Nazi leadership didn’t decide to pursue “the Final Solution” until 1941. Before the war, they considered the “Madagascar Plan”—the Polish plan to relocate European Jews to Madagascar—before dismissing the idea of shipping millions of people as infeasible. They also considered moving Jews to a reservation in Lublin, but this plan never materialized.

In retrospect, genocide was the logical conclusion to the antisemitic campaign Hitler and the Nazis orchestrated before the war. In a January 1939 speech to the Reichstag, Hitler declared his willingness to go to that extreme:

If the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should again succeed in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will not be the bolshevization of the world and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race throughout Europe (236).

Nazi leadership decided to exterminate all European Jews in 1941 as they began their invasion of Russia. Einsatzgruppen (Action Groups) followed the Wehrmacht into Russia to carry out Hitler’s order to execute “Jews, gypsies, racial inferiors, asocials and Soviet political commissars” (244). Jews constituted the vast majority of those executed: By early 1942, the Einsatzgruppen had shot over half a million Jews, two-thirds of them women and children.