression that the Wannsee Conference was a cold, businesslike meeting at which mass murder was treated as a routine office task. This is shown by the language used. The officials dealt with eleven million lives 'as calmly as if it were a railway timetable', a comparison that makes them seem to feel nothing for the people involved. The phrase 'the business was done' makes the meeting sound like ordinary paperwork, and 'Nobody objected', a very short sentence, stresses how easily it was all agreed. The author has also chosen to stress that the men were educated 'senior officials' in a 'comfortable lakeside villa', which makes their calm seem more shocking. The author leaves out the victims and the killing itself and focuses only on the calm, tidy way the meeting was run. This selection makes the conference seem chillingly efficient.
What lifts this to the top level: it names one clear impression, proves it with short quotations and explains what each suggests, and then comments on what the author chose to stress and to leave out.
Do not retell what happened at Wannsee or add facts you have learned about it. This question gives marks only for what the author is doing. Start with 'The author gives the impression that...', quote loaded phrases such as 'as calmly as if it were a railway timetable', say what each suggests, and finish with what the author stressed and left out.