State-sanctioned persecution of the Jews began from the moment that Hitler came to power in 1933. One of Hitler's main doctrines was that the Jews should be removed from the Aryan state of the Third Reich. But it is important to realise that although the Jews were persecuted from the outset, there does not seem to have been an immediate policy to exterminate them.

Find out all that you can about the following:

1. The Nuremberg laws

2. Kristallnacht

3. The Madagascar project

Up until as late as 1941 it was possible for Jews to leave Germany and other Reich-occupied territories. Many were imprisoned, many were killed but there was no policy to attempt to exterminate them as a whole. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws simply excluded the Jews from citizenship of the Reich, although these paved the way for further repression.

Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) in the summer of 1941 brought another 2 million Jews under Nazi rule. It also directly precipitated the move towards the 'final solution of the Jewish question'. On Himmler's orders, SS mobile killing groups followed the German Army, killing Jews by shooting and by inciting the local populations to carry out pogroms. This was the first stage of the final solution. Himmler was anxious however of the effect the brutality of the shootings were having on his officers who were carrying them out. Mobile gas vans were then employed for extermination. Between December 1941 and the spring of 1943 over 20,000 Polish Jews and thousands of gypsies and Soviet POWs (prisoners of war) were killed in this way.

A new stage in industrialised mass murder was entered with the establishment of death camps in Poland. The first one was Chlemo, which began operating in December 1941.

Look at the text of the Wannsee Conference which refers to the Final Solution. How does this mark a change in the proposed treatment of Jews?

Until 1941 Jews had been used for forced labour in camps or taken from the ghettos in forced labour details. The camps from this time onwards, however, developed a more sinister character - many became death camps, converted for the ultimate destruction of the Jewish population of Europe.