AQA 7042 · 2O · R20 - The treatment of Jews in the early years of war: the Einsatzgruppen
This lesson traces how ghettos, deportations and mass shootings overlapped from the invasion of Poland in September 1939 to the end of 1941. You will judge what changed after the invasion of the Soviet Union and assess an authentic perpetrator document without mistaking official provenance for truth or completeness.
War widens persecution
By September 1939, Nazi rule had already excluded, dispossessed and driven many Jews from Germany and Austria. War changed the geographical and political conditions: conquest brought much larger Jewish populations under German power and removed restraints on what German authorities could do in occupied territory. The enquiry begins on 1 September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, and ends in December 1941, by which point systematic mass shootings and deportations from the German Reich were under way.
Radicalisation means an escalation in the reach, coercion and lethality of policy. It does not mean that each decision followed one fixed plan or that every occupied region experienced the same sequence.
| Date | Development | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| 1 September 1939 | Germany invaded Poland | Nearly two million Polish Jews came under German occupation, creating opportunities for mass segregation, plunder and forced movement |
| 21 September 1939 | Reinhard Heydrich instructed security units to concentrate Jews from the countryside in larger towns, preferably near rail links, and to establish Jewish councils | German security policy linked concentration, administration and transport, but did not prescribe one uniform type of ghetto |
| 1939–1940 | German authorities created ghettos and deported Jews within and from annexed Polish territory | Coercive segregation and displacement became policies affecting whole communities |
| 22 June 1941 | Germany invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa | A planned racial and ideological war opened a new phase of systematic mass shooting across newly occupied territories |
| October–December 1941 | Systematic deportations from Greater Germany began while mass shootings continued in the east | Forced removal, ghettoisation and murder now operated together across a widening area |
Sequence alone is not explanation. The invasions mattered because territorial conquest placed people, transport networks and administrative systems under German control. Nazi antisemitic ideology supplied the targets and aims; German institutions and individual perpetrators turned those aims into arrests, forced removals, deprivation and murder.
Ghettos under coercion
German military, SS, police and civilian authorities created and controlled ghettos; their timing, boundaries and degree of closure varied.
Ghetto under Nazi occupation
An area into which German or allied authorities forced Jews to move and in which they restricted movement and daily life. It was not a freely chosen Jewish neighbourhood.
The first ghetto in German-occupied Poland was created at Piotrków Trybunalski in October 1939. In early 1940, German authorities established the Łódź ghetto and confined about 160,000 Jews in roughly 1.5 square miles. The Warsaw ghetto was established in October 1940 and sealed the following month. More than 350,000 Jews—around 30 per cent of the city’s population—were initially confined within about 2.4 per cent of Warsaw; its population later rose above 400,000 as people were deported there from surrounding areas.
Ghettos served several connected German purposes:
- segregation and surveillance: separating Jews from neighbouring populations and making movement easier to police;
- plunder and displacement: seizing homes, businesses and property while concentrating people selected for later removal;
- forced labour: exploiting ghetto residents for German state and private enterprises;
- administrative control: imposing Jewish councils, or Judenräte, to transmit German orders under coercion.
The conditions were themselves destructive. Deliberately inadequate food, overcrowding, poor sanitation, disease and forced labour caused suffering and death. Jewish residents nevertheless made constrained choices to secure food, sustain families, organise welfare, worship, educate and record what was happening. Recognising these actions does not soften the coercion, and the impossible tasks imposed on Jewish councils do not transfer responsibility from the German authorities.
It is therefore misleading to treat “the ghetto” as one institution with a single unchanging purpose. Some ghettos were open for a time and others sealed; local German officials shaped when and why they were created. From summer 1941, ghettos in newly occupied Soviet territories sometimes followed or accompanied mass shootings rather than serving as a universal first stage.
Deportation as forced removal
Deportation is forced removal by state authority from one place to another. It must not be confused with voluntary emigration. Nazi officials often called transports “resettlement,” a euphemism that concealed coercion and, increasingly, mortal danger.
Deportation changed in reach and purpose across the early war:
- In October 1939, Adolf Eichmann coordinated the Nisko or Lublin Plan, which deported about 3,500 Jews from Moravia, Katowice and Vienna towards a proposed “reservation” near Nisko in occupied Poland. The scheme was halted. Its failure shows experimentation and institutional initiative, not humane restraint.
- In autumn and winter 1939–1940, the Reich Security Main Office coordinated the deportation of roughly 100,000 Jews from Polish territories annexed to Germany into the General Government. These expulsions fed overcrowding and instability while serving German plans to remake the occupied population.
- From October 1941, after Hitler authorised systematic deportations from Greater Germany, trains carried Jews from Germany, Austria and the annexed Czech lands to eastern ghettos and shooting sites. About 42,000 people were deported between October and December, principally to Łódź, Minsk, Kovno and Riga.
This work required more than an SS order. The Reich Security Main Office selected and coordinated transports; railway and transport officials scheduled trains; regional administrations assembled people and seized property; police guarded collections and departures; occupation authorities received the transports. Deportation therefore shows how mass persecution became a cross-government process.
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