The Nazis were driven to make Germany free of Jews—what they called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Initially, they harassed and intimidated the Jews after first taking power in the 1930s, but their plans became increasingly violent over time. After the outbreak of World War II, the Nazis began conceiving of ways to deport Europe’s Jews to remote locations, including Madagascar and Siberia. Hundreds of ghettos were created between 1939 and 1941 to help concentrate Jews for their eventual expulsion, which was originally planned for after the war.

In 1941, after growing impatient with the duration of the war up to that point, Hitler and other Nazi leaders decided to murder all Jews under their control. Some scholars think that this decision was made because the Nazis felt emboldened by a (false) perception that they were winning the war. Other historians hypothesize that the Germans knew that they were losing the war and believed that killing all the Jews would improve their war efforts. Regardless, the annihilation of the Jews quickly became a top priority for Nazi leaders, who now considered the “Final Solution” to be a central part of the war for Aryan supremacy. Nazi police began slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Jews after the invasion of the Soviet Union and then expanded the genocide into Poland and the rest of Europe after 1941. 

Nazi leaders notoriously discussed the fate of European Jewry during the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. The conference was convened by SS General Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler’s top deputies. The primary purpose of the Wannsee Conference was to coordinate and implement the murder of the entire Jewish population, particularly the process by which Jews would be sent to extermination camps.

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