Dachau inmates crowd to hear a speech by Hitler.

World War II erupted on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. It took mere days for Germany to emerge victorious, and the Nazis began to enslave the Poles and destroy their culture, deemed "subhuman." The first step was to eliminate the leaders. Nazis massacred many university professors, artists, writers, politicians, and Catholic priests. Large group of the Polish people were resettled to make room for the "superior" Germans. German families began to move in to the newly annexed land. Thousands of Poles and Polish Jews were imprisoned in concentration camps. (The model concentration camp was Dachau, which was established March 20, 1933 in an abandoned munitions factory.) Fifty-thousand " Aryan-looking" Polish children were kidnapped and taken to be adopted by German families. Many were later rejected as incapable of "Germanization" and send to special children's camps, where death by starvation, lethal injection, and disease was all very possible.

During the beginning of the war, Hitler authorized an order to kill institutionalized, handicapped patients deemed "incurable." State hospitals filled out questionnaires on their patients, which were then reviewed by a special commission of physicians who would simply decide if the subject lived or died. Those marked for death were sent to one of six death camps in Germany and Austria, where special gas chambers killed them. Public protests in 1941 forced the Nazis to continue this "euthanasia" program in secret. Babies, small children, and others were killed afterwards by lethal injection, pills, or forced starvation. Their bodies were burned in crematoria.

The mass murder of the European Jewry and other persecuted groups was thus preceded by the "euthanasia" program, which had all the elements needed for the later genocides in the Nazi death camps: an express decision to kill, specially trained personnel, the equipment for the deadly gas, and the use of the euphemistic terms like "euthanasia" which psychologically distance the killers from their victims and hid the criminal character of the killings from the public.

Germany continued their conquest of most of Europe in 1940, crushing Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France handily. June 22, 1941 saw the Germans invade the Soviet Union, breaking their peace. They neared Moscow by September. Italy, Romania, and Hungary all had joined the Axis Powers by this time, led by Germany. The Allied Powers consisted of the British Commonwealth, Free France, the United States, and the Soviet Union.

In the months following the invasion of the Soviet Union, Jews, political leaders, Communists, and Gypsies were killed in mass executions, the vast majority of the victims being Jewish. Mobile killing squads, Einsatzgruppen, carried out these murders at improvised sites throughout the Soviet Union, following behind the advancing German army. The most famous (or infamous, as the case may be), is Babi Yar, near Kiev, where an estimated 33,000 persons, mostly Jewish, were murdered. The killers used language to distance themselves, referring to these executions as "special actions," or "special treatments," so that they could distance themselves from it; many drank to help ease their minds. Keep in mind that these killing squads were not angry rioters, nor gangs of street thugs, but ordinary people who were "just following orders," indeed, Nazi training taught that this was a task of eliminating enemies of the state, not a racist plot. Entire communities were literally erased. Towns disappeared. German execution of the handicapped and institutionalized made its way into the Soviet Union as well. As a result, more than three million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered.

Major changes in the concentration camp system were brought about as a result of World War II. Floods of prisoners in larger numbers, deported from German-occupied countries swamped the camps. Entire groups were often sent to the camps, an example being all of the members of underground resistance organizations who were rounded up in a sweep across Europe due to the 1941 "Night and Fog" decree. The only way to handle all of these new prisoners was to open up hundred of new camps in occupied Europe, which the Nazis did.

Ghettos, transit camps, and forced labor camps were all used in addition to concentration camps by the Germans and their collaborators to imprison their victims. The conditions were horrible, food was kept scarce on purpose, disease spread like wildfire, and life was desperate. Many committed suicide just to escape the situation. Orphans would beg in the streets and many would die in the rough winter cold. Smuggling was the only way of getting enough food, and children were often the volunteers, a brave thing, since smuggling was dealt with harshly if caught. In the aftermath of the invasion of Poland, 3 million Polish Jews were forced into roughly 400 new ghettos. Large amounts of Jews were deported from Germany and other countries to Polish ghettos and other eastern territories.

Polish cities under Nazi occupation (such as Warsaw and Lodz) had Jews confined in sealed ghettos; tens of thousands died from starvation, overcrowding, exposure, and disease. At great risk, Jews made every effort to maintain their culture, community, and religion. The ghettos also served as excellent fodder for forced labor. Nazi forced labor groups worked on road gangs, in construction, and other hard labor for the Nazi war cause, where many died of exhaustion and maltreatment.

It was between 1942 and 1944 that the Germans decided to eliminate the ghettos and deport the ghetto populations to "extermination camps," killing centers equipped with gassing facilities in Poland. This was known as "the final solution to the Jewish question," implemented after a meeting of senior German officials in late January 1942 at a villa in Wannsee (a suburb of Berlin). It was official state policy, the first ever to advocate the murder of an entire people. It was also the first time non-Nazi leaders were entirely informed of the Nazi plan- not one spoke out against it. Jews from western Europe were sent east to be killed.

Six killing sites were chosen according to their closeness to rail lines (essential for shipping the victims) and for their location in semi-rural areas. The locations were: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Chelmno has the shameful distinction of being the first camp in which mass gas executions took place: mobile gas vans piped in the lethal gas, killing 320,000 between December 1941 and March 1943, as well as between June and July of 1944. Belzec used gas vans and later gas chambers, over 600,000 people were murdered between May 1942 and August 1943. May 1942 was the opening of Sobibor, which did not cease killing until a successful one day revolt of the prisoners on October 14, 1943. By that time 200,000 people had died of gassing. Treblinka, the largest (in terms of size) of the extermination camps, and responsible for at least 750,000 deaths, opened in July of 1942 and closed November, 1943- a revolt in August 1943 destroyed much of it. Most of those victims were Jews, some were Gypsies. All four were terribly brutal, few survived since most were slain upon arrival. Those who weren't performed forced labor or were put into concentration. Their identities were ripped from them, their hair shorn. They became a number, no longer a name, which was tattooed on their arm. Many survivors will not remove their number. It is a part of them forever.

Camp living conditions were atrocious. Crammed into windowless, non-insulated barracks, up to 500 in one building, inmates were jammed against one another. No bathrooms were available- a bucket was the only form of waste control. Each barrack had about 36 bunks, it was typical for 5 or 6 inmates to squeeze onto one plank. Food was scarce and what was available was disgusting, watery soup with rotten stew or vegetables, stale, molded bread, perhaps some tea, or a bitter, coffee-like drink that was anything but coffee. Malnutrition made prisoners easy targets for disease and dehydration.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, not just a killing center but a concentration camp and slave labor facility, is usually mentioned the moment anyone discusses the Holocaust. This is for a good reason: it is the institution responsible for the largest number of European Jews murdered as well as the largest number of Gypsies murdered. An experimental gassing of 250 malnourished, ill Polish prisoners and 600 Russian prisoners of war in September 1941 grew into daily, routine mass murder. More than 1.25 million people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 9 out of 10 of those were Jews. (Imagine that amount of people for a moment. Don't let the sheer amount of numbers numb you to them.) Four of its gas chambers could hold 2,000 victims at a time. The electrically charged barb wire fencing made escape a virtual impossibility, not to mention the gun towers. Besides the Jews, Auschwitz-Birkenau killed Gypsies, Soviet POWs, and ill prisoners of various nationalities. Between just under three months, (May 14 through July 8, 1944), 437,402 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz via 48 trains. This is most likely the single largest deportation of the Holocaust. A similar system was used at Majdanek, which also saw "double usage" as a concentration camp and which was responsible for at least 275,000 deaths.

The SS operated the killing centers, and their methods were similar in each location. Railroad freight cars and passenger trains would bring in victims. Men were immediately seperated from women. Prisoners were stripped and their valuables confiscated. They then were forced naked into the gas chambers, disguised as showers, where carbon monoxide or Zyklon B asphyxiated them. The bodies were then stripped of hair, gold fillings and teeth, and burned in crematoria, or buried in enormous mass graves. The hair was used for ship rope and mattresses. The few picked for slave labor were quarentined, after which they were particularly succeptible to malnutrition, exposure, starvation, and epidemics. Laborers would work outside the camps occasionally, companies like Bavarian Motor Works (BMW) and I. G. Farben used them for cheap labor to save money. They also were often used for medical experiments and subject to extreme brutality on the part of the guards. Many died as a result.

It is a shameful blemish on the history of Europe that the systematic murders perpetrated by the Nazis were carried out with the help of local collaborators in much of Europe and silently accepted by millions of bystanders. As in any case however, there are exceptions to the rule- organized resistance would be found in some areas. Denmark, in particular, shines as an example. The Danish resistance, in the fall of 1943, and with the support of the local population, rescued nearly the entire Jewish population of Denmark from impending deportation to the camps by smuggling them in fishing boats to neutral Sweden in a dangerous and risky national effort. Individuals (the most famous at the moment being Oskar Schindler, of Schindler's List), in many other countries also risked their lives to save the persecuted. Another famed individual, Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who led the rescue effort that saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews in 1944. He is honored by having his name given to the street on which the United States Holocaust Memorial Musuem resides.

In late 1944 the tide of the war had turned. Allied armies approached German soil, and the SS decided to evacuate outlying concentration camps. In an attempt to cover up the evidence of death marches to the inner camps. Many were killed during the marches, and sometimes the Nazis would execute the rest when they reached their destination; during one march of 7,000 Jews, 6,000 of whom were women, 700 were killed during the March. Upon arrival at the Baltic Sea ten days later the rest were forced into the water and shot. The finals days, in the spring of 1945, conditions in the remaining camps exacted a terrible toll in human lives. Ironically, it had been the goal of the Nazis to keep a record of all the people who was exterminated once the job was "complete" and to open a "musuem" of the dead "race." It was this careful record keeping that couldn't be covered up in the hurried attempt to hide evidence or destroy it. Camps like Bergen-Belsen, never intended for extermination, became death traps for thousands like Anne Frank, who died of typhus in March 1945. Nazi propaganda continued to the bitter end to claim that the Nazis had a secret plan to win the war, even though the officials knew it was a lost cause. Majdanek was liberated July 23, 1944 by the Soviets, and the other camps would soon follow, freed by troops from the United States, Canada, and France. Unfortunately many of the freed prisoners were so weak they couldn't eat or digest the food they were given and died shortly after liberation. Survivors would return home to find many prejudices still firmly ingrained in the population- pogroms erupted in Poland and elsewhere, leaving Jews and others technically free, but still prisoners of hate.

The Third Reich collapsed in May 1945. SS guards fled and the camps ceased to function as killing centers, labor sites, or concentration camps. Some become displaced person (DP) camps, such as Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Landsberg, all in Allied-occupied Germany.

The Nazi legacy was a vast empire of murder, pillage, and exploitation that had affected every country in occupied Europe. The sheer number of individuals whose lives were cut short was enormous. In the end, the full magnitude of this tragic genocide, and the moral and ethical implications of this sad era are only now beginning to be understood more fully.

Hitler and his personal architect, Albert Speer, at the Eiffel Tower just after France fell to Germany.

Group portrait of the nursing staff at the Hadamar Institute, where handicaps were murdered.

A cemetary of Hadamar "euthanasia" victims.

The gates of Auschwitz- it says: Arbeicht Macht Frei (Work Will Set You Free).

A victim of the medical experiments at Auschwitz sits in the infirmary.

Bales of hair found in Auschwitz's warehouses.

Anna Glinberg, a 3 year old Jewish girl, who was executed at Babi Yar by Einsatzgruppen.