Page 23 - Witness

While persecution of the Jews began in 1933 in Germany with Hitler’s assumption of power, the mass murder of large numbers of Jews did not begin until the onset of WWII and Nazi Germany’s occupation of much of Europe.
With a few notable exceptions, the Nazis in every occupied European country, and every country controlled by Nazi-allied regimes, targeted Jews and those who assisted them – along with numerous minorities, ethnic and religious groups, and many others they deemed inferior or a threat.
The Nazis murdered their victims, the largest number of whom were Jewish, in a variety of ways. After invading Poland, many of the country’s Jews were herded into ghettos where they awaited eventual transportation to slave labor or death camps. Ghettoization followed in many other countries invaded by Nazi Germany, mostly in the Soviet Union. The ghetto Jews were often rounded up and shot in random actions or died of disease or malnutrition.
From July 1941, before the death camps assumed the role for the vast majority of murders, the Nazis sent mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen into various parts of eastern Europe. Together with German/Austrian SS, police, and military, as well as tens of thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of local collaborators, by war’s end they had slaughtered approximately two million Jews in town squares, forests, and pits, often burying their victims alive. In a vast array of forced labor camps – numbering some 42,500 at last count – Jews and other prisoners were often forced to work under extreme conditions; hundreds of thousands perished from arbitrary executions, disease, starvation, or from being worked to death. (According to the most recent research reported in the New York Times, the forms of Nazi incarceration across Europe included “30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, ‘Germanizing’ prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.”)
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