The declaration of war by Great Britain and France and their few allies, far from stopping Hitler’s thirst for conquest, only exacerbated it.

With much the same speed, force, and lightning success, Hitler proceeded to invade France, Norway, and Denmark in 1940; and Yugoslavia, Greece, and North Africa in 1941. Only Great Britain (despite punishing bombing by the German Luftwaffe), and to a lesser degree the Soviet Union (who now found Hitler, their temporary ally, launching an invasion against them as well), held out against the vastly superior German forces.

Japan’s attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 at last brought America aggressively into the conflict on the side of the British. As the year 1942 opened, the entire world was engaged in a global war such as the community of nations and peoples of the earth had never seen. Utterly irreconcilable ideologies between the Allies and the three Axis powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy rendered a compromised settlement of peace unthinkable. Only total defeat and unconditional surrender could decide the outcome of such a monstrous clash.

Territorial conquest, however, represented but a portion of Adolf Hitler’s megalomaniacal objective. Even greater proved his growing obsession to rid not only Germany but all of Europe of what he considered the scourge of the Jewish race.

The resolution could be nothing less than complete extermination. The only permanent remedy, as he saw it, was the eradication of the Hebrew race from the face of the earth, beginning with Poland, now in his hands and by far the largest territorial home for European Jews, and including not only those of Polish descent but recent immigrants from Russia and Germany.

The details of this objective were first carried out by special Einsatzgruppen, who rounded up Jews in a given area, loaded them like animals into trucks, and drove them to a predesignated and prepared location in the country, where they were thrown into large ditches and shot from above with machine guns.

Gradually, as the war progressed, methods and techniques of this genocide became more refined, always with the end in view of killing more people more quickly. Death vans were devised, gassing their victims while the vehicles sped on their way to whatever final resting place had been prepared for the bodies.

By the end of 1941, a decision was made in this evil high command to undertake what its architects termed the “final solution of the Jewish problem.” To this end, orders were passed from Hitler and his chief architect of the plan, Heinrich Himmler, to the SS commanders, thence to the Gestapo chiefs Heinrich Müller and Adolph Eichmann, who then forwarded specific instructions to the local officials, who carried out the gruesome deeds of mass murder.