IB History Reasons for the Persecution and Mass Murder of Marginalized Groups in Nazi-occupied Europe Key Definitions

Mobile SS killing units (literally "deployment groups") that followed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union from June 1941. Organised into four groups (A, B, C, D), they were tasked with killing Jews, Soviet political commissars, and other designated enemies. By mid-1942 they had killed approximately 1.5 million Jews. The Einsatzgruppen conducted the "Holocaust by bullets," the first phase of the genocide before the shift to industrialised killing in death camps.

Administrative councils imposed by German authorities on Jewish communities in occupied Poland and Eastern Europe. Composed of Jewish community leaders, they were required to compile deportation lists, distribute food, manage internal ghetto order, and organise forced labour. Judenrate faced impossible choices between compliance (which facilitated deportations) and refusal (which generally resulted in more violent SS operations). The Warsaw Ghetto Judenrat chairman Adam Czerniakow poisoned himself in 1942 rather than submit deportation lists.

The code name for the systematic murder of approximately two million Jews in the German-occupied General Government area of Poland, conducted through three purpose-built death camps: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Named after Reinhard Heydrich after his assassination in May 1942. Between 1942 and 1943 these camps killed approximately 1.7 million people using carbon monoxide gas. Operation Reinhard was the largest component of the Holocaust in terms of lives taken in the shortest time.

A meeting of fifteen senior Nazi and SS officials held on 20 January 1942 at a villa in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, convened by Reinhard Heydrich. Its purpose was to coordinate the implementation of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" across all German-occupied territories. The conference did not decide on genocide (already underway) but assigned roles to all relevant government ministries. The meeting minutes (Wannsee Protocol) were drafted by Adolf Eichmann and list the Jewish population of all European countries totalling 11 million people.