On July 22, 1942, Nazi Germany began the mass deportation of Polish Jews in the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp. In all, some 250,000 of the 400,000 total residents were moved in the summer of 1942, with “resettlement in the East” as the operation’s stated objective. After an uprising in April-May 1943, the ghetto was shut down and the remaining residents were moved to extermination camps. At Treblinka, some 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were killed in the gas chambers or by firing squad; another 90,000 died from starvation or disease.
The Germans had set up ghettos in occupied Europe to segregate Jews, gypsies (Romani) and other “undesirables” for eventual extermination. In total, some 3 million Polish Jews (50% of all Jews in the Holocaust, and 90% of all Jews in Poland) perished in the Holocaust.
(Excerpts taken from Wars of the 20th Century – World War II in Europe)
Events Leading up to World War II in Europe
Hitler and the Nazis in Power Adolf Hitler imposed Nazi racial policies, which saw ethnic Germans as the “master race” comprising “super-humans” (Ubermensch), while certain races such as Slavs, Jews, and Roma (gypsies) were considered “sub-humans” (Untermenschen); also lumped with the latter were non-ethnic-based groups, i.e. communists, liberals, and other political enemies, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. Nazi lebensraum (“living space”) expansionism into Eastern Europe and Russia called for eliminating the Slavic and other populations there and replacing them with German farm settlers to help realize Hitler’s dream of a 1,000-year German Empire.
In Germany itself, starting in April 1933 until the passing of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935 and beyond, Nazi racial policy was directed against the local Jews, stripping them of civil rights, banning them from employment and education, revoking their citizenship, excluding them from political and social life, disallowing inter-marriages with Germans, and essentially declaring them undesirables in Germany.
By far, the most famous extermination program was the Holocaust, where six million Jews, or 60% of the nine million pre-war European Jewish population, were killed in the period 1941-1945. German anti-Jewish policies began in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and violent repression of Jews increased at the outbreak of war. Jews were rounded up and confined to guarded ghettos, and then sent by freight trains to concentration and labor camps. By mid-1942, under the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” decree, Jews were transported to extermination camps, where they were killed in gas chambers. Some 90% of Holocaust victims were Jews. Other similar exterminations and repressions were carried out against ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and other Slavs and Romani (gypsies), as well as communists and other political enemies, homosexuals, Freemasons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. In Germany itself, a clandestine program implemented by German public health authorities under Hitler’s orders, killed tens of thousands of mentally and physically disabled patients, purportedly under euthanasia (“mercy killing”) procedures, which actually involved sending patients to gas chambers, applying lethal doses of medication, and through starvation.
Some 12-15 million slave laborers, mostly civilians from captured territories in Eastern Europe, were rounded up to work in Germany, particularly in munitions factories and agriculture, to ease German labor shortage caused by the millions of German men fighting in the various fronts and also because Nazi policy discouraged German women from working in industry. Some 5.7 million Soviet POWs also were used as slave labor. As well, two million French Army prisoners were sent to labor camps in Germany, mainly to prevent the formation of organized resistance in France and for them to serve as hostages to ensure continued compliance by the Vichy government. Some 600,000 French civilians also were conscripted or volunteered to work in German plants. Living and working conditions for the slave laborers were extremely dire, particularly for those from Eastern Europe. Some 60% (3.6 million of the 5.7 million) of Soviet POWs died in captivity from various causes: summary executions, physical abuse, diseases, starvation diets, extreme work, etc.