On March 15, 1936, Nazi armies invaded Czechoslovakia. On September 1, they invaded Poland. Great Britain and France declared war, and World War II had begun. The invasion of Poland brought a new dimension to the twisted Nazi ideas known as "the Jewish problem." That part of the country under German occupation (the rest was occupied by the Soviet Union) contained more than 1 million Jews. Successive decrees published by the Nazis confined these Jews to ghettoes, or in newly built concentration camps. All Jews were ordered to wear yellow stars of David on their clothes so they could be immediately identified.
Jews in Nazi Germany were forced to sew this symbol onto their clothing, proclaiming their Jewish identity.
Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo, gave orders for death squads known as SS Einsatzgruppen (SS Special Action Units) to search out Jews in the occupied territories. Death or worse awaited Jews in the ghettoes and the camps.
Toward the autumn of 1940, the Nazi armies occupied Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece. In addition to Italy and Japan—which had already formed an alliance with Germany—Hungary, Romania and Slovakia also declared themselves allies of Germany. The Nazi armies' largest invasion was of the Soviet Union, which began on June 22, 1941. Within 12 weeks, the Germans had taken Kiev, and a month later had approached the outskirts of Moscow.
To sum up, in the first two years of the World War II, Hitler or his allies had captured most of the continent of Europe, from the French coast to Moscow, from Denmark to Greece. Shortly before their collapse in 1945, the Nazis initiated a ruthless genocide campaign in all their occupied regions. First Jews in particular and then—as we shall see—other ethnic and religious groups began to be systematically wiped out. Even after 1944, when it had become clear that Germany would lose the war, the Nazis continued their genocide. During that final stage of the conflict, in fact, the elimination of the Jews—and also of gypsies, Poles and Slavs, all members of the so-called "inferior race"—became the Nazis' principal aim. Hitler knew that he would lose the war, but wanted to eliminate all the Jews first. This genocide had several main "areas of implementation:"
1) Ghettoes: These open-air prisons where Jews were kept were used to kill by degrees.
2) Concentration camps were first established as places where Jews and others were kept as "slave laborers." In early 1942, however, the mass extermination of detainees began. A total of 11 million people (5.5 million Jews, 500,000 gypsies, 3 million Poles, 400,000 handicapped and hundreds of thousands of Russian, Slav and other prisoners of war) were systematically exterminated in these camps.
3) Mass killings in occupied regions: Special German Army units, and particularly the SS Einsatzgruppen responsible for "finding and killing Jews," executed civilians in a great many places.
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