[Moose4]

Even earlier than that. They were shooting Jews in Poland in late 1939, the ones that weren’t being walled up in the ghettos in places like Lodz and Warsaw. And yes, hundreds of thousands of Jews had been shot, or asphyxiated in gas trucks, by the SS Einsatzkommando groups in the months between June 1941 and the Wannsee conference.

Pat has this either/or thing going...he’s acting like he is totally forgetting what life must have been like in the Warsaw ghetto in 1940 or 1941, even before the trains were rolling for Treblinka. By 1937, Jews in Germany were no longer citizens, but “subjects.” 50% were unemployed. Most professions were verboten to them. Yes, the Nazis were more interested in exporting Jews than they were killing them before the start of the war, but only because it was easier to just kick them out of the Reich after stealing all their property.

}:-)4

[SJackson]

And yes, hundreds of thousands of Jews had been shot, or asphyxiated in gas trucks, by the SS Einsatzkommando groups in the months between June 1941 and the Wannsee conference

Corrected since Pat says you can't kill people with diesel fumes. No solace to the dead I'm afraid.

[Luke21]

Thank you. The Jews were persecuted and driven into ghettos within months of the surrender of Poland. The Nazis were content to let them die of starvation and disease at first. But it was about death, nonetheless. When they invaded Russia, there were so many Jews living in that region that they couldn't die fast enough to clear living space for their superior Aryan master race. But the Nazis tried everything from mass shootings at Babi Yar to portable gas vans.