Nazi Germany's Transition to Extermination Camps

In 1941, a time where Germany was dominated by the Nazi Party, Jewish people were constantly being oppressed by the use of various tactics in Nazi Germany. However, all of these tactics were eventually phased out in favor of extermination camps, which Nazi Germany deemed as the most efficient method and “the final solution to solve the Jewish problem”. Prior to the infamous extermination camps; general repressive laws, ghettos, along with death squads were all techniques used on the Jewish population in order to rid Nazi Germany of Jewish people. All of these techniques were denounced as “inefficient” by the government of Germany, which led to the eventual disuse of these practices.

The initial signs of Jewish oppression in Germany were the

The laws that divided society in Nazi Germany were the first indicators of Jewish oppression in Germany, as the “gemeinschaftsfemde” consisted of Jews, Christians, communists, and other groups that the Nazis did not believe were “pure German” or “pure Aryan”. These divisions in social structure were created so that the Nazis could identify certain people, and so the Nazis could use future laws in order to target only those in the gemeinschaftsfemde group. The divisions created led to the future use of what are known as Nuremberg Laws. Michael Berenbaum for the Britannica Encyclopedia defines Nuremberg Laws as “…two race-based measures depriving Jews of rights, designed by Adolf Hitler and approved by the Nazi Party…one deprived Jews of German citizenship, and the other forbade marriage or sexual relations between Jews and ‘citizens of German or kindred blood…’” (1-7). Nuremberg Laws

Ghettos in Nazi Germany were living spaces designed specifically to separate Jews from the rest of society. Ghettos were used by the Germans immediately after legal tactics were deemed to have failed, and were regarded as a temporary relocation of Jews while Nazi leaders came up with “a final solution”. Geoffrey Megargee for The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos writes “Living conditions were miserable…The Germans established at least 1,000 ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone…” (61). The ghettos were primarily built by forced labor done by the Jewish people, and some ghettos such as the Warsaw ghetto even had a wall around itself in order to completely isolate the Jews from the rest of society, as shown in figure 1. The inside of the ghettos were crowded, small, and heavily policed and monitored. In these ghettos, the Jews mostly worked as forced laborers for the German government. Living conditions within the ghettos were inhumane as most living there died from starvation. Many Jews also died from being shot by ghetto police, or died from being deported to killing centers. Once the “final solution” was enacted by the Germans, there was no longer any use for ghettos, so the Germans began to destroy the small living