Since the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Nazi anti-Jewish persecution entered a new phase of expansion. As the war progressed, the Third Reich extended its control over millions of European Jews and intensified the policies of exclusion, dispossession, and violence that the regime had initiated in Germany in 1933.
In the occupied territories, Jews were subjected to a systematic process of segregation. They were forced to wear the Star of David as an identifying mark and, in Eastern Europe, were compelled to move into ghettos. There, hunger, disease, forced labor, overcrowding, and lack of sanitation caused massive mortality. In an initial stage, the ghettos functioned as spaces of confinement and exploitation; later, they became a central link in the process of deportation and extermination.
The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked another turning point. Within the framework of a war conceived by Nazism as ideological and racial, special units known as the Einsatzgruppen advanced behind the German army and carried out mass shootings, often with the collaboration of local actors. Men, women, children, and elderly people were executed in forests, ravines, and mass graves. This phase preceded the systematization and industrialization of mass murder.
The Nazi leadership then advanced toward the so-called “Final Solution,” the plan for the systematic murder of the Jews of Europe. Its administrative coordination was carried out at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. From that moment onward, deportations intensified: millions of Jews were transported in freight trains from ghettos, occupied cities, and countries allied with Nazi Germany to extermination camps such as Chełmno Extermination Camp, Bełżec Extermination Camp, Sobibór Extermination Camp, Treblinka Extermination Camp, Majdanek Concentration Camp, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In these killing centers, most victims were murdered shortly after arrival, primarily in gas chambers. The extermination process was accompanied by the looting of personal belongings, the exploitation of forced labor, and a sustained process of dehumanization.
As the Third Reich began to collapse, the Nazis evacuated many camps and forced tens of thousands of prisoners to undertake the so-called “Death Marches.” The liberation of the camps by the Allies revealed to the world the magnitude of the crimes committed. With the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, a policy of extermination planned and carried out by the Nazi state was fully exposed.
During the World War II, Nazism murdered six million Jews, three million Soviet prisoners of war, 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish civilians, 200,000 people with disabilities, between 196,000 and 220,000 Roma and Sinti people, around 1,900 Jehovah’s Witnesses, at least 70,000 individuals classified as “criminals” or “asocials,” thousands of homosexuals, and an undetermined number of political opponents.
