Editing Nazi Germany (section)

=== The Holocaust and Final Solution ===
{{Main|The Holocaust|Final Solution}}
[[File:Buchenwald Corpses 60623.jpg|thumb|A wagon piled high with corpses outside the crematorium in the [[Buchenwald concentration camp]] liberated by the [[United States Army|U.S. Army]], 1945|alt=]]
Around the time of the failed offensive against Moscow in December 1941, [[Reich Chancellery meeting of 12 December 1941|Hitler resolved]] that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated immediately.{{sfn|Longerich, Chapter 17|2003}} While the murder of Jewish civilians had been ongoing in the occupied territories of Poland and the Soviet Union, plans for the total eradication of the Jewish population of Europe—eleven million people—were formalised at the [[Wannsee Conference]] on 20 January 1942. Some would be [[Extermination through labour|worked to death]] and the rest would be murdered in the implementation of the [[Final Solution to the Jewish Question]].{{sfn|Longerich|2012|pp=555–556}} Initially the victims were murdered by ''Einsatzgruppen'' firing squads, then by [[Aktion T4|stationary gas chambers]] or by [[gas vans]], but these methods proved impractical for an operation of this scale.{{sfn|Evans|2008|pp=256–257}}{{sfn|Browning|2005|pp=188–190}} By 1942 extermination camps equipped with gas chambers were established at [[Auschwitz II|Auschwitz]], [[Chełmno extermination camp|Chełmno]], Sobibor, Treblinka, and elsewhere.{{sfn|Longerich|2010|pp=279–280}} The total number of Jews murdered is estimated at 5.5 to six million,{{sfn|Evans|2008|p=318}} including over a million children.{{sfn|USHMM, ''Children during the Holocaust''}}

The Allies received information about the murders from the [[Polish government-in-exile]] and Polish leadership in Warsaw, based mostly on intelligence from the [[Polish underground]].{{sfn|Fleming|2014|pp=31–32, 35–36}}{{sfn|Evans|2008|pp=559–560}} German citizens had access to information about what was happening, as soldiers returning from the occupied territories reported on what they had seen and done.{{sfn|Evans|2008|pp=555–556, 560}} Historian [[Richard J. Evans]] states that most German citizens disapproved of the genocide.{{sfn|Evans|2008|pp=560–561}}{{efn|"Nevertheless, the available evidence suggests that, on the whole, ordinary Germans did not approve. Goebbel's propaganda campaigns carried out in the second half of 1941 and again in 1943 had failed to convert them". {{harvnb|Evans|2008|p=561}}.}}