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had to lie face down inside the trench and were then shot in the side of the head. During the shootings at Bialystok, Novgorod and Baranowice, the corpses were well covered over, more or less, with sand and chalk before the next batch was brought up. In the later shooting operations, this was only rarely done so that the next batch of victims always had to lie down on the corpses of those who had just been killed before. But even in those cases where the corpses had been covered with sand and chalk, the next victims often saw them, because body parts would frequently be jutting out of the thin layer of sand or earth.

Some time between mid-July and mid-October 1941, just as the mass murder of Russian Jews was being escalated after Operation Barbarossa, Hitler decided to kill every Jew that his Reich could reach, regardless of the help they could have afforded Germany’s war effort. The exact date is impossible to determine, since the Nazis attempted to obliterate evidence of the Holocaust itself, quite apart from its organizational genesis. On 4 October 1943, for example, Himmler told senior SS officers that the murder of the Jews was ‘a glorious page in our history that has never been written and cannot be written’. It is therefore vain to try to seek a piece of paper from Hitler actually authorizing the Holocaust, despite the wealth of circumstantial evidence that he and Himmler were its architects.

In October 1941 all Jewish emigration from Europe was banned, and deportations of German Jews from the Reich began. The next month, mobile gas vans were used to kill Jews in Łódź in Poland and soon afterwards in Chełmno. The SS had been using gas vans to kill more than 70,000 lunatic-asylum patients since 1939; it was an idea borrowed from Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, during which people had been gassed in specially converted trucks and vans parked outside Moscow, into which the carbon monoxide from the vehicles’ engines was introduced.14 Reinhard Heydrich pioneered the use of these mobile gas chambers for the SS, sometimes disguised as furniture-removal vans. In 1959 one of the chemists involved, Dr Theodor Leidig, explained what happened after victims had been packed into them:

I was told that the people who would be getting into the lorry were Russians who would have been shot anyway. The higher-ups wanted to know if there was a better way of killing them… I still remember that you could look inside the lorry through a peephole or window. The interior was lit. Then they opened the lorry. Some of the bodies fell out, others were unloaded by prisoners. As we technicians confirmed, the bodies had that pinkish-red hue which is typical of people who have died [of carbon-monoxide poisoning].

The process of these local massacres was still very haphazard, but before the end of 1941 the SS were starting to kill Russian POWs and the disabled with Zyklon B gas. In October 1941 the German Army in Serbia also began to shoot Jews under the pretext of ‘reprisals’ against partisan activity.

On 12 December 1941, the day after his declaration of war on America, Hitler spoke to senior Nazi Party functionaries. ‘As far as the Jewish question is concerned,’ recorded Goebbels afterwards, ‘the Führer is determined to make a clean sweep.’ Hitler had referred to his January 1939 Reichstag speech, saying, ‘The world war is here, the extermination of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.’ Six days later Himmler made a note of a meeting he had held with Hitler, which read: ‘Jewish Question. To be extirpated as partisans.’15 The policy was to be changed from killing Jews wherever they happened to be, while moving them eastwards and keeping them living in conditions also likely to kill them, to carrying out the Final Solution in specially adapted camps dedicated to the purpose. Sobibór camp was opened near Lublin in Occupied Poland in May 1942, and work was begun on Treblinka in north-east Poland the next month.

In order for the Nazis to exterminate almost two million Polish Jews in less than two years between early 1942 and late 1943, they