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:''“Another possible solution of the [Jewish] problem has now taken the place of emigration—i.e., evacuation of the Jews to the east…Such activities are, however, to be considered as provisional actions, but practical experience is already being collected which is of greatest importance in relation to the future final solution of the Jewish problem.”''
:''“Another possible solution of the [Jewish] problem has now taken the place of emigration—i.e., evacuation of the Jews to the east…Such activities are, however, to be considered as provisional actions, but practical experience is already being collected which is of greatest importance in relation to the future final solution of the Jewish problem.”''
The minutes of the meeting were kept, but had been edited by Heydrich. The language it contains euphemisms in place of what was really said. ''Evacuation of Jews to the east'' meant relocation to the concentration and extermination camps in Poland; ''special handling'' regarded the killing of Jews, either through slave labor in which the Jew was worked to death, or being killed immediately on arrival. The ''final solution'' was put into practice within a few months of the conference, as the bullets of the machine guns and the exhaust of carbon monoxide were replaced by the more efficient killing methods installed in the first gas chambers.
The minutes of the meeting were kept, but had been edited by Heydrich. The language it contains euphemisms in place of what was really said. ''Evacuation of Jews to the east'' meant relocation to the concentration and extermination camps in Poland; ''special handling'' regarded the killing of Jews, either through slave labor in which the Jew was worked to death, or being killed immediately on arrival. The ''final solution'' was put into practice within a few months of the conference, as the bullets of the machine guns and the exhaust of carbon monoxide were replaced by the more efficient killing methods installed in the first gas chambers.
==The killing centers==
In the early years of Nazi Germany concentration camps were built with the expressed purpose of housing political prisoners; this was quickly expanded to Jews and other people the Nazis considered undesirable. But by 1942 new camps were built in eastern Poland as killing centers; the victims, once targeted by the Einsatzgruppen coming to them, had been rounded up by units of the Army and Waffen S.S., and forced to travel to their own destruction. The victims were packed tightly into cattle cars - so tight in fact that many would die standing up – and transported by rail to the new extermination camps of Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Belzec. The camps were for all intents, factories which specialized in death, making the process coldly efficient.
As they arrived the victims were divided in two: those fit for work, usually young to middle aged men, and the remainder sent for delousing in the showers. Deceived to the end, the “showers” was actually a sealed room in which a chemical tablet known as “Zyklon-B” was dropped through a hole in the ceiling. The cyanide-based vapors would kill the entire room within minutes; within thirty, the room was emptied by the ''soderkomandos'', cleaned, and ready for another group of victims.
Of the killing centers, the one at Osweicim, Poland - Auschwitz - was perhaps the most notorious. Auschwitz was three camps: a prisoner-of-war camp (Auschwitz I), a slave-labour camp (Auschwitz III–Buna-Monowitz) and the extermination camp (Auschwitz II–Birkenau). The arrivals would disembark the trains at Auschwitz II, where the old, handicapped, infirm, sick, and pregnant women would face a German doctor (among them the notorious [[Joseph Mengele]]) in the “selektion”, where a flick of a thumb could mean the difference between slave labor in the nearby factory run by I.G. Farben (which took advantage of the forced labor by investing some 700 million Reichsmarks in the project), or the gas chambers. Those selected for labor would be worked to death by a combination of hard labor and inadequate food and medical care; a second selection of their numbers, if they survived, would mean a trip to the gas chambers.
The numbers killed were staggering. Beginning in the summer of 1942 a bare minimum of 960,000 were believed killed at Auschwitz during its three years in operation. At Treblinka, between 750,000-900,000 Jews were killed within 17 months, considering the staff and guards there numbered 120. 600,000 Jews died at Belzac within 10 months by a staff numbering 104. In the eighteen months of its operation, Sobibor killed 250,000.