The Beginning Of The Final Solution - Yad Vashem

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3. Thematic and Chronological Narrative
4. The Beginning of the Final Solution

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The naked people stepped down the stairs carved in the pit’s wall, and walked over the heads of those who lay there to the spot where the SS man told them. Then they lowered themselves atop of the dead or those who were still alive. A volley of shots was heard. I looked into the pit and saw the stirring bodies and the bodies down below which didn’t stir. Blood was running from the back of their necks.

From the testimony of Herman Friedrich Graebe, director of the Ukraine branch of the Jung company, about what he witnessed in Dubno, Volhynia, on October 5, 1942. The testimony was given before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.

The mass murder of the Jews began with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. By the end of 1941 80% of Lithuanian Jewry had been murdered, and by the beginning of 1943, most of the Jews of the western parts of Ukraine and Belorussia had been murdered. Additionally, Romanians and Germans murdered 150,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews in the first months after the invasion of the Soviet Union. In January 1942 a conference was held in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, in order to coordinate the implementation of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”, the codename for the plan to murder all Jews within reach.

The Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Beginnings of Mass Murder

The turning point in the Nazis’ plan to “solve the Jewish problem” began with Operation Barbarossa, the massive military invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, intended to wind up the war by the winter. The invasion had been planned for a long time, and in anticipation, the Germans prepared units of Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Belorussion nationalist and oppositionist collaborators.Hitler...Continue reading...

Murder of the Jews of the Baltic States

Some 220,000 Jews were living in Lithuania when the Germans invaded in June 1941. The day after the German invasion of the Soviet Union and even before the Germans arrived at the major Jewish settlements, murderous riots perpetrated by the Lithuanians broke out against the Jews . At the encouragement of the Germans, the riots continued and thousands of Jews were murdered.The German entrance to Lithuania...Continue reading...

Murder of the Jews of Romania

Romania, an ally of Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1944, had a Jewish population of about 757,000 before World War II. Extreme antisemitic tendencies, long evident in the country, escalated on the eve of the war. In June 1941, in the weeks following the invasion of the USSR by Nazi Germany and the Romanian army (under the dictatorship of Ion Antonescu), the Romanian army, with the partial cooperation...Continue reading...

The Wannsee Conference

There is no document in our possession that indicates specifically by whom, at what time, and in what way it was decided to embark on the total extermination of the Jews. Many scholars believe that such an order was never issued in writing: instead, it was given orally, by Hitler, or with his knowledge, in the summer of 1941. On July 31, 1941, shortly after the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazi...Continue reading... x

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