police entered and began murdering primarily Jews and also various Communist officials

and so on, but their main target was Jews. But by the end of 1941, in that first stage,

the first 6 months of murder, they had already murdered 800,000 Jews or even more. But the

murder expanded gradually, beginning in the second half of the summer of 1941, with discussions

inside of Nazi Germany about bringing other Jews into this picture of murder, because

as Germany now looked around and saw they had even more millions of Jews under their

rule and there was nowhere to send them, and there is no other solution, they felt themselves,

ironically, trapped, and now they had to deal with the problem of so many millions of Jews.

And they determined that the only solution to the problem was to kill the problem. But

it was a process to reach that decision: They began discussing including the Jews of the

Third Reich in the murder parallel to the murder in the Soviet Union. Their ally - Romania,

began murdering Jews on their own in territories that Romania controlled in Romania and the

Ukraine. And particularly inside of Poland, one SS general named Odilo Globocnik began

organizing plans to murder the Jews of the areas of Poland where he had influence, which

included more than 2,000,000 Jews and that became, later on, what was known as "Operation

Reinhardt". Parallel to that, experiments began at the end of the summer of 1941 to

design gas vehicles - lorries or vans - into which you could load several dozen Jews, drive

around for a few minutes and kill them. They experimented with a number of prototypes until

they reached the correct model, and then they began using that model in various places,

but primarily in a new camp, that was constructed in November of 1941 and opened on December

8th 1941, that was Chelmno. And parallel to that they experiment with a different kind

of gas, at the concentration camp known as Auschwitz. And in early September 1941, the

first experiment using Zyklon B, the prussic acid, was a pesticide for agriculture, was

being adapted, and the experiment was found to be successful enough that they then embarked

upon improving on the model and looking to build gas chambers that would use that method

of gassing. And therefore we have parallel developments during the course of the second

half of 1941: Massive shooting, gas vans, murder in other places, planning on bringing

Jews from all over Europe into the murder areas that were being prepared, and murder

by the exhaust of engines, "Operation Reinhardt" planned by Globocnik - all of this coalesced,

by the end of 1941, became the Final Solution to the Jewish question.