IB History Military Factors Including Invasions of Poland and the USSR and the Einsatzgruppen Notes

How the Invasions of Poland and the USSR Turned Persecution into Genocide

Poland 1939: Invasion and Ghettoisation

1. The invasion placed the largest Jewish population in Europe under German control. When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, approximately 3.3 million Jews lived there. Within weeks, German authorities ordered Jews to register, mark themselves with yellow stars (or armbands), surrender property, and perform forced labour.
   1. These measures pre-dated any decision to exterminate Jews. They functioned as tools of humiliation, economic exploitation, and administrative control, laying the groundwork for what followed.
2. Ghettoisation confined Jewish populations from late 1939. German authorities established ghettos in Polish cities, walling off overcrowded Jewish districts cut off from the rest of the city.
   1. The Warsaw Ghetto, sealed in November 1940, held approximately 400,000 people, 30 per cent of Warsaw's population, in 2.4 per cent of the city's area. Deliberately below-subsistence rations killed an estimated 83,000 people between 1940 and 1942, before mass deportations to Treblinka began in July 1942.

Operation Barbarossa: War of Annihilation in the East

1. The invasion of the Soviet Union was framed as a racial-ideological war from the outset. The invasion on 22 June 1941 suspended the normal laws of war. The Commissar Order mandated the execution of captured Soviet political officers rather than treating them as prisoners of war. The occupied population was classified as racially inferior and to be exploited or eliminated. Jewish communities were to be killed outright, not ghettoised.
   1. This ideological framing was communicated down the military chain of command. Senior Wehrmacht commanders issued orders accepting, and in some cases endorsing, the special treatment of Jewish civilians, and army units cooperated with, supported, and sometimes directly participated in Einsatzgruppen shootings.
2. Mass shootings began within days of the invasion and escalated through 1941. Four Einsatzgruppen (A, B, C, D), assisted by local auxiliary police, moved behind the advancing Wehrmacht, killing Jews, Communist officials, and Roma in mass shootings across occupied Soviet territory.

The Holocaust by Bullets: Scale and the Shift to Gas Chambers

1. The scale of shooting escalated through 1941 and into 1942. By the end of 1941 the Einsatzgruppen and their collaborators had killed approximately 500,000 Jews. By mid-1942 the toll had reached 1.5 million. Entire Jewish communities, with generations of history and culture, were destroyed in operations lasting hours or days.
2. The psychological cost of mass shooting drove the search for a more "efficient" method. Heinrich Himmler visited Minsk in August 1941 and watched a mass shooting. Disturbed by its effect on the perpetrators, he instructed Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, to develop a killing method that did not require shooters to confront victims directly.
   1. The development of gas chambers using Zyklon B at Auschwitz emerged directly from this context, linking the military phase of shooting to the later, more industrialised phase of the Holocaust.

Paper 3 preparation