Ghettos during the final solution, 1941-1943: the territories occupied in operation Barbarossa

ENOperation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, was intended to be the start of Nazi Germany’s apocalyptic war against Judeo-Bolshevism. In the wake of the Wehrmacht’s rapid advance through Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, Belorussia, prewar eastern Poland, and the Ukraine, the first stage of the organized mass murder of the Jews took shape in the space of a few weeks. For many years after 1945 the Final Solution was considered to be the implementation of an idea that had crystallized in advance; only later was this so-called intentionalist view replaced by the perception that the emergence of the genocidal campaign was more complex. In fact, the intentionalist interpretation was not constructed only by scholars after the Holocaust; it took root at an early stage of World War II among individuals who were not at the center of the decision-making process – both Jews, such as the members of the underground group headed by Abba Kovner in the Vilna ghetto, during the last weeks of 1941,1 and Germans in the field. Consider the post-war testimony of Andreas von Amburger, an interpreter who served with Arthur Nebe, the commander of Einsatzgruppe B, concerning the assignment to liquidate the Jews and its implementation.