Answer:
Here are some ideas based on my notes for AP World History from 1933 to 1946.
Explanation:
Nazi policy singled out several racial groups as “subhumans” who could not be allowed to “contaminate” the Germans’ “pure Aryan” blood. These included Slavs, those of African descent, Roma (Gypsies), and especially Jews. Others considered “undesirable” were homosexuals, the mentally disabled, and people with venereal or incurable diseases.
Before 1939, treatment of these groups—particularly anti-Semitic persecution—had grown steadily worse, but the war triggered an escalation of systematic violence, culminating in the mass exterminations popularly known as the Holocaust. Nazi officials estimated that 11 million Jews in Europe would have to be expelled or eradicated—the so-called Jewish problem—and Roma were to be eliminated as well. Slavic peoples were to be conquered with brute force and the survivors enslaved.
In 1939 and 1940, as much of Europe came under German control, Nazi authorities began detaining Jews in concentration camps and city neighborhoods called ghettos.
In the spring of 1941, as Germany readied its invasion of the USSR, special task groups (Einsatzgruppen) were formed to accompany the German army and execute Soviet Jews by shooting. In July, moreover, an order to prepare a “final solution of the Jewish problem” was handed down to Nazi security forces, and though it was not signed by Hitler, it came from Nazi leader Hermann Goering, certainly on Hitler’s orders.
Firing-squad executions proved too slow for the Nazis, and by late 1941, they were seeking more efficient means of mass killing. Inspired by how Nazi doctors had been clinically “euthanizing” the mentally and physically ill since 1939, key officials decided—principally at the Wannsee Conference of January 1942—to use special extermination camps, already under construction in German-held Poland, to kill victims on a truly industrial scale. At these camps, which included the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau, victims were gassed, their bodies plundered for hidden loot, and their remains cremated. Also at these camps, numerous victims, especially Jews, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war, were used for medical and scientific experiments to the point of mutilation and death. In the end, the “final solution” killed approximately 6 million Jews. Another 5 to 6 million non-Jewish victims—including an estimated 200,000 to 1.5 million Roma—perished as a result of nonmilitary killings carried out by the Germans.
The results?
It was to punish these atrocities that the Allies organized the Nuremberg Trials (1945–1946), where Nazi leaders were prosecuted and the concept of crimes against humanity was codified. (A series of Tokyo Trials followed in the years 1946–1948.) In 1948, in a collective effort to avoid such barbarities in the future, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
