The problem is that people confuse the Final Solution and the Holocaust. Massacres of about one million Jews occurred before plans for the Final Solution were fully implemented in 1942, but it was only with the decision to annihilate the entire Jewish population that extermination camps such as Auschwitz II Birkenau and Treblinka were fitted with permanent gas chambers to murder large numbers of Jews in a relatively short period of time. The plans to exterminate all the Jews of Europe were formalized at the Wannsee Conference, held at an SS guesthouse near Berlin, on 20 January 1942. Informally the Final Solution had begun when the Einsatzgruppen transitioned from targeting selective political and wartime enemies to the total, systematic extermination of the Jewish population, which occurred in mid-to-late August 1941 during the invasion of the Soviet Union. It should be noted that the Einsatzgruppen were set up originally to target enemies of the Wehrmacht, ie Bolshevik soldiers and other enemies, not to target jews. That transition came later. Equally when the Einsatzgruppen were allowed to use Zyklon B, that was not specifically to target jews, it was later that Zyklon B was used to kill Jews. This transition came in August 1941, following a tour of the East by Himmler. He was the driving force behind the Final Solution, and it was him who mandated that any jew, as a matter of principle, behind German lines should be shot. It was also Himmler who insisted that women and children be killed. Observing that the current metrics were not moving fast enough, Himmler explicitly expanded the execution orders. The Einsatzgruppen were instructed to lift all age and gender restrictions. Historians point to a combination of factors for this August escalation: Ideological Intent: The ultimate goal was always the total removal of the Jewish population; the Eastern Front served as the radical laboratory to test absolute physical destruction. Logistical Pressures: The German leadership realized that leaving women and children alive behind the lines created massive displacement and ghettoization problems that they had no intention of managing logistically. Field Initiative: Einsatzgruppen commanders on the ground actively competed to demonstrate ideological zeal, often expanding the scope of execution quotas on their own initiative before formal, centralized orders were universally codified. So we see here very clearly that it was the war in the East that was the driving force behind the Final Solution. The Holocaust, by contrast, is a more opaque concept and people disagree on the start date. In terms of the Final Solution and the actual mass annihilation of the jews those dates are well known and as above.
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