The failure of Operation Barbarossa forced Hitler and the Nazi Party to put their grand plan for colonizing the Soviet Union on hold.

In its place, the Nazis began one of the most terrible crimes in human history.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

Thank you. Episode 358, the Von Zeyer Conference

Regular listeners to this podcast already know that the first people imprisoned in concentration camps by the Nazi SS were communists

and socialists. Only later did the Nazis begin incarcerating Jewish and Roma people in them.

They also know that after the invasion of the Soviet Union began, the first people the Nazis

ordered to be shot on site were

commissars, communists, and partisans. Within a matter of weeks, though, the definitions of

communist and partisan were expanded until they included any Jewish person, babies and old women

included. In the Nazi vocabulary, babies and old women included.

In the Nazi vocabulary, Jewish and Bolshevik were virtually synonyms.

And as we've seen in the past, the German military has always had a serious fear and loathing

of partisans.

As the German army advanced deeper into the Soviet Union,

thousands of partisans took up guerrilla warfare

in the German-occupied portions of the country.

Many of these partisans were Jewish people

who had fled the German murder squads.

Soon, the Germans regarded Jewish and partisan as also synonymous.

I suppose I should put up a trigger warning here because we are going to be talking about some very difficult topics today.

I confess, I find this material difficult myself to read about, think about, write about,

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