#OnThisDay in 1941 – Under instructions from Hitler, Hermann Göring orders Reinhard Heydrich to "submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired Final Solution of the Jewish question." 
With the onset of Operation Barbarossa, mobile killing units of the SS, the Einsatzgruppen, and Order Police battalions were dispatched to the occupied Soviet Union for the express purpose of killing all Jews.
During the early stages of the invasion, Himmler himself visited Białystok in the beginning of July 1941, and requested that, "as a matter of principle, any Jew" behind the German-Soviet frontier was to be "regarded as a partisan".
His new orders gave the SS and police leaders full authority for the mass murder behind the front lines. By August 1941, all Jewish men, women, and children were shot.
In the second phase of annihilation, the Jewish inhabitants of central, western, and south-eastern Europe were transported by Holocaust trains to concentration/extermination camps.
The plans to exterminate all the Jews of Europe was formalized at the Wannsee Conference, held at an SS guesthouse near Berlin, on 20 January 1942.
Read more encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/art…
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