152 Holocaust, the in June 1941 led to the use of mobile killing vans or, more commonly, troops in mobile killing squads who ordered Jews to line up, dig a trench, and strip; the troops then shot them so they fell into the graves they had dug extermination Plans for more systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews proceeded in late 1941 and early 1942 The first death camp opened at Chełmno in December 1941 The first gassing experiments occurred in September 1941 at Auschwitz, where there were old Austrian army buildings as well as new construction As the system developed into more than 9,000 installations, three types of camps emerged: transit camps (temporary holding pens); concentration and/or labor camps, where German firms used slave labor; and extermination camps, the last all in Poland Though inmates died in ghettos and other camps of disease, starvation, execution, and despair, the six extermination camps were death factories whose administrators dealt with such problems as how to kill more people faster and how to dispose of bodies Gassing with Zyklon B in mass gas chambers and burning bodies night and day in crematoria or in outdoor pits were the usual solutions Some camps served more than one purpose The vast Auschwitz-Birkenau-Buna complex encompassed both a death factory and a labor camp for industrial purposes Theresienstadt (Terezin) in Czechoslovakia was a ghetto, a supposedly “model” concentration camp twice visited by the German Red Cross and a transit station en route to Auschwitz From 1942 into 1944 Jews were shipped across Europe to camps in the east They were crammed standing up in freight cars without food, water, or lavatories for a trip of several days Some died or went mad en route Upon arrival at a camp, if not immediately sent to die in the “showers,” dazed Jews were deprived of their possessions, clothes, hair, and identity They were issued a striped uniform with a number and a badge—yellow stars for Jews and otherwise triangles: homosexuals pink, political prisoners red, criminals green, and Gypsies brown Existing in rough barracks on starvation rations, prisoners worked in manufacture for leading German firms or in pointless projects such as hauling boulders up steep hills to roll them down Some were subjected to unethical medical experiments, often senseless In time most died or were killed The Nazis wasted nothing from those who died or were gassed Hair was woven into cloth, gold teeth were extracted from corpses, bones and ashes became fertilizer, and fat was used for soap or to fuel outdoor fires Tattooed skin was favored for lampshades; other skin became bookbindings and purses Resistance was almost impossible but occurred, nonetheless, usually when hope and dependent relatives were gone Inmates worked slowly and badly with some sabotage Some tried to escape, and a few succeeded Some chose their own death on the electrified fences surrounding the camps Most camps had an underground organization Plans for rebellion were made in many camps and were realized in six; the prisoners succeeded in closing Sobibór and Treblinka In eastern Europe, Jews who had evaded initial registration and roundups fled to the forests and formed partisan bands Usually strained relations with national underground movements meant scanty armaments, but they fought the Germans, engaged in sabotage, and provided potential havens for escapees from ghettos and camps In the ghettos, smuggling, illegal education of children, and carefully hidden documentation of Nazi outrages were common Though local undergrounds were reluctant to give weapons to those they considered doomed, ghetto revolts were numerous, especially in the smaller ghettos Of the larger ghettos, Białystok fought for four days, Vilna achieved an armed breakout through the sewers into the forests, and Warsaw battled German forces from April 19 to May 10, 1942, when about 75 survivors slid forth from sewers final solution From mid-1942 on, Jewish leaders in Switzerland and Poland sought to inform the Allies of major aspects of the Final Solution They succeeded, but much skepticism greeted such startling news on both sides of the Atlantic President Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden were sympathetic, but they were preoccupied with the global struggle Inaction prevented substantive aid In mid-1943 an emissary of the Polish resistance saw four British cabinet members, including Eden and several top U.S officials, and gave his own eyewitness account of conditions in the Warsaw ghetto and killing operations at Belzec As a result, after bureaucratic delays Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board in January 1944 The British government and the State Department were hostile, but the board, with the aid of neutral states, distributed valuable neutral passports to Jews and sponsored the important rescue efforts of Swedish banker Raoul Wallenberg, among other activities It saved perhaps 200,000 Jews Ordinary individuals played a role as well In both Germany and occupied Europe, some abetted the Nazis,