Holocaust (1933–1945) as they detrained at some death camp At first, most executions even in the camps were by firing squad or machine gun, with thousands of bodies bulldozed into mass graves or anti-tank ditches, such as those used at Babi Yar This was “inefficient,” however, even when SS killers jocularly competed to see how many Jews they could dispatch with a single bullet Mobile gas vans were tried next, mainly to speed up and increase the volume of killings, but also to relieve dutiful SS men of the psychological strains that accompanied shooting tens of thousands of women and children In addition, Himmler once became hysterical and fainted during a mass execution when two Jewish women failed to die quickly or quietly, writhing and moaning on the ground in front of him during their death agony He ordered that henceforth women and children should be gassed As morale fell among some men of the Einsatzgruppen, but while the prospect of victory over the Soviet Union still seemed possible, a proposal was mooted to resettle all Jews in soon-to-be-conquered Asiatic Russia There, they would be worked to death as slaves, all dead within a generation But as the chance for military victory in the east slipped away, SS plans turned to a more immediate and “final solution” laid out ultimately in the Aktion Reinhard program: outright extermination of all Jews by mass killings carried out in a new system of purpose-built death camps Ghetto and labor camp Jews were shipped by sealed cattle car to industrialized death camps such as Auschwitz The killing camps were constructed in accordance with decisions taken at Wannsee that January day to “exterminate” all Jews The Wannsee plan called for full scale extermination camps, with several capable of killing and disposing of as many as 25,000 people each day Killings began early in 1942, even before the first death camps were finished and in operation by midyear Forced deportations to the camps took place from all over occupied Europe, under the cover of “relocation” and “resettlement.” The SS planned to kill as many as 11 million Jews, but they were unable to reach that total once Germany began to lose the war and control of occupied eastern territories That fact enraged Hitler and his henchmen and speeded the rate of killing As the advance of the Red Army threatened to overrun the main death camps in late 1944 and early 1945, the SS began destroying physical evidence of their crimes, blowing up gas chambers and crematoria and bulldozing barracks That also meant accelerating the killing to be rid of witnesses What happened next had no precedent in history: severing of families and genders; transport to the camps by packed cattle and freight cars; upon arrival, a selection into those who died immediately—mainly the very old, very young, and mothers with small children—and those fit enough for slave labor until they, too, died or were murdered in turn; slow starvation; sadistic medical experimentation; mass hangings and shootings; and the gross obscenity and indignity of gas chambers and crematoria at sites of horror and suffering that remain unparalleled in all human history At least six million Jews were murdered by the Germans and local and ideological collaborators That was an unprecedented attempt at industrialized slaughter of a whole people, stateless and bereft of an army to defend them Several million non-Jews were also systematically murdered, mainly Russians and Poles starved or worked to death, but also homosexuals, Jehovah’s 533