the quest for racial purity - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

policy that began with legal discrimination against Jews in Germany, transitioned to coercive
emigration and schemes for mass expulsion, and then escalated from the mass murder of
the Soviet Jews to the attempted annihilation of the entire Jewish population of Europe.
A family (left) poses for a photograph in the prewar Polish town known in Yiddish as Eishishok
and in Polish as Ejszyszki (present-day Eisˇisˇkes, Lithuania). The history of this town mirrors that
of many Jewish communities in eastern Europe. German troops arrived on June 23, 1941, and
less than three months later, on September 21, an SS Mobile Killing Squad entered the town, ac-
companied by Lithuanian auxiliaries. Four thousand Jews from Eishishok and its environs were
herded into three synagogues and imprisoned there. They were taken in groups of 250 to the
old Jewish cemetery where SS men ordered them to undress and stand at the edge of open pits.
There, Lithuanian auxiliary troops shot them to death. Over only a few days, the massacre ended
900 years of Jewish life and culture in Eishishok. Today, no Jews live there. eishishok (present-day
eisˇisˇkes, lithuania), before 1941. with permission of the shtetl foundation
The exact timing of the decision to implement the “Final Solution” will probably never be
known and remains a subject of debate among scholars. Implementation of the policy surely
was accelerated by the unparalleled success of German forces in the Soviet Union in
the summer of 1941, when the prospect of victory over the Soviets and indeed all of Europe
seemed within reach. After the SS and police had begun to physically annihilate entire
Jewish communities in the east, mass murder became not only conceivable but also
achievable in practice—a more “final” solution than mass expulsion. But some of the
inherent problems in the killing operations in the Soviet Union rendered them difficult, if
not impossible, to implement elsewhere in German-occupied Europe. Murder by shooting in
open-air pits was slow, inefficient, and psychologically traumatic for some of the shooters;
also, it tended in the long term to awaken genuine unrest in the indigenous populations.
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