As soon as Germany invaded the Soviet Union, special murder units of the SS and the German
police entered and began murdering primarily Jews, and also various Communist officials
and so on, but their main target was Jews. But by the end of 1941, in that first stage,
the first 6 months of murder, they had already murdered 800,000 Jews or even more. But the
murder expanded gradually, beginning in the second half of the summer of 1941, with discussions
inside of Nazi Germany about bringing other Jews into this picture of murder.
Because as Germany now looked around and saw they had even more millions of Jews under their
rule and there was nowhere to send them, and there is no other solution, they felt themselves,
ironically, trapped, and now they had to deal with the problem of so many millions of Jews.
And they determined that the only solution to the problem was to kill the problem.
But it was a process to reach that decision: They began discussing including the Jews of the
Third Reich in the murder, parallel to the murder in the Soviet Union. Their ally - Romania,
began murdering Jews on their own in territories that Romania controlled in Romania and the Ukraine.
And particularly inside of Poland, one SS general named Odilo Globocnik began
organizing plans to murder the Jews of the areas of Poland where he had influence, which
included more than two million Jews, and that became, later on, what was known as "Operation
Reinhardt". Parallel to that, experiments began at the end of the summer of 1941 to
design gas vehicles - lorries, or vans - into which you could load several dozen Jews, drive
around for a few minutes and kill them. They experimented with a number of prototypes until
they reached the correct model, and then they began using that model in various places,
but primarily in a new camp, that was constructed in November of 1941 and opened on December
8th 1941, that was Chelmno. And parallel to that they experiment with a different kind
of gas, at the concentration camp known as Auschwitz. And in early September 1941, the
first experiment using Zyklon B, the prussic acid, which was a pesticide for agriculture,
was being adapted, and the experiment was found to be successful enough that they then embarked
upon improving on the model and looking to build gas chambers that would use that method
of gassing. And therefore we have parallel developments during the course of the second
half of 1941: Massive shooting, gas vans, murder in other places, planning on bringing
Jews from all over Europe into the murder areas that were being prepared, and murder
by the exhaust of engines, "Operation Reinhardt" being planned by Globocnik - all of this coalesced,
by the end of 1941, became the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".