II. And with the invasion of Poland, they suddenly had in their hands an additional

nearly 2,000,000 Jews. Months after that, they invaded Scandinavia and conquered Norway

and Denmark, and then Western Europe. They conquered Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, and

France, and with all of these conquests, by the summer of 1940, Germany found itself now

not with a problem of a few hundred thousand Jews inside the Third Reich, but with a problem

of several million Jews across territories they had conquered in Europe. And they continued

their pursuit of some solution to this problem. They looked for places to send the Jews. Perhaps

they could create some gigantic ghetto somewhere, they thought about the Lublin area as one

of those solutions - that didn't work. Perhaps they could shove all the Jews into the Soviet

Union, but that didn't work either - the Soviet Union wasn't going to receive millions of

Jews simply because Germany wanted to get rid of them. They thought of places that were

maybe far away, they could push the Jews far, far from Europe, such as the island of Madagascar,

but that too was logistically impossible.

But this pursuit of a solution, was something the Nazis never left. And once they conquered

Poland, and particularly for Eastern European Jews, it was a good option in that local and

regional commanders of the Nazis could pursue the idea of putting Jews into ghettos as a

kind of holding pen, until they could find a solution for the Jews.