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Since Kristallnacht on Nov. 9-10, 1938, the number of German Jews herded into concentration camps or forced into exile had risen dramatically. As the armies of Operation Barbarossa swept across Russia, units of the SS's special mobile killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, systematically combed occupied territory for local Jews. In the Lithuanian city of Vilna, 19,311 Jews were killed in September and October 1941. In two days at the end of September 1941, 33,771 Kiev Jews were herded to the suburban ravine of Babi Yar and machine-gunned by the SS and Ukrainian collaborators. November 1941 saw the first experimental large-scale gassing of concentration-camp internees: 1,200 prisoners from the infamous Buchenwald camp were killed. Later, the mass murders were concentrated in six death camps, all on Polish soil; in the most notorious of them, Auschwitz, 2 million people perished. Uprisings were put down ruthlessly. The most famous occurred in 1943 in the Warsaw ghetto, where, at one point, almost 400,000 Jews had been penned up since November 1940. Only , 70,000 Jews remained in the ghetto by the time of the uprising, and more than 56,000 of them were shot, burned alive or deported to Treblinka.
The Jews were not the only victims of Nazi race hatred. Hitler's scorn for the Slavs guaranteed bestial treatment of Russian prisoners of war; of 5 million POWs, more than 3 million died. Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals and mental patients too would be detained, persecuted and killed. But the Jews were the principal target: by the war's end 6 million would be dead.
The Nazis, of course, never referred to the policy as genocide. To distance the leadership from even the slightest link to murder, no public discussion was permitted. That did not mean that the Third Reich was ashamed of its final-solution policy. Heinrich Himmler, the chicken farmer who rose to become Reichsfuhrer of the SS and chief architect of the final solution, called the killings "an unwritten and never to be written page of glory in our history." He said, "We had the moral right, we had the duty with regard to our people, to kill this race that wanted to kill us."
He spoke in October 1943. The superior Aryan race, he said defiantly, would win the war. Nature ensured that Nazi victory was inevitable. By then, the tide of war had already shifted: the Russians were marching inexorably westward; Italy was a shambles; North Africa was lost. But one of the war's greatest acts of inhumanity remained a virtual secret. The methodical extermination of millions in the six Polish death camps was just nearing its terrible climax.