When and how did the Nazis decide to murder the Jews under their control?When and how did the Nazis decide to murder the Jews under their control?
The exact date of the Nazi policy decision to murder all the Jews is not entirely clear. No written order from Hitler to this effect has been found. Currently there is a consensus among historians, however, that before the outbreak of the war the Nazis did not have a definite plan to murder the Jews of Europe. Rather, the policy that came to be known as the “Final Solution”, which called for the murder of all Jews, developed during the war itself. At the time of the German conquest of Poland, in the autumn of 1939, the Nazis crossed the line from earlier forms of discrimination to murder. At this point, sporadic mass killings in the Generalgouvernement alone, the area where most Polish Jews were gathered, resulted in the deaths of at least 7,000 in the last months of 1939. With the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, murderous activities against the Jews were greatly intensified. German armed formations, chief among the special units of the SS known as the Einsatzgruppen, be
