THE FINAL SOLUTION

On January 20, 1942, when the Wannsee Conference was held, close to 800,000 Jews had already been killed by the bullets of the Einsatzgruppen in the conquered lands of the USSR.

At Wannsee, German authorities shut down filas on the program to murder the remaining Jews in Europe, and security chief Reinhard Heydrich accelerated the engines of genocide.

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Two million Jews were trapped in the ghettos of occupied Poland, so the Germans needed only to organize the freight trains that would take them to the newly built killing centers in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

In the rest of Europe, the Final Solution required a greater effort. There, the Jews had not yet been completely isolated, and it would be necessary to arrest them in their homes - something that was often done by the local police, and to send them to transit camps located at a certain distance from the cities, in places that allowed them to operate discreetly and guaranteed the proper functioning of the deportations. In these camps, it would be possible to hold Jews, and sometimes also Roma, until their final destination "in the East” as yet unknown, was ready to receive them. The only way to avoid deportation was to go into hiding or to flee to a neutral country: Spain, Switzerland or Sweden.