“When most of us think of the Holocaust we think of Auschwitz. But the industrialized, largely hands-off method of killing Jews at Auschwitz and the five other gassing centers in Poland was developed to a great extent because of what the German leadership saw as the too hands-on experience of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union — individual bullets shot into individual Jews by individual Germans, or by the local police they oversaw. In Babi Yar, a ravine in Kiev, the Einsatzgruppen shot 33,771 Jews in just two days. The work was bloody and sometimes, even for these hardened killers, demoralizing. Auschwitz was the final solution to the Final Solution.”
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