The Final Solution

In an effort to further control the lives of the Jews, 80,000 of them were placed ghettos (designated areas in the city where Jews were confined to - here they were forced to live and not have contact with the outside world) in 1939.

In 1941 Hitler's obsession with wiping out the Jewish race reached a high. He introduced the Final Solution to the problem of the Jews. In the areas of Europe in which he had power, he rounded up every Jew he could find and sent them via rail to extermination camps, where mass genocide occurred. Genocide is the systematic extermination of a religious or racial group. Here Jews (those who didn't die on the way to the camps) were killed by the hundreds in gas chambers, those who were not killed this way were tortured and killed other ways:
-Starvation
-Exhaustion
-Disease
-Inhumane medical experiments or other acts of extreme violence

Through propaganda in Germany and many other countries, the Nazis carried out this genocide without most of the world's knowledge at the time. As for the Jews not in camps, hiding from the Germans was their top priority, even if it meant uncomfortable living conditions in the dark for many weeks, and days without food. Jews fled the country when the rare opportunity arose. The recovered written accounts of the survival stories and experiences of many and even the accounts of living Holocaust survivors are still studied and told today.