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. 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.”9 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. 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. 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.10 In most occupied countries local non-German officials also cooperated in the arrest and deportation of Jews.