Nazi Racial Policy and the Holocaust

From exclusion to genocide

The Holocaust was the systematic persecution and murder of approximately six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. It was a genocide: an attempt to destroy a whole people. Nazi racial persecution also targeted other groups, including Roma.

Antisemitism—hostility towards Jews—was central to Nazi ideology. The Nazis falsely presented Jews as a racial enemy. Once in power in 1933, they used the state to turn these beliefs into persecution: anti-Jewish laws, boycotts, the forced transfer of Jewish businesses to non-Jewish ownership, and violence. Kristallnacht, often called the ‘Night of Broken Glass’, was a major example of this violence.

Before the Second World War, these policies largely aimed to isolate Jews, destroy their livelihoods and force them to leave Germany. During the war, persecution escalated into systematic mass murder. This was not simply an unchanged policy carried out on a larger scale: the methods and immediate aims developed as German conquest brought more people under Nazi control.

Conquest and confinement: ghettos from 1939

Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. The conquest brought millions more Jews under Nazi rule and allowed German authorities to impose racial policies across occupied territory.

From late 1939, the Nazis established ghettos: areas where Jews were forcibly confined and separated from the surrounding population. On 21 September 1939, Reinhard Heydrich ordered the concentration of Polish Jews in large towns and cities near railway lines. This made communities easier to control and provided access to transport for later deportations. The first ghetto opened at Piotrków in October 1939; a major ghetto opened at Łódź in February 1940.

Ghettos were initially regarded as temporary holding places while Nazi leaders considered plans for removing Jews. One proposal was deportation to Madagascar. By September 1940, Britain's naval superiority made that plan impracticable. Confinement in ghettos continued, but policy would subsequently move towards extermination.

Not every ghetto had the same layout. Some had walls or fences; others lacked physical barriers but still restricted movement. What connected them was enforced segregation and Nazi control—not simply the presence of a wall.

How ghetto life intensified persecution

Ghettos allowed the Nazis to isolate, exploit and impoverish Jewish communities. Overcrowding, inadequate food and water, and unsanitary conditions caused starvation, disease and high death rates. Nazi claims that Jews spread disease were racist justifications for segregation; the authorities themselves created conditions in which disease could spread.

The SS imposed demands on Jewish councils, known as Judenräte, which administered daily life. Their duties included distributing food rations, providing forced labour and, later, supplying names for deportation. Councils sometimes tried to relieve suffering through hospitals, orphanages and illegally obtained food, but refusal to obey SS orders could bring punishment upon the whole community. Their position was one of coercion, not independent control.

Ghettos were therefore more than a stage of social exclusion. They concentrated people under German authority, weakened them through deprivation and became starting points for deportations to camps and killing centres.

The invasion of the Soviet Union: mass murder in 1941

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 marked a major escalation. SS and police units, including the Einsatzgruppen, followed German troops into newly occupied territory. They carried out mass shootings intended to annihilate entire Jewish communities.

These killings were not the work of a few isolated individuals. They involved organised SS and police operations, assistance from local auxiliaries and, when required, units of the German armed forces. German leaders treated Jews and other targeted people as supposed threats to permanent German rule in the east.

In July 1941, Hitler gave SS leader Heinrich Himmler broad responsibility for security in the occupied Soviet Union. Later that month, Hermann Göring authorised Heydrich to prepare a ‘complete solution’ of the so-called Jewish question. These decisions strengthened SS authority over the developing programme of murder.

By autumn 1941, mobile gas vans supplemented shootings. Poisonous exhaust gas was directed into sealed compartments containing victims. German forces and their collaborators killed between one million and one and a half million Jews through shootings and gas vans in the occupied Soviet Union.

Coordinating the ‘Final Solution’

The Nazis used the expression ‘Final Solution’ to disguise their plan to murder Europe's Jews. The exact point at which the leadership decided upon a Europe-wide programme remains uncertain. However, mass murder was already underway before the Wannsee Conference, held near Berlin in January 1942. The conference coordinated implementation rather than beginning the killings.

Systematic murder required cooperation between different parts of the state. Officials organised deportations; civilian and police authorities helped assemble victims; transport moved them to killing sites; and the SS operated the killing centres. Racial persecution had become an organised programme extending across German-controlled Europe.

The stages overlapped. Mass shootings continued after killing centres began operating, while ghettos remained in use until their inhabitants were deported or murdered. The diagram shows escalation, not a neat sequence in which one method completely replaced another.

Killing centres and the destruction of communities

In October 1941, Himmler authorised a plan to systematically murder Jews in the Generalgouvernement, the part of occupied Poland under German administration. The project became known as Operation Reinhard in 1942. Its killing centres included Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka II. Up to 1.7 million Jews were murdered in these centres and associated shooting operations.

Other killing sites included Chełmno, where gas vans were used, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, which began operating as a killing centre in spring 1942. Approximately one million Jews from many European countries were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

A concentration camp imprisoned people and could exploit them through forced labour; a killing centre existed primarily for mass murder. These functions could overlap. Auschwitz-Birkenau combined forced labour and killing, while Majdanek primarily functioned as a concentration camp but also contained gas chambers used to murder Jews.

As ghettos were liquidated—closed and emptied—their inhabitants were deported to killing centres or selected temporarily for forced labour. Labour did not provide lasting safety. The Łódź ghetto was liquidated in 1944. The artist David Friedmann was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps and later forced on a death march. He survived, but his wife Mathilde and daughter Mirjam did not.

Why persecution escalated during the war

Nazi antisemitism supplied the underlying motive. War and conquest expanded the territory and populations under Nazi control, while occupation enabled forced confinement, exploitation and killing. The invasion of the Soviet Union widened mass murder, and the SS coordinated deportations and killing centres across Europe.

Approximately six million Jews—about two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population in 1939—were murdered through poison gas, shootings and other means. Roma also suffered racial persecution and murder: approximately 4,300 were killed in gas vans at Chełmno. The Holocaust demonstrates how a racist dictatorship escalated from exclusion and forced removal to organised genocide.