By Keyword:   Chapter PROLOGUE 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 EPILOGUE Or, Page Number: Click on an image to see a larger, more detailed picture.		1942: The "Final Solution"  pg. 359    EUROPE'S BORDERS AT THE HEIGHT OF NAZI POWER, 1942 By 1942 Germany had occupied most of Northern Europe, while most Southern European countries were ruled by pro-Nazi regimes. In the East, German forces advanced deep into the Soviet Union. In the second half of 1942, the Soviets began to push the Germans back. This poster is a painful commemoration of the fate of Polish Jewry during the first three years of the Nazi occupation. The Hebrew text reads, "Polish Jewry Day: September 1, 1939-September 1, 1942." No group in World War II Europe suffered as profoundly as Poland's Jews, who by their very numbers were marked by the Nazis as special targets. From the time that the German Army first occupied Poland in September 1939, Polish Jews were systematically herded into crowded ghettos, deprived of life's essentials, and subject to summary executions. Beginning in the spring of 1942, Polish Jews were deported to Nazi death facilities. Of the more than 3.3 million Polish Jews alive in September 1939, three million were dead by 1945. Photo: Central Zionist Archives / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive An energetic Führer addresses a crowd in 1942. Such occasions grew increasingly rare soon after, as the Third Reich began to disintegrate. Failure to achieve victory on the Russian front and accelerated British bombings of German cities plunged Hitler into growing isolation and depression. Photo: AP/Wide World  Late summer 1942: SS officer Kurt Gerstein fails in his attempt to publicize his knowledge of the mass gassings of Jews. He is rebuffed in his approach to the German papal nuncio, Cesare Orsenigo.  September 1942: Fourteen thousand Jews are taken to gravel pits at Piatydni, Ukraine, and machine-gunned.  September 1942: Moshe Skoczylas and Michael Majtek form Jewish partisan units at Dzialoszyce, Poland.  September 1942: German troops reach the Caucasus and begin exterminations of indigenous Jews.  September 1942: SS chief Heinrich Himmler suggests that camp inmates be put to work in on-site arms factories. Armaments chief Albert Speer objects, offering a compromise accepted by Hitler: Himmler's inmates will be made available to Speer for labor in conventional arms factories.  September 1942: New York Congressman Emanuel Celler, a Jew, submits legislation to allow French Jews about to be deported to their deaths in Eastern Europe to immigrate to the United States. The bill is killed by the House Committee on Immigration.   1942: The "Final Solution"  pg. 359  The Holocaust Chronicle © 2009 Publications International, Ltd.