Why did the Nazis treatment of the Jews change from 1939-45?

Essay by Wrighty88High School, 10th grade June 2004

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On January 20, 1942 fifteen high ranking Nazi party and German government leaders gathered for an important meeting. They met in a wealthy section of Berlin to discuss a topic only known as 'The Final Solution'. The Nazis used this vague term to hide their policy of mass murder from the rest of the world; they were to remove the Jews from German society.

In 1939 Germany invaded Poland and 2 million Polish Jews came under Nazi Control.

After the German army invaded the Soviet Union on June 22 1941 a new stage in the Holocaust began, several million more Jews came under Nazi rule as the SS took control.

The mobile killing acted swiftly, taking the Jewish population by surprise. The killers entered a town or city and rounded up all Jewish men, women and children. They also took away many communist leaders and gypsies. Victims were forced to surrender any valuables and remove their clothing, which was later sent for use in Germany.

On September 21 1941 for example, the eve of the Jewish New Year, a mobile killing squad entered Ejszyszki, a small town in what is now Lithuania. The killing squad members herded 4,000 Jews from the town and the surrounding region into three synagogues, where they were held for two days without food or water. Then in two days of killing, Jewish men, women and children were taken to cemeteries lined up in front of open pits and shot dead.

The killing squads murdered more than a million Jews and hundreds of thousands of other innocent people. So why, specifically did these killings occur towards the Jews? Looking at history between Germany and the Jews we can see conflict occurred directly after the First World War. Germany blamed the Jewish population for their defeat in...