Table of ContentsIntroductionThe Holocaust Death Camps During the WarAftermath and Lasting Impact of the HolocaustIntroductionThroughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler's empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium. , Luxembourg and France. Beginning 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 extermination units called Einsatzgruppen would murder more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) during the German occupation. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get an original essayA memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler's commander-in-chief, Hermann Goering, to Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD (the security service of the SS), spoke of the need for an Endlösung (final solution) to "the Jewish question". From September 1941, anyone designated as Jewish in German-controlled territory was marked with a yellow star, making them open targets. Tens of thousands of people were soon deported to Polish ghettos and German-occupied towns in the USSR. Since June 1941, experiments with methods of mass extermination had been underway in the Auschwitz concentration camp near Krakow. In August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet prisoners of war to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for gas from a German pest control company, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust. starting with those considered the least useful: the sick, the old, the weak and the very young. The first mass gassings began at 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 most great of all, Auschwitz-Birkenau. . From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to camps throughout Europe, including territories controlled by Germany as well as countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall 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 massacres made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses reported Nazi atrocities in Poland to Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond or make public information about the mass slaughter. This inaction was probably primarily due to the Allies' desire to win 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 can occur in such a context. ladder. In Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process that resembled a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked there in the labor camp; Although only Jews were gassed, thousands more died of starvation or disease. During the summer of 1944, even as the events of D-Day (June 6, 1944) and the Soviet offensive of the same month marked the beginning of the end of the war for Germany, a large part of the Jewish population from Hungary was deported to.