Finally, the Nazi state condemned all European Jews to extermination in the Holocaust. After Warsaw fell in 1939, the Nazis forced Jews in the occupied territories to move to urban ghettos, while German Jews were sent to occupied Poland. After Germany attacked Russia in June 1941, forced expulsion spiraled into extermination. Himmler’s SS killing squads and regular army units compelled Soviet Jews to dig giant pits, then stand on the edge of these mass graves and be cut down by machine guns. In late 1941 Hitler and the Nazi leadership, in some still-debated combination, ordered the SS to speed up planning for “the final solution of the Jewish question.”28 Throughout the Nazi empire Jews were systematically arrested, packed like cattle onto freight trains, and dispatched to extermination camps.

Arriving at their destination, small numbers of Jews were sent to nearby slave labor camps, where they were starved and systematically worked to death. (See “Individuals in Society: Primo Levi.”) Most victims were taken to “shower rooms,” which were actually gas chambers. For fifteen to twenty minutes terrible screams and gasping sobs arose from men, women, and children choking to death on poison gas. Then, only silence. Special camp workers quickly yanked the victims’ gold teeth from their jaws, and the bodies were cremated. By 1945 about 6 million Jews had been murdered.

Who was responsible for this terrible crime? After the war historians laid the guilt on Hitler and the Nazi leadership, arguing that ordinary Germans had little knowledge of the extermination camps, or that those who cooperated had no alternative given the brutality of Nazi terror and totalitarian control. Beginning in the 1990s studies appeared revealing a much broader participation of German people in the Holocaust and popular indifference (or worse) to the Jews’ fate.29 In most occupied countries local non-German officials also cooperated in the arrest and deportation of Jews.

Only a few exceptional bystanders did not turn a blind eye. Catholic and Protestant church leaders protested rarely. Thus some scholars have concluded that the key for most Germans (and most people in occupied countries) was that they felt no personal responsibility for Jews and therefore were not prepared to help them. This meant that many individuals, who were sympathetic to Nazi racist propaganda and were also influenced by peer pressure and brutalizing wartime violence, were psychologically prepared to perpetrate ever-greater crimes, from mistreatment to arrest to mass murder.