They Went Left

Part of Hitler’s plan for German expansion and domination was the extermination of European Jewry; Hitler conceived of Judaism as a race rather than as a religious belief system. Hitler believed that Jews were a lesser, subhuman species: Untermenschen, who were determined to achieve world domination at the detriment of all other races. Most notably, these Untermenschen were allegedly taking wealth and power from the Aryan race, whom Hitler identified non-Jewish Germans (apart from Roma and Sinti groups and Germans of African descent) as belonging to.

Initially, murders of Jews took the form of close-range shooting into mass graves. This was carried out by a specialized sub-group of the Nazi army called the Einsatzgruppen. Tens of thousands of Jews in Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania lost their lives in this way. However, this was not considered an expedient solution, and the physical and psychological strain on German troops from this method of killing was considered problematic. Furthermore, by October 1939, the Nazis had control of over 2 million Jews between Germany, Poland, Austria, and the Czech Republic (known at the time as the territories of Sudetenland, Moravia, and Bohemia), and this number continued to grow with German expansion.

In 1942, the Nazi party developed the “final solution” to the Jewish “problem”: an intentional, mass extermination of European Jews. Purpose-built killing centers were established in German-controlled Poland: Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and—most notorious of all—Auschwitz. Mobile gas vans were initially used at these centers. Later, permanent gas chambers were built attached to crematoriums. To minimize the psychological cost to German personnel, slave labor of Jewish prisoners or prisoners of war were often used as the sonderkommandos, the workers in the gas chambers and crematoria.

Over 6 million European Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, which only ceased when camps were liberated by allied soldiers (Berenbaum, Michael. “Holocaust.” Britannica, 2024).